Entry o8. Serendipitous
Title: Serendipitous
Entry Number: 08
Author: Callunavulgari
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts/Pacific Rim
Rating: PG-16
Genre: crossover
Spoiler Warnings: Spoilers for all of Pacific Rim.
Word Count: 5482 words
Roxas barely remembers cold Russian winters now. He had thirteen whole years of them before K-Day-before the Kaiju floated up from the murky waters of the deep and set their sights on San Francisco-before his brother turned away from the television to face him, melted snow still in his lashes, all wind-bitten red cheeks from the run back home and said: “Roxas, it’s our duty to help them.”
At thirteen, there wasn’t a whole lot that two orphans could do but watch the world turn-watch men with big guns try their damndest to eradicate the monsters and not blow up the earth in the process. They’re too young for the military, so they watch, until late 2014, when a new program goes into effect. Turns out that while fourteen year olds aren’t accepted into the military, they’re more than welcome as volunteers for the new Soviet Jaeger program.
They’re the youngest volunteers by far, which means they can’t actively do much about getting into a jaeger, but they can get a head start on training. They get to know the other volunteers-the engineers, the strike rangers. They watch Sasha and Aleksis rise in the ranks, the way her smile curls crooked when they’re chosen as Cherno Alpha’s pilots, leaping up and throwing her arms around her husband in a rare display of affection.
Roxas and Sora watch. They train. They learn other languages, quizzing each other in cold beds at night. The dorms aren’t very good about heating, so they learned quickly to either sleep together and conserve body heat or figure out how to deal with the cold taste of frost in the back of their throats come morning.
The year that they turn sixteen, when the Shatterdome in Vladivostok is finally opened, they’re unceremoniously thrown into a Jaeger. Cherno Alpha’s offline and Nova Hyperion isn’t responding, and they may be sixteen, but they’ve got the highest simulation kill rate among their peers, so they’re the ones who are picked for the still new Mark 3, Serendipitous Key.
They don’t have time for a proper neural handshake-they’re to get their asses over to where Cherno Alpha’s dead in the water and salvage the mission.
The drift is supposed to be scary-it’s supposed to be invasive, but Roxas has spent all his life in his brother’s head, so he figures not much can go wrong.
.
He’s wrong.
.
They last twenty-three minutes before their sync rates crash and fail, flopping belly up. They’re stubborn though-almost impossibly so. Stubborn enough that even with their heads splitting apart, memories scrambling reality like egg, they still make the kaiju into so much sushi.
Stubborn, but apparently incompatible.
.
“Thank you,” Pang So-Yi tells them over dinner, in stilted, fumbling Russian. Sora and Roxas are surrounded on all sides by pilots-So-Yi and An Yuna on both sides of them and Sasha and Aleksis across, like they’re making a shield out of their bodies, hiding them from prying eyes.
Roxas snorts, eyes blank, and spoons shitty gruel into his mouth. Sora’s better at hiding his emotions-always has been, unless the emotion is happiness. That he wears on his sleeve.
“It was nothing,” he replies, in Korean this time. His accent is atrocious, but So-Yi smiles at him anyway. “We were just doing what you would have done for us.”
We were doing our jobs-our duty, Sora doesn’t say.
“You were good out there, kid,” Sasha tells them, holding eye-contact with Roxas until he’s forced to look away. “Don’t let them tell you anything else. Not everyone can hold down a steady drift.”
Yes, Roxas doesn’t say. But what are we supposed to do now?
.
It’s simple, really. Sora gets imported off to the brand new Shatterdome in LA, where they’re in desperate need of a pilot for their three-man jaeger, Saving Destiny, and Roxas follows him.
.
Kairi is a sweet-faced redhead with a powerful right hook and a smile that could charm the devil himself. Originally from Cardiff, she’d been orphaned while she and her parents had been visiting her grandparents in O’ahu. She was one of the lucky ones, because she’d actually made it off the island when Hawaii was considered a lost cause.
Sora takes to her instantly.
Riku is a tall, pale-haired teenager from Denmark, who’d volunteered when his brother became one of the leading commanders of the strike rangers. He reminds Roxas of winter, with his pale features and high nordic brow.
The three of them get along famously, and their drift goes off without a hitch-one of the highest sync rates for a pair of strangers ever recorded.
Roxas tries not to be jealous-he does.
He also tries not to wonder why two strangers can sync with his brother perfectly while he’d nearly killed them both.
.
The years pass. Saving Destiny rises in fame, the one US-made jaeger that’s yet to be defeated. His brother and his copilots become celebrities, and Roxas gets to watch him on the television they keep in the break room just outside of engineering. Piloting a jaeger was the worst thing that ever happened to him, but working on them isn’t quite as bad. They’re just machines-really heavy, complex machines that take him almost a year to learn every part of.
Eventually, he becomes more familiar with his brother’s jaeger than he is with his brother.
He still follows Sora wherever he goes, but they rarely see each other. Sora’s too busy with his copilots, with the rest of the Shatterdome, and with his adoring public. Sora’s accent fades to nearly nothing while Roxas’ remains so thick it’s nearly unintelligible, unaccustomed to speaking in other languages without his brother at his side.
Years pass-jaegers and their pilots rise and fall, but Roxas’ brother never does.
It’s 2025 and he dreads the day when his brother doesn’t come home.
.
When word reaches him that the jaeger program is being shut down for the sake of some stupid wall, he’s furious. How the leaders of this world thinks that some shitty wall is going to make a bit of a difference is beyond him. He cannot think for one second why they’d think it was a good idea.
Then Sora comes marching into engineering, helmet still under one arm-still in his drivesuit, eyes like ice. Roxas recognizes the expression on Sora’s face, because it’s a mirror to his.
“We’re going to Hong Kong,” his brother hisses up to him in rough-painfully rough-Russian. “They’ve given Pentecost eight months of funding to keep the Hong Kong Shatterdome operational, so we get one last try to blow up the breach.”
He’s glowering, visibly enraged, and Roxas’ coworkers are all staring at them like they don’t know what the hell is happening. Most of them don’t even know Roxas has a brother much less who his brother is.
“Hong Kong, huh,” he responds, feeling hysterical amusement welling up in his belly. Blowing up the breach has been tried before, each time with spectacular amounts of failure. He doubts that this time will be any different. “Is she coming with us?” he asks, pointing over his shoulder at the immense leg he’d been working on before Sora stormed in. Saving Destiny is probably his favorite mech in the hangar, and not just because she’s his brother’s. She’s immense for a Mark-2 and her colors are so eye-searingly incompatible that it’s endearing.
Sora gives him a weird look, like he’s being stupid, which okay, yeah. If Sora’s going, so is his mech, but whatever. He’s allowed to be concerned.
He sighs, dropping his pliers and trying not to smirk at the way the girl closest to him jumps. She probably thinks he’s about to lose his shit and tackle a jaeger pilot. He’s not known for his temper, and hasn’t been since that time he got fed up and started beating Coyote Tango until it started working again. He considers actually doing it, leaping down from his perch and tackling Sora to the floor, just to see them shit themselves. He probably would have done it before, when him and his brother were talking more than every couple months. Instead he just shrugs, brushes the worst of the oil off onto his jeans, and starts his way down.
(It would be easier if he used the ladder, but he’s fundamentally opposed to them. He’s got a couple nicknames in the hangar, most of them not entirely nice, but the one he most often hears is: ‘stupid spider monkey.’)
“Okay,” he tells Sora, in English this time, so his brother doesn’t strain himself trying to speak their native tongue. He grins, wide enough to show his teeth. “When do we leave?”
.
Hong Kong is grayer than he’d thought it would be. For some reason he’d thought that once he got to China the smog of LA would have faded into something at least kind of resembling the clear skies of Russia. He’d forgotten that Hong Kong had some of the worst light pollution in the world.
“So, you’re Sora’s brother, huh?” Kairi asks him. They’re still on the airplane, waiting for the call that it’s okay to disembark. For some reason she’s sitting beside him, even though the plane is all but empty. Just them and a couple strike troopers. The advantages of being famous, supposedly.
“Yep,” he says. “Doesn’t talk about me much, does he?”
His accent is so thick that many of his fellow engineers had told him that he shouldn’t even try speaking english, that he should just stick to his own language and let them puzzle over russian dictionaries. Kairi doesn’t seem bothered at all, holding his gaze steady and smiling.
“Actually, he talks about you quite a lot,” she chirps, smile still holding. “You’d know if you ever came to visit us.”
.
He spends his first few days in Hong Kong drowning himself in repairs and making small talk with the other engineers. He spends his nights in a tiny little dive in the Bone Slums, pouring shot after shot down his throat and occasionally going home with an ill-advised stranger, the neon signs making the puddles on the street glow-oil-slick bright-like rainbows.
The morning that he wakes up in bed next to Hannibal Chou and a woman with her head shaved to the quick, he cuts himself off from going home with whoever bats their eyes in his direction. He doesn’t cut himself off from the little bar or the booze, because it’s the end of the world and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t at least have a record breaking blood count level when he dies.
(Hopefully he dies at night in that case, because he’s not stupid enough to touch Saving Destiny when he’s drunk. He isn’t gonna fuck up his brother like that.)
He’s seated on a stool of chiseled bone, staring up at the sky through slats of huge alien ribcage, when a man slides onto the stool next to him, eyes on Roxas.
“Nope,” Roxas says, before the man can even say anything. He’s already too drunk, reality starting to spin a little bit. He doesn’t have the patience for some asshole hitting on him.
The man laughs though, cheerfully-all raspy and low. Roxas tries not to let it go straight to his cock, but mostly fails miserably.
“I didn’t even say anything,” the man chuckles. It takes Roxas a moment to realize that he’s not speaking English, Chinese, Cantonese, or Japanese-none of the languages he’s most accustomed to hearing at places like this. The man’s speaking his language. It takes even longer for him to realize that he wasn’t speaking English himself, the entire process nearly making him go cross-eyed.
“I told myself I’m not allowed to go home with anyone,” he slurs into the rim of his shot glass. The man laughs again, but it’s softer this time, like he’s deliberately trying to make it as obvious as possible that he’s not laughing at Roxas. His hackles start going down when the man flags down the bartender and gets him a glass of water of all things.
From the corner of his eye, Roxas can only see the corner of his lips flicked upwards. “I’d buy you an actual drink,” the man says, clinking their glasses together. “But something tells me that you shouldn’t be drinking anymore.”
That’s not entirely true. Roxas is Russian, capital R and everything, he can hold his liquor. But the guy is probably right. Once the room starts spinning it’s the beginning of the end.
“Probably not,” he concedes, risking the motion sickness and turning to look at the guy.
He’s attractive enough, Roxas supposes. Bit tall, bit on the bony side, but nice looking. High brows, ridiculous cheekbones, a sharp jawline that blurs in and out of focus. His hair is one big blob of fire engine red-a bright enough color that it probably isn’t real. Roxas squints and finally realizes that the guy has dreadlocks, except for the unruly bangs falling loose on one side of his forehead and the other half that’s shaved almost to the scalp.
The green eyes are the most arresting, if only because the world is a haze of orangeredgold and it’s the first green thing he’s seen all night.
The guy looks amused, eyes crinkled up at the corners. He’s got a lip piercing, which Roxas had overlooked. Now he can’t look away. He narrows his eyes in the guy’s direction.
“I’m Roxas,” he says, thrusting a hand out to shake and nearly unbalancing himself. It would be a shame if he ended up on the floor. “And I’m considering breaking my rule.”
The man throws his head back and laughs.
.
He does end up breaking his rule. Not at first, because he’s not that easy. They talk for a couple hours, trading off languages until they’ve cycled through Russian, Korean, French, Italian, and Mandarin. The guy’s name is Axel and he’s here for a job. Apparently he’s from a city called La Rochelle along the coast of France, but moved to Washington state when he was three. He doesn’t have an accent and never has, but he’s fond of languages, so his French is, of course, flawless. Roxas tells him that he’s from a little town in Russia, that he’s got a twin brother, and that he’s here for a job too.
He doesn’t say anything about jaegers, so they spend their time talking about the countries they’ve been, trading amusing bar stories, and just talking.
They walk along the kaleidoscope streets of Hong Kong, marveling at the long, sprawling carcass that the people here have made their homes, eating cha siu baau and sipping on tiny cups of milk tea. Roxas staggers a little from time to time-the streets are wet and his shoes are threadbare, peeling in places-but Axel always catches him, with a steady hand to his back.
When they finally kiss, it’s beneath a bright red overhang of some kind of sweet shop, the warm glow from the neon lit letters swallowing them up. Roxas is happy, the alcohol a dull burn in his chest and happiness lighting him up from the insides.
“Your cheeks are red,” Axel told him, a moment ago-an eternity ago. His mouth is lopsided and he smells like vodka, and he is the most beautiful thing Roxas has ever seen.
Now that he’s aware of it, he can almost feel the blood in his cheeks.
“So they are,” he murmurs, only slurring in a vague round-about kind of way, and pulls Axel down for a kiss.
.
He wakes up the next morning to kisses bruised into his skin, an ache between his legs, and Axel’s hair in his mouth.
It’s not a bad way to wake up.
.
“Give me your number?” Axel asks him after he’s come back with a full tray of breakfast.
Roxas is still sprawled across his sheets, naked as the day he was born, and scrutinizing a cut out picture of the Eiffel Tower-not a photo, but almost like the image had been cut out of a magazine. He takes a croissant from the tray without looking, and knows that Axel must have bribed someone, because he’s never gotten croissants from the mess hall.
“Don’t have to,” he says through a mouthful of bread. It’s sweet with drizzled honey, the pastry flaking against his chin. “I live right down the hall.”
.
“So what’s your story?” Axel asks him later, when he’s found Roxas in the far corner of the mess hall at dinner, partially hidden by a pillar.
Roxas shrugs. “Same as what I told you. I just left out the part where my brother’s one of Saving Destiny’s pilots.”
He still doesn’t say anything about failed sync rates or a childhood spent training for something just that much out of reach. He doesn’t have to. He’s sure that Axel can read it in every line of his body-in the way he holds himself, in the strength of his arms and the way he’d flipped Axel onto the bed last night, grinning as he slid up Axel’s body.
“What’s yours?” he asks, because Axel started this conversation, and wouldn’t have if he wasn’t willing to volunteer the same information.
Axel bites down on his lip, eyes suddenly unsure. “I piloted Flurry Diviner a few years ago-one of the two Mark 3’s that weren’t fully destroyed.”
“What happened?”
Axel’s lips tilt sideways into a grim smirk. “I broke my arm and my partner left me for a Mark 4 and a pay raise. They offered to find a replacement for him but-”
He trails off, wrinkles digging a furrow into his brow. “I didn’t trust anyone in my head after that,” he settles on. There are things he isn’t saying, enough to make Roxas wonder if his partner was his lover, his friend, because hurt doesn’t dig that deep unless it’s been done to you by someone you love.
Roxas smiles at him, cautiously, and bumps their shoulders together, hoping it will chase the sadness from Axel’s face.
.
He meets Mako Mori the day that she becomes Raleigh Beckett’s copilot. She’s shining with pleasure, singing with it, because it’s before they fail their neural handshake miserably.
“Good luck,” he tells her, her native language sitting thick and unfamiliar on his tongue. He’s streaked with jaeger oil and reeks of sweat and metal, but she lights up for him anyway, offering him a quick bow of thanks before hurrying away.
He hears about it from Axel, later, about the failed sync rates-about chasing the rabbit-and Roxas frowns into his pillow and pretends he’s asleep.
.
“Raleigh Beckett isn’t the only one looking for a replacement partner, you know,” Axel tells him. He has to almost shout to be heard, but the hangar’s quiet today, and he’s pretty sure the few people who are with him don’t speak French.
It had occurred to him. When Axel told him about his past as a jaeger pilot, Roxas had known. They wouldn’t have brought a washed up old pilot here for no reason. They needed all the power they could get, and it answered the question of what the shiny red and gold Mark 3 hiding in Gipsy Danger’s shadow was for.
“Really?” he drawls back, swiping the back of his hand across his brow. “You don’t say.”
Axel grins up at him, bright like the trailing end of a comet-white-hot and blinding.
“You should find me in the Kwoon Combat Room,” he shouts, and leaves, like he doesn’t even need to hear Roxas’ response.
.
“I knew you’d come,” Axel whispers, grin taking up most of his face. He looks good shirtless-all pale skin and faded purple scars-but Roxas already knew that.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” Roxas asks him, smirking. They pressed a stick into his hand when he stepped into the ring, but he doesn’t need it.
The crowd around them is whispering and despite himself, Stacker Pentecost almost looks intrigued. Behind him, Mako is chewing her lip nervously, eyes quick and darting as she takes in their stances. Roxas doesn’t know how much they know of his story, because this isn’t Russia, and though Serendipitous Key wasn’t a secret, it wasn’t well-publicized. The motherland doesn’t like being laughed at.
“Give me all you’ve got,” Axel murmurs, and just like that, they’re off, spinning and whirling in a dance that Roxas’ bones remember.
.
“Congratulations,” Riku tells him after, making it a point to find him in the mess hall. Sora isn’t by his side, but then, Roxas hadn’t expected him to be.
“Thank you,” he says, watching as his brother’s partner turns to walk away.
“Riku,” he calls, because he’s curious, and he’s never said the words before. Riku looks back, eyebrow lifted in question. Roxas grins. “You keep taking care of my brother, you hear?”
.
The alarms are loud-louder than he remembers, and Axel is jostling his shoulder, talking to him in a soft shout as he stumbles out of bed and nearly trips getting on his boxers.
“You aren’t ready yet,” Pentecost tells them sternly, shaking his head. “We’re sending Cherno, Typhoon, Striker, and Destiny. There will be time for you two, don’t worry.”
He turns away and almost walks straight into Mako. He tells her the same thing, and for a moment, Roxas shares her frustration.
.
Things go badly-things go worse than badly. They lose the Wei Triplets, and Roxas listens in the Local Command Room, heart in his throat, as Sasha and Aleksis go down-as Chuck Hansen protests loudly to being on standby, and then later, as Striker Eureka charges in.
He’d listened to Sasha and Aleksis drown, the Wei triplets screams ringing in his ears, and now he’s listening to his brother pant for breath, checking Kairi and Riku for damages.
“We’re fine for now, sir,” Sora gasps in their native tongue and something shatters in Roxas’ chest as he curses and repeats himself in English.
The power goes out, audio going dead on Kairi’s scream, and Roxas doesn’t say anything as he turns to Stacker, just looks.
“Go,” Stacker sighs. Mako looks disappointed, Raleigh even more so, but they can’t keep all their eggs in one basket.
They go.
.
Syncing with Axel is like jumping into a pool of warm water. Roxas blinks, Pentecost’s voice in his ears, easing them into it with a 3, 2, 1, and then he’s watching Isa smile at him, his front tooth chipped from that time that they accidentally headbutted each other in the lake, screaming no, no, Isa, how could you, and his arm hurts, broken in three places and held together with metal struts, and Isa is gone, as gone as Sora is to him now, out of reach and out of time, gone on to do better things, and it hurts hurts hurts beneath his breastbone, heart aching and what use are you anyway?
He surfaces, gasping, and doesn’t have to look at Axel to know the neural handshake went off without a hitch, because Axel’s in his head, going Did we do it? Shit yeah, I think we did.
The sound of another person laughing in his head is weird, giddiness that isn’t his own blossoming up out of his chest and let’s do this.
.
Jump move twirl swim, shit land hard, ouch, why, kay, back up now.
It’s everything and nothing like fighting with Sora was, because it’s Axel in his head, Axel in his thoughts, Axel moving half of his (not his, not his, the mechs) body. Leatherface roars and they roar back at it, tossing it away from his/their brother, and gutting it like the fish he/they gutted with their granddad when they were little.
Otachi is deep inside the city, like she’s looking for something, her footsteps visible in the rubble and bodies.
One more, one of them says, or maybe both of them, who knows. They grin at each other, blood on their teeth.
.
It’s only when they’re plummeting through the mesosphere that he realizes he still hasn’t talked to Sora since they came here, that he might die without telling his brother he loves him, that he always has-that he’s sorry, he’s really not mad that Sora got the life they wanted and he didn’t, he’s not, he just thought that now that Sora was important he didn’t need him anymore.
Shush, Axel whispers, nudging him, a kind of mental push that makes Roxas’ toes curl with contentment so out of place that for a second, he’s thrown off kilter. And then- Brace for impact.
.
They rechristen their jaeger Serendipitous Flame, because Axel doesn’t like the idea of calling it by the last name he’d known it as. Too many memories-a layer of shiny red-gold-orange paint didn’t change that.
The mess hall is loud, and Roxas regrets being the center of attention, just a little bit, but then Sora’s tackling him backwards (into a startled Axel, who makes the mistake of catching him) and they’re all going sprawling onto the floor, Sora barking rapid-fire Russian in his face and checking him all over for injuries.
“I’m sorry,” Sora’s wailing, and then Roxas is doing the same thing, a couple pushes away from breaking into tears-Axel’s hands on his hips and his chest shaking with silent laughter.
.
They have a day before the triple event and the clock is ticking down down down, Pentecost barking that they don’t have time to grieve.
Peripherally, he becomes aware of the fact that one of the crazy scientists has synced up with a kaiju, that Mako and Raleigh are sulking a little bit-not noticeably, but they’re still sulking.
“There’s always next time,” he tells Mako and immediately winces, realizing that this isn’t what she needs to hear.
He rides Axel that night, mind still sparking with the ghost of him, and they rock together until they’re wrung out and exhausted-sore from the sex and the battle both-before collapsing into a deep sleep.
Tomorrow, they’re accompanying Saving Destiny and Gipsy Danger into the deep with the intent of dropping a nuclear bomb into an unstable rift of space-time.
.
Striker Eureka is still out of commission when the next kaijus emerge, hovering around the breach like they're expecting them.
“We can handle it,” Axel tells Chuck Hansen. “It’s better this way. You get to be the backup if we fail miserably.”
.
The drift is cold this time, brittle with tension and unspoken fears, memories of everything bad that’s ever happened haunting them like rowdy poltergeists. It’ll be okay, Axel murmurs into his head, giving him another mental nudge of warmth and assurance.
Saving Destiny is submerging on their left-its garish pink-blue-green sinking below the waves-Gipsy Danger on their right, and there’s no turning back now. He thinks of his brother’s face that morning, streaked with tears, his back straight as Riku and Kairi nearly held him up, their arms around his waist. He hadn’t been hurt, but Roxas’ brother always was emotional.
I hope so, he sends back, hopelessly bleak in the face of Axel’s determination.
.
The depths of the Pacific is dark-lit up only by the yellow glow of the breach in the distance and the light of their own mechs.
“So,” Kairi laughs over the comms, voice shaky with nerves. “How ‘bout them Yankees?”
.
Shit hits the fan fast. It always does. One minute they’re standing over the breach, the next there’s a third kaiju clawing it’s way through. Brace yourself, Axel sends his way, right as Gipsy Danger is tackled from the side by one of the others.
“Well shit,” Sora says over the comms.
“Go after them,” Roxas says, watching the immense creature pull itself free. “If you’re fast, you’ll be back here before shit goes south.”
You know they won’t get back here in time, right? Axel murmurs as Saving Destiny goes sprinting the other way. Roxas nods, sharply.
We can hold it off, he sends back, because they can-they can, he knows they can.
.
He was right-they do a great job at fending it off, considering that it’s the only Class 5 kaiju in existence. They take damage, but they’re fine.
Fuck yes, they hiss, pulling their right arm back for the killing blow.
Then it’s calling for help, and they’re fine right up until they aren’t.
.
“Damages,” Roxas hisses into the comms, arm on fire.
“Riku’s down,” Kairi gasps out, sounding out of breath. “Unconscious, I think. I can still feel him. Sora, can you see if he’s breathing-”
There’s no response and Kairi sucks in a breath. “Riku’s down and Sora’s in and out of consciousness,” she says, voice strained. “I don’t know if I can get us there in time by myself.”
Something cold and hard is unfurling in his belly-regret, maybe.
“We’re coming,” Raleigh hisses, and Roxas can kind of see them, limping along in the distance.
Fuck, Axel hisses, a stream of profanity coming from his end of the drift. They aren’t gonna get here in time.
Roxas feels it when his resolve hardens, when he comes to the same realization as Roxas. (Earth needs your brother’s team and Gipsy more than it needs us.) There are alerts beeping everywhere and they’re down to nothing but their bones and a couple charges on a shitty plasma cannon. Their chakram was lost a while ago and Roxas’ sword is embedded somewhere in that thing.
“Gipsy,” he barks. “If we tackle that thing into the breach, do you think you can catch whichever one is aiming for us.”
“I think so,” Raleigh says, unsure.
“Roxas,” Mako and Kairi both start, and he laughs, quick and sharp.
“You’re not the only one with a nuclear core,” Axel says, because Roxas can’t, his throat’s tight with emotion, swollen with thoughts of his brother in the aftermath. He’ll try to rebuild the world, forever guilty that he hadn’t been awake enough to save him, doing his penance.
“Sora,” he finally chokes out. “If you can hear me, I’m sorry. I’ve always been proud of you, I was just too lame to say it. You know how I get.”
“Kairi, if he’s out right now, tell him that for me.” He hesitates, because the Cat 5 is staggering back up and in the distance is a glimmer of the other monster, and Gipsy, right behind it. “And tell him I love him, okay-ya lyublyu tyebya-just like that, okay?”
“Okay,” she gets out, and it sounds like she’s crying. “He-he says ya tozhe tyebya lyublyu, and-crap, Roxas, I’m sorry, I can’t understand the rest. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he hurts so bad, I can’t-”
She chokes and goes quiet, but that’s okay, because he’s heard what he had to hear. They’ll take care of him, he knows they will. They’ve done better at it than he has for the last few years.
I’m sorry, Axel, he murmurs into the drift, letting it float there between them.
S’okay kid. I knew when I took the job that I probably wasn’t coming back from it. I’m just sorry that I dragged you into it.
I wouldn’t have it any other way, he thinks, before he can stop himself. Axel flashes a grin his way and a memory-of the night before, stretched out in the cool sheets together, legs entwined, lips touching.
They tackle the Cat 5 into the breach, shredding it open as they go.
Just barely, they can hear Gipsy grabbing the other creature above them.
They fall and fall and then they’re through-
.
“You need to eject now,” Pentecost is yelling. Roxas smiles, because that ship sailed when the kaiju clawed into their wiring last time. He’s worked on these machines long enough, and Axel knows because the knowledge is in Roxas’ brain.
The other world is shiny-bright, full of colors he’s never seen, a sky no human has ever set eyes on. There are creatures below them, staring up, like they’ve seen the second coming. Good, let them know the fear they put into humankind every time a kaiju surfaced.
The clock is ticking down-their clock that will end the clock back home.
(10)
He feels it when Axel takes his hand, ripping both of their gloves free and tangling their fingers together.
(5)
You were the best thing that ever happened to me, Roxas thinks, I-love-you’s in every language spilling from his mind and into the drift around them. Axel squeezes his hand.
Let’s meet again, in the next life, one of them (both of them) thinks.
(3, 2…)
I’ll be waiting.
(1.)
Entry Number: 08
Author: Callunavulgari
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts/Pacific Rim
Rating: PG-16
Genre: crossover
Spoiler Warnings: Spoilers for all of Pacific Rim.
Word Count: 5482 words
Roxas barely remembers cold Russian winters now. He had thirteen whole years of them before K-Day-before the Kaiju floated up from the murky waters of the deep and set their sights on San Francisco-before his brother turned away from the television to face him, melted snow still in his lashes, all wind-bitten red cheeks from the run back home and said: “Roxas, it’s our duty to help them.”
At thirteen, there wasn’t a whole lot that two orphans could do but watch the world turn-watch men with big guns try their damndest to eradicate the monsters and not blow up the earth in the process. They’re too young for the military, so they watch, until late 2014, when a new program goes into effect. Turns out that while fourteen year olds aren’t accepted into the military, they’re more than welcome as volunteers for the new Soviet Jaeger program.
They’re the youngest volunteers by far, which means they can’t actively do much about getting into a jaeger, but they can get a head start on training. They get to know the other volunteers-the engineers, the strike rangers. They watch Sasha and Aleksis rise in the ranks, the way her smile curls crooked when they’re chosen as Cherno Alpha’s pilots, leaping up and throwing her arms around her husband in a rare display of affection.
Roxas and Sora watch. They train. They learn other languages, quizzing each other in cold beds at night. The dorms aren’t very good about heating, so they learned quickly to either sleep together and conserve body heat or figure out how to deal with the cold taste of frost in the back of their throats come morning.
The year that they turn sixteen, when the Shatterdome in Vladivostok is finally opened, they’re unceremoniously thrown into a Jaeger. Cherno Alpha’s offline and Nova Hyperion isn’t responding, and they may be sixteen, but they’ve got the highest simulation kill rate among their peers, so they’re the ones who are picked for the still new Mark 3, Serendipitous Key.
They don’t have time for a proper neural handshake-they’re to get their asses over to where Cherno Alpha’s dead in the water and salvage the mission.
The drift is supposed to be scary-it’s supposed to be invasive, but Roxas has spent all his life in his brother’s head, so he figures not much can go wrong.
.
He’s wrong.
.
They last twenty-three minutes before their sync rates crash and fail, flopping belly up. They’re stubborn though-almost impossibly so. Stubborn enough that even with their heads splitting apart, memories scrambling reality like egg, they still make the kaiju into so much sushi.
Stubborn, but apparently incompatible.
.
“Thank you,” Pang So-Yi tells them over dinner, in stilted, fumbling Russian. Sora and Roxas are surrounded on all sides by pilots-So-Yi and An Yuna on both sides of them and Sasha and Aleksis across, like they’re making a shield out of their bodies, hiding them from prying eyes.
Roxas snorts, eyes blank, and spoons shitty gruel into his mouth. Sora’s better at hiding his emotions-always has been, unless the emotion is happiness. That he wears on his sleeve.
“It was nothing,” he replies, in Korean this time. His accent is atrocious, but So-Yi smiles at him anyway. “We were just doing what you would have done for us.”
We were doing our jobs-our duty, Sora doesn’t say.
“You were good out there, kid,” Sasha tells them, holding eye-contact with Roxas until he’s forced to look away. “Don’t let them tell you anything else. Not everyone can hold down a steady drift.”
Yes, Roxas doesn’t say. But what are we supposed to do now?
.
It’s simple, really. Sora gets imported off to the brand new Shatterdome in LA, where they’re in desperate need of a pilot for their three-man jaeger, Saving Destiny, and Roxas follows him.
.
Kairi is a sweet-faced redhead with a powerful right hook and a smile that could charm the devil himself. Originally from Cardiff, she’d been orphaned while she and her parents had been visiting her grandparents in O’ahu. She was one of the lucky ones, because she’d actually made it off the island when Hawaii was considered a lost cause.
Sora takes to her instantly.
Riku is a tall, pale-haired teenager from Denmark, who’d volunteered when his brother became one of the leading commanders of the strike rangers. He reminds Roxas of winter, with his pale features and high nordic brow.
The three of them get along famously, and their drift goes off without a hitch-one of the highest sync rates for a pair of strangers ever recorded.
Roxas tries not to be jealous-he does.
He also tries not to wonder why two strangers can sync with his brother perfectly while he’d nearly killed them both.
.
The years pass. Saving Destiny rises in fame, the one US-made jaeger that’s yet to be defeated. His brother and his copilots become celebrities, and Roxas gets to watch him on the television they keep in the break room just outside of engineering. Piloting a jaeger was the worst thing that ever happened to him, but working on them isn’t quite as bad. They’re just machines-really heavy, complex machines that take him almost a year to learn every part of.
Eventually, he becomes more familiar with his brother’s jaeger than he is with his brother.
He still follows Sora wherever he goes, but they rarely see each other. Sora’s too busy with his copilots, with the rest of the Shatterdome, and with his adoring public. Sora’s accent fades to nearly nothing while Roxas’ remains so thick it’s nearly unintelligible, unaccustomed to speaking in other languages without his brother at his side.
Years pass-jaegers and their pilots rise and fall, but Roxas’ brother never does.
It’s 2025 and he dreads the day when his brother doesn’t come home.
.
When word reaches him that the jaeger program is being shut down for the sake of some stupid wall, he’s furious. How the leaders of this world thinks that some shitty wall is going to make a bit of a difference is beyond him. He cannot think for one second why they’d think it was a good idea.
Then Sora comes marching into engineering, helmet still under one arm-still in his drivesuit, eyes like ice. Roxas recognizes the expression on Sora’s face, because it’s a mirror to his.
“We’re going to Hong Kong,” his brother hisses up to him in rough-painfully rough-Russian. “They’ve given Pentecost eight months of funding to keep the Hong Kong Shatterdome operational, so we get one last try to blow up the breach.”
He’s glowering, visibly enraged, and Roxas’ coworkers are all staring at them like they don’t know what the hell is happening. Most of them don’t even know Roxas has a brother much less who his brother is.
“Hong Kong, huh,” he responds, feeling hysterical amusement welling up in his belly. Blowing up the breach has been tried before, each time with spectacular amounts of failure. He doubts that this time will be any different. “Is she coming with us?” he asks, pointing over his shoulder at the immense leg he’d been working on before Sora stormed in. Saving Destiny is probably his favorite mech in the hangar, and not just because she’s his brother’s. She’s immense for a Mark-2 and her colors are so eye-searingly incompatible that it’s endearing.
Sora gives him a weird look, like he’s being stupid, which okay, yeah. If Sora’s going, so is his mech, but whatever. He’s allowed to be concerned.
He sighs, dropping his pliers and trying not to smirk at the way the girl closest to him jumps. She probably thinks he’s about to lose his shit and tackle a jaeger pilot. He’s not known for his temper, and hasn’t been since that time he got fed up and started beating Coyote Tango until it started working again. He considers actually doing it, leaping down from his perch and tackling Sora to the floor, just to see them shit themselves. He probably would have done it before, when him and his brother were talking more than every couple months. Instead he just shrugs, brushes the worst of the oil off onto his jeans, and starts his way down.
(It would be easier if he used the ladder, but he’s fundamentally opposed to them. He’s got a couple nicknames in the hangar, most of them not entirely nice, but the one he most often hears is: ‘stupid spider monkey.’)
“Okay,” he tells Sora, in English this time, so his brother doesn’t strain himself trying to speak their native tongue. He grins, wide enough to show his teeth. “When do we leave?”
.
Hong Kong is grayer than he’d thought it would be. For some reason he’d thought that once he got to China the smog of LA would have faded into something at least kind of resembling the clear skies of Russia. He’d forgotten that Hong Kong had some of the worst light pollution in the world.
“So, you’re Sora’s brother, huh?” Kairi asks him. They’re still on the airplane, waiting for the call that it’s okay to disembark. For some reason she’s sitting beside him, even though the plane is all but empty. Just them and a couple strike troopers. The advantages of being famous, supposedly.
“Yep,” he says. “Doesn’t talk about me much, does he?”
His accent is so thick that many of his fellow engineers had told him that he shouldn’t even try speaking english, that he should just stick to his own language and let them puzzle over russian dictionaries. Kairi doesn’t seem bothered at all, holding his gaze steady and smiling.
“Actually, he talks about you quite a lot,” she chirps, smile still holding. “You’d know if you ever came to visit us.”
.
He spends his first few days in Hong Kong drowning himself in repairs and making small talk with the other engineers. He spends his nights in a tiny little dive in the Bone Slums, pouring shot after shot down his throat and occasionally going home with an ill-advised stranger, the neon signs making the puddles on the street glow-oil-slick bright-like rainbows.
The morning that he wakes up in bed next to Hannibal Chou and a woman with her head shaved to the quick, he cuts himself off from going home with whoever bats their eyes in his direction. He doesn’t cut himself off from the little bar or the booze, because it’s the end of the world and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t at least have a record breaking blood count level when he dies.
(Hopefully he dies at night in that case, because he’s not stupid enough to touch Saving Destiny when he’s drunk. He isn’t gonna fuck up his brother like that.)
He’s seated on a stool of chiseled bone, staring up at the sky through slats of huge alien ribcage, when a man slides onto the stool next to him, eyes on Roxas.
“Nope,” Roxas says, before the man can even say anything. He’s already too drunk, reality starting to spin a little bit. He doesn’t have the patience for some asshole hitting on him.
The man laughs though, cheerfully-all raspy and low. Roxas tries not to let it go straight to his cock, but mostly fails miserably.
“I didn’t even say anything,” the man chuckles. It takes Roxas a moment to realize that he’s not speaking English, Chinese, Cantonese, or Japanese-none of the languages he’s most accustomed to hearing at places like this. The man’s speaking his language. It takes even longer for him to realize that he wasn’t speaking English himself, the entire process nearly making him go cross-eyed.
“I told myself I’m not allowed to go home with anyone,” he slurs into the rim of his shot glass. The man laughs again, but it’s softer this time, like he’s deliberately trying to make it as obvious as possible that he’s not laughing at Roxas. His hackles start going down when the man flags down the bartender and gets him a glass of water of all things.
From the corner of his eye, Roxas can only see the corner of his lips flicked upwards. “I’d buy you an actual drink,” the man says, clinking their glasses together. “But something tells me that you shouldn’t be drinking anymore.”
That’s not entirely true. Roxas is Russian, capital R and everything, he can hold his liquor. But the guy is probably right. Once the room starts spinning it’s the beginning of the end.
“Probably not,” he concedes, risking the motion sickness and turning to look at the guy.
He’s attractive enough, Roxas supposes. Bit tall, bit on the bony side, but nice looking. High brows, ridiculous cheekbones, a sharp jawline that blurs in and out of focus. His hair is one big blob of fire engine red-a bright enough color that it probably isn’t real. Roxas squints and finally realizes that the guy has dreadlocks, except for the unruly bangs falling loose on one side of his forehead and the other half that’s shaved almost to the scalp.
The green eyes are the most arresting, if only because the world is a haze of orangeredgold and it’s the first green thing he’s seen all night.
The guy looks amused, eyes crinkled up at the corners. He’s got a lip piercing, which Roxas had overlooked. Now he can’t look away. He narrows his eyes in the guy’s direction.
“I’m Roxas,” he says, thrusting a hand out to shake and nearly unbalancing himself. It would be a shame if he ended up on the floor. “And I’m considering breaking my rule.”
The man throws his head back and laughs.
.
He does end up breaking his rule. Not at first, because he’s not that easy. They talk for a couple hours, trading off languages until they’ve cycled through Russian, Korean, French, Italian, and Mandarin. The guy’s name is Axel and he’s here for a job. Apparently he’s from a city called La Rochelle along the coast of France, but moved to Washington state when he was three. He doesn’t have an accent and never has, but he’s fond of languages, so his French is, of course, flawless. Roxas tells him that he’s from a little town in Russia, that he’s got a twin brother, and that he’s here for a job too.
He doesn’t say anything about jaegers, so they spend their time talking about the countries they’ve been, trading amusing bar stories, and just talking.
They walk along the kaleidoscope streets of Hong Kong, marveling at the long, sprawling carcass that the people here have made their homes, eating cha siu baau and sipping on tiny cups of milk tea. Roxas staggers a little from time to time-the streets are wet and his shoes are threadbare, peeling in places-but Axel always catches him, with a steady hand to his back.
When they finally kiss, it’s beneath a bright red overhang of some kind of sweet shop, the warm glow from the neon lit letters swallowing them up. Roxas is happy, the alcohol a dull burn in his chest and happiness lighting him up from the insides.
“Your cheeks are red,” Axel told him, a moment ago-an eternity ago. His mouth is lopsided and he smells like vodka, and he is the most beautiful thing Roxas has ever seen.
Now that he’s aware of it, he can almost feel the blood in his cheeks.
“So they are,” he murmurs, only slurring in a vague round-about kind of way, and pulls Axel down for a kiss.
.
He wakes up the next morning to kisses bruised into his skin, an ache between his legs, and Axel’s hair in his mouth.
It’s not a bad way to wake up.
.
“Give me your number?” Axel asks him after he’s come back with a full tray of breakfast.
Roxas is still sprawled across his sheets, naked as the day he was born, and scrutinizing a cut out picture of the Eiffel Tower-not a photo, but almost like the image had been cut out of a magazine. He takes a croissant from the tray without looking, and knows that Axel must have bribed someone, because he’s never gotten croissants from the mess hall.
“Don’t have to,” he says through a mouthful of bread. It’s sweet with drizzled honey, the pastry flaking against his chin. “I live right down the hall.”
.
“So what’s your story?” Axel asks him later, when he’s found Roxas in the far corner of the mess hall at dinner, partially hidden by a pillar.
Roxas shrugs. “Same as what I told you. I just left out the part where my brother’s one of Saving Destiny’s pilots.”
He still doesn’t say anything about failed sync rates or a childhood spent training for something just that much out of reach. He doesn’t have to. He’s sure that Axel can read it in every line of his body-in the way he holds himself, in the strength of his arms and the way he’d flipped Axel onto the bed last night, grinning as he slid up Axel’s body.
“What’s yours?” he asks, because Axel started this conversation, and wouldn’t have if he wasn’t willing to volunteer the same information.
Axel bites down on his lip, eyes suddenly unsure. “I piloted Flurry Diviner a few years ago-one of the two Mark 3’s that weren’t fully destroyed.”
“What happened?”
Axel’s lips tilt sideways into a grim smirk. “I broke my arm and my partner left me for a Mark 4 and a pay raise. They offered to find a replacement for him but-”
He trails off, wrinkles digging a furrow into his brow. “I didn’t trust anyone in my head after that,” he settles on. There are things he isn’t saying, enough to make Roxas wonder if his partner was his lover, his friend, because hurt doesn’t dig that deep unless it’s been done to you by someone you love.
Roxas smiles at him, cautiously, and bumps their shoulders together, hoping it will chase the sadness from Axel’s face.
.
He meets Mako Mori the day that she becomes Raleigh Beckett’s copilot. She’s shining with pleasure, singing with it, because it’s before they fail their neural handshake miserably.
“Good luck,” he tells her, her native language sitting thick and unfamiliar on his tongue. He’s streaked with jaeger oil and reeks of sweat and metal, but she lights up for him anyway, offering him a quick bow of thanks before hurrying away.
He hears about it from Axel, later, about the failed sync rates-about chasing the rabbit-and Roxas frowns into his pillow and pretends he’s asleep.
.
“Raleigh Beckett isn’t the only one looking for a replacement partner, you know,” Axel tells him. He has to almost shout to be heard, but the hangar’s quiet today, and he’s pretty sure the few people who are with him don’t speak French.
It had occurred to him. When Axel told him about his past as a jaeger pilot, Roxas had known. They wouldn’t have brought a washed up old pilot here for no reason. They needed all the power they could get, and it answered the question of what the shiny red and gold Mark 3 hiding in Gipsy Danger’s shadow was for.
“Really?” he drawls back, swiping the back of his hand across his brow. “You don’t say.”
Axel grins up at him, bright like the trailing end of a comet-white-hot and blinding.
“You should find me in the Kwoon Combat Room,” he shouts, and leaves, like he doesn’t even need to hear Roxas’ response.
.
“I knew you’d come,” Axel whispers, grin taking up most of his face. He looks good shirtless-all pale skin and faded purple scars-but Roxas already knew that.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” Roxas asks him, smirking. They pressed a stick into his hand when he stepped into the ring, but he doesn’t need it.
The crowd around them is whispering and despite himself, Stacker Pentecost almost looks intrigued. Behind him, Mako is chewing her lip nervously, eyes quick and darting as she takes in their stances. Roxas doesn’t know how much they know of his story, because this isn’t Russia, and though Serendipitous Key wasn’t a secret, it wasn’t well-publicized. The motherland doesn’t like being laughed at.
“Give me all you’ve got,” Axel murmurs, and just like that, they’re off, spinning and whirling in a dance that Roxas’ bones remember.
.
“Congratulations,” Riku tells him after, making it a point to find him in the mess hall. Sora isn’t by his side, but then, Roxas hadn’t expected him to be.
“Thank you,” he says, watching as his brother’s partner turns to walk away.
“Riku,” he calls, because he’s curious, and he’s never said the words before. Riku looks back, eyebrow lifted in question. Roxas grins. “You keep taking care of my brother, you hear?”
.
The alarms are loud-louder than he remembers, and Axel is jostling his shoulder, talking to him in a soft shout as he stumbles out of bed and nearly trips getting on his boxers.
“You aren’t ready yet,” Pentecost tells them sternly, shaking his head. “We’re sending Cherno, Typhoon, Striker, and Destiny. There will be time for you two, don’t worry.”
He turns away and almost walks straight into Mako. He tells her the same thing, and for a moment, Roxas shares her frustration.
.
Things go badly-things go worse than badly. They lose the Wei Triplets, and Roxas listens in the Local Command Room, heart in his throat, as Sasha and Aleksis go down-as Chuck Hansen protests loudly to being on standby, and then later, as Striker Eureka charges in.
He’d listened to Sasha and Aleksis drown, the Wei triplets screams ringing in his ears, and now he’s listening to his brother pant for breath, checking Kairi and Riku for damages.
“We’re fine for now, sir,” Sora gasps in their native tongue and something shatters in Roxas’ chest as he curses and repeats himself in English.
The power goes out, audio going dead on Kairi’s scream, and Roxas doesn’t say anything as he turns to Stacker, just looks.
“Go,” Stacker sighs. Mako looks disappointed, Raleigh even more so, but they can’t keep all their eggs in one basket.
They go.
.
Syncing with Axel is like jumping into a pool of warm water. Roxas blinks, Pentecost’s voice in his ears, easing them into it with a 3, 2, 1, and then he’s watching Isa smile at him, his front tooth chipped from that time that they accidentally headbutted each other in the lake, screaming no, no, Isa, how could you, and his arm hurts, broken in three places and held together with metal struts, and Isa is gone, as gone as Sora is to him now, out of reach and out of time, gone on to do better things, and it hurts hurts hurts beneath his breastbone, heart aching and what use are you anyway?
He surfaces, gasping, and doesn’t have to look at Axel to know the neural handshake went off without a hitch, because Axel’s in his head, going Did we do it? Shit yeah, I think we did.
The sound of another person laughing in his head is weird, giddiness that isn’t his own blossoming up out of his chest and let’s do this.
.
Jump move twirl swim, shit land hard, ouch, why, kay, back up now.
It’s everything and nothing like fighting with Sora was, because it’s Axel in his head, Axel in his thoughts, Axel moving half of his (not his, not his, the mechs) body. Leatherface roars and they roar back at it, tossing it away from his/their brother, and gutting it like the fish he/they gutted with their granddad when they were little.
Otachi is deep inside the city, like she’s looking for something, her footsteps visible in the rubble and bodies.
One more, one of them says, or maybe both of them, who knows. They grin at each other, blood on their teeth.
.
It’s only when they’re plummeting through the mesosphere that he realizes he still hasn’t talked to Sora since they came here, that he might die without telling his brother he loves him, that he always has-that he’s sorry, he’s really not mad that Sora got the life they wanted and he didn’t, he’s not, he just thought that now that Sora was important he didn’t need him anymore.
Shush, Axel whispers, nudging him, a kind of mental push that makes Roxas’ toes curl with contentment so out of place that for a second, he’s thrown off kilter. And then- Brace for impact.
.
They rechristen their jaeger Serendipitous Flame, because Axel doesn’t like the idea of calling it by the last name he’d known it as. Too many memories-a layer of shiny red-gold-orange paint didn’t change that.
The mess hall is loud, and Roxas regrets being the center of attention, just a little bit, but then Sora’s tackling him backwards (into a startled Axel, who makes the mistake of catching him) and they’re all going sprawling onto the floor, Sora barking rapid-fire Russian in his face and checking him all over for injuries.
“I’m sorry,” Sora’s wailing, and then Roxas is doing the same thing, a couple pushes away from breaking into tears-Axel’s hands on his hips and his chest shaking with silent laughter.
.
They have a day before the triple event and the clock is ticking down down down, Pentecost barking that they don’t have time to grieve.
Peripherally, he becomes aware of the fact that one of the crazy scientists has synced up with a kaiju, that Mako and Raleigh are sulking a little bit-not noticeably, but they’re still sulking.
“There’s always next time,” he tells Mako and immediately winces, realizing that this isn’t what she needs to hear.
He rides Axel that night, mind still sparking with the ghost of him, and they rock together until they’re wrung out and exhausted-sore from the sex and the battle both-before collapsing into a deep sleep.
Tomorrow, they’re accompanying Saving Destiny and Gipsy Danger into the deep with the intent of dropping a nuclear bomb into an unstable rift of space-time.
.
Striker Eureka is still out of commission when the next kaijus emerge, hovering around the breach like they're expecting them.
“We can handle it,” Axel tells Chuck Hansen. “It’s better this way. You get to be the backup if we fail miserably.”
.
The drift is cold this time, brittle with tension and unspoken fears, memories of everything bad that’s ever happened haunting them like rowdy poltergeists. It’ll be okay, Axel murmurs into his head, giving him another mental nudge of warmth and assurance.
Saving Destiny is submerging on their left-its garish pink-blue-green sinking below the waves-Gipsy Danger on their right, and there’s no turning back now. He thinks of his brother’s face that morning, streaked with tears, his back straight as Riku and Kairi nearly held him up, their arms around his waist. He hadn’t been hurt, but Roxas’ brother always was emotional.
I hope so, he sends back, hopelessly bleak in the face of Axel’s determination.
.
The depths of the Pacific is dark-lit up only by the yellow glow of the breach in the distance and the light of their own mechs.
“So,” Kairi laughs over the comms, voice shaky with nerves. “How ‘bout them Yankees?”
.
Shit hits the fan fast. It always does. One minute they’re standing over the breach, the next there’s a third kaiju clawing it’s way through. Brace yourself, Axel sends his way, right as Gipsy Danger is tackled from the side by one of the others.
“Well shit,” Sora says over the comms.
“Go after them,” Roxas says, watching the immense creature pull itself free. “If you’re fast, you’ll be back here before shit goes south.”
You know they won’t get back here in time, right? Axel murmurs as Saving Destiny goes sprinting the other way. Roxas nods, sharply.
We can hold it off, he sends back, because they can-they can, he knows they can.
.
He was right-they do a great job at fending it off, considering that it’s the only Class 5 kaiju in existence. They take damage, but they’re fine.
Fuck yes, they hiss, pulling their right arm back for the killing blow.
Then it’s calling for help, and they’re fine right up until they aren’t.
.
“Damages,” Roxas hisses into the comms, arm on fire.
“Riku’s down,” Kairi gasps out, sounding out of breath. “Unconscious, I think. I can still feel him. Sora, can you see if he’s breathing-”
There’s no response and Kairi sucks in a breath. “Riku’s down and Sora’s in and out of consciousness,” she says, voice strained. “I don’t know if I can get us there in time by myself.”
Something cold and hard is unfurling in his belly-regret, maybe.
“We’re coming,” Raleigh hisses, and Roxas can kind of see them, limping along in the distance.
Fuck, Axel hisses, a stream of profanity coming from his end of the drift. They aren’t gonna get here in time.
Roxas feels it when his resolve hardens, when he comes to the same realization as Roxas. (Earth needs your brother’s team and Gipsy more than it needs us.) There are alerts beeping everywhere and they’re down to nothing but their bones and a couple charges on a shitty plasma cannon. Their chakram was lost a while ago and Roxas’ sword is embedded somewhere in that thing.
“Gipsy,” he barks. “If we tackle that thing into the breach, do you think you can catch whichever one is aiming for us.”
“I think so,” Raleigh says, unsure.
“Roxas,” Mako and Kairi both start, and he laughs, quick and sharp.
“You’re not the only one with a nuclear core,” Axel says, because Roxas can’t, his throat’s tight with emotion, swollen with thoughts of his brother in the aftermath. He’ll try to rebuild the world, forever guilty that he hadn’t been awake enough to save him, doing his penance.
“Sora,” he finally chokes out. “If you can hear me, I’m sorry. I’ve always been proud of you, I was just too lame to say it. You know how I get.”
“Kairi, if he’s out right now, tell him that for me.” He hesitates, because the Cat 5 is staggering back up and in the distance is a glimmer of the other monster, and Gipsy, right behind it. “And tell him I love him, okay-ya lyublyu tyebya-just like that, okay?”
“Okay,” she gets out, and it sounds like she’s crying. “He-he says ya tozhe tyebya lyublyu, and-crap, Roxas, I’m sorry, I can’t understand the rest. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he hurts so bad, I can’t-”
She chokes and goes quiet, but that’s okay, because he’s heard what he had to hear. They’ll take care of him, he knows they will. They’ve done better at it than he has for the last few years.
I’m sorry, Axel, he murmurs into the drift, letting it float there between them.
S’okay kid. I knew when I took the job that I probably wasn’t coming back from it. I’m just sorry that I dragged you into it.
I wouldn’t have it any other way, he thinks, before he can stop himself. Axel flashes a grin his way and a memory-of the night before, stretched out in the cool sheets together, legs entwined, lips touching.
They tackle the Cat 5 into the breach, shredding it open as they go.
Just barely, they can hear Gipsy grabbing the other creature above them.
They fall and fall and then they’re through-
.
“You need to eject now,” Pentecost is yelling. Roxas smiles, because that ship sailed when the kaiju clawed into their wiring last time. He’s worked on these machines long enough, and Axel knows because the knowledge is in Roxas’ brain.
The other world is shiny-bright, full of colors he’s never seen, a sky no human has ever set eyes on. There are creatures below them, staring up, like they’ve seen the second coming. Good, let them know the fear they put into humankind every time a kaiju surfaced.
The clock is ticking down-their clock that will end the clock back home.
(10)
He feels it when Axel takes his hand, ripping both of their gloves free and tangling their fingers together.
(5)
You were the best thing that ever happened to me, Roxas thinks, I-love-you’s in every language spilling from his mind and into the drift around them. Axel squeezes his hand.
Let’s meet again, in the next life, one of them (both of them) thinks.
(3, 2…)
I’ll be waiting.
(1.)