Chapter Text
The kaiju sighted at 1700 hours on the first of May 2021 breaks the surface of the Sea of Japan off the coast of Dalnegorsk, making for the shore. The image that the sensors call up on Otabek’s monitor is broad and bipedal, with a wicked curved horn crowning the top of its head and two axelike spikes of bone protruding from its back. Armored all over except at the joints and the base of the throat, where the bony plates taper off into unprotected flesh. He knows the pilots will be studying the same image on the HUD in their Jaeger, homing in on those vulnerable points, calculating how best to reach them.
“All good upstairs, Mission Control?” Right-hemisphere pilot for the Mark-4 Jaeger Justice Jackal Isabella Yang speaks through the communication line, into his ear. “Are we cleared to engage?”
Otabek spares a glance at one of the screens to his left, taking stock of the stability of the neural bridge before answering. “Affirmative, Justice Jackal. You’ve got a stable Drift going.”
After he’s rechecked the pilots’ vitals and brain activity once more for good measure and keyed in a few more commands, the metallic, toneless voice of the central operating system’s AI sounds, reverberating all through the control tower. Simulation Start: Justice Jackal. Target: Category 4 kaiju, codename Hookheart.
Six months now Otabek’s been assisting with neural bridge operations at the J-Tech lab, facilitating test-Drifts and sync tests and running simulated battles. Officially the sim is meant to serve as a proving ground for Rangers-in-training, to familiarize them with the Drift and teach them the particulars of handling a Jaeger, though given the closeness with which it’s able to mirror the experience of actual combat it’s not uncommon for full-fledged pilots to also make use of it on the regular, to keep their skills sharp between attacks. Otabek’s current charges have logged more hours on the simulator than anyone else on the base, even the current point team.
Some of the techs—meaning Phichit, by and large—like to chat all throughout the simulation, trading tips and tactics and gossip with the pilots in their pods, so at ease even in the midst of battle that you’d swear there were three people in the Drift instead of two. The extra handholding’s proven to spell the difference between success and failure for a good few wet-behind-the-ears trainees still struggling to think on their feet, but Otabek prefers to keep his own counsel, whatever he might see playing out on the screens, speaking barely at all beyond the necessary cues. He’d once heard a senior Ranger describe a run through the Jaeger Combat Simulator as “trying to solve a Rubix cube in the middle of a boxing match,” and he knows that, more than any kind of instruction that might come from the outside, you need to concentrate on what’s in front of you to win. The trainees, just by necessity, figure this out eventually. The more seasoned pilots know it back to front.
“Go ahead and put your feet up, Altin.” The new voice in his ear is Jean-Jacques “JJ” Leroy, Isabella’s partner and fiancé and one of the only souls on-base with even a shadow of a chance of matching Phichit for chattiness. Otabek can see on the main monitor that they’ve hit the water, striding at top speed through the shallows to intercept the kaiju at the requisite distance of ten miles off the coast of the virtual city, but JJ talks like he’s knee-deep in a kiddie pool. “Catch some Z’s or something. We won’t tell.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’d like not to be demoted for abetting illegal naps,” Isabella cuts in. She’s probably rolling her eyes, even as the kaiju rears up from the water to meet them and Justice pulls her right fist back to strike out, aiming for the head. “Left hook.”
“Bella, c’mon! I’m just trying to do a friend a favor.” Hookheart staggers backward, reeling, as the Jaeger follows up from the left. Justice Jackal’s built to be a brawler, and her pilots work best running a proactive strategy, which in a nutshell means finding a way to mount a full assault as quickly as possible, and not let up until they’ve brought the monster down. It’s an approach that smells at least seventy-five percent of JJ, but for two years Isabella’s run with it, and for two years it’s mostly worked. “You’ve seen Otabek lately. Under-eye bags down to his chin, permanent scowl. All classic signs of stress.”
“He’ll be less stressed out if you stop talking his ear off every time he has to run a sim for us. Again; get it under the jaw.”
Strictly speaking, the pilots don’t need to talk when they’re synchronized with the Jaeger. All the communication that matters takes place in the shared headspace created by the Drift, sophisticated deliberations playing out in a matter of seconds without need for words. But even with two years of experience as Vladivostok’s primary flank team under their belts—two solo kills, two point-team assists—JJ and Isabella still talk more than most. Otabek’s theory is that it centers them to hear each other’s voices; he imagines it’s one reason their neural bridge is one of the most secure the base has ever seen. Privately he knows he’d sit through as many hours of cockpit-talk as they wanted, just for the chance to observe the way their brainwaves spike and slow in near-perfect synchronization, although he’d never say it aloud.
There’s a moment that looks like it might tip the balance. A punch goes wide, pulling the Jaeger forward with it, and Hookheart finds its footing just in time to meet it head on. The clawed forefeet descend on Justice’s shoulders, raking against the metal and screeching as they grapple in the surf. Otabek’s first instinct is to look back at the brain scans; sure enough, JJ’s lines have sped up, gone jagged across the screen as his thoughts race to regroup. He’s always had the more dynamic mind, but those high-intensity mental processes also mean the panic’s like to get him if he isn’t careful.
“JJ, don’t let him breach the pod.” Isabella’s voice is warning, but she takes care at all times to keep it level. This is why she holds the right hemisphere—the lead pilot’s place, for all intents and purposes. She’s a watcher. She catches JJ and holds him steady, pulls him back into sync. (It’s funny to some of the older veterans but not by any means unprecedented, to have the bride in the lead like this; the Marshal herself and her partner were the same way, back in the day, as was Vladivostok’s first and most renowned point team.)
“I hear you, babe.” He’s quick to rally—he always is, with her there. The left fist comes up again, and one retractable arm-blade slides into view just in time to sink into the swathe of unarmored tissue along the underside of the kaiju’s throat. The cut knocks Hookheart clear, giving Justice the shooting space she needs for an impact at point-blank range. “One counterattack coming right up, JJ-style.”
Justice’s frontmost armor plates slide apart, and her chest-mounted missile launcher empties a full salvo into the kaiju’s head and neck. With a final long scream it collapses in the surf and sinks below the surface, disappearing from view. The blip on Otabek’s radar likewise winks out.
“You’re in the clear, Rangers,” he says. “Looks like a new personal best.” In front of him the computer hums as it draws up the assessment report for the simulation, calculating values for total duration, damage sustained, and Kaiju blue containment, but he already knows it’s a new high score.
He can practically hear Isabella’s smile, red-lipped and triumphant and just a little wild, crackling to brilliant life over the comm. “Thanks, tech. Couldn’t have done it without you.”
It’s the AI that answers in his stead as the image of the Jaeger fades from view, standing tall, the water roiling about its legs glowing with the fluorescent blue blood of the monster. The words flash out across the screen to take its place: Simulation complete. Humanity stands.
Otabek’s last task of the evening is to go upstairs to the main lab, to encode and file the last batch of simulation reports. The rest of the techs have cleared out for the day, gone back to their quarters or down to the mess hall for dinner—no one else is around but Phichit, hunched like a gargoyle over one of the computers by the wall, so fully absorbed in his task he doesn’t even look up to say hello. Highly anomalous behavior for Phichit, so Otabek approaches.
“Are you winning the war, Dr. Chulanont?”
“Haha. Just you wait ‘til you’re the one swimming in homework from the top brass.” Phichit’s shoulders pop audibly as he straightens up and stretches his arms high above his head. His grin is half a grimace, worn down at the edges, but still wide enough across to split his face in two. It must be doing wonders for his sanity to see a friendly face, talk to a real person, even if Otabek never has much to offer by way of either friendliness or conversation. “I’ve gone through so many files I could probably tell you the names of all the candidates for official Ranger training in my sleep. Plus blood types, plus countries of origin.”
Maybe it’s to be expected that even Phichit’s unassailable good humor is giving way a little, buckling under the strain. Everyone’s operating on frayed nerves and too little sleep these days; what Otabek hears of the official base-to-base communications is hardly encouraging, snatches of gossip and conjecture, two Jaegers going down at different bases in the same month, a predicted rise in the frequency of Kaiju attacks. Add to that the pet theory that’s being passed around among the crazies down in K-Science, that the kaiju are evolving both physically and mentally based on the fighting experiences of the ones the Jaegers manage to take down.
To stoke the fire even higher, a minimum of three operational Jaegers is standard protocol for every Shatterdome, and as things currently stand Vladivostok is short-staffed. Senior pilots Nikiforov and Katsuki lead the defense with only Yang and Leroy on-site to assist; just last month the base lost Sara and Michele Crispino to an emergency transfer to the Sydney Shatterdome, itself a stopgap measure to cover for yet another lost team. It’s not at all a stretch to imagine how easily a strike group of only two might be picked off by a Category 4 kaiju, however seasoned its Rangers. No wonder the brass are scrambling.
News through the grapevine—not that Otabek ever actively listens for it, but somehow it always finds him—is that there’s a new crop from the Academy coming within the week. It only makes sense for Phichit to have been put in charge of canvassing for a new team among the recruits. He’s been the favorite psych analyst since he did some gamechanging therapy work with Yuuri Katsuki a few years ago; Otabek’s never quite gotten the full story of his rise in the ranks out of him (“It’s embarrassing! That was a long time ago!”) but it’s enough to see that he knows everything about everyone, above and beyond whatever vital information you might find in their individual files.
He can’t help a little smile of his own, in sympathy. “Plus favorite foods and colors?”
“And whether they prefer boxers or briefs, yeah. God.” Phichit kicks out the empty chair next to him and motions Otabek into it, waving the folder in his hand back and forth like a banner of war. “Come here, Beka. Look at this piece of work.” As Otabek accepts the file and flips it open, he takes it upon himself to narrate its contents. “Yuri Plisetsky. Aced all his physicals at the Jaeger Academy. Top marks in engineering and weapons development. An unprecedented fifty-one drops, fifty-one kills in the simulator. Interfaces with the machine like it’s in his blood.”
Otabek’s eyes have only just made it down the first page. Fifty-one drops, fifty-one kills. A clean zero-loss record would already have been something to write home about, for a cadet; to graduate with such a high base score on top of that seems almost criminal. But Otabek finds he could well believe it, with that name. “Isn’t it? He’s a Plisetsky.”
“That kid practically grew up on this base, did you know? He was maybe sixteen or seventeen when I came here for Yuuri. Always wanted to be a pilot. Seeing his name on this file felt like a dream.” The exhaustion slips for a moment from Phichit’s face, laying bare the excitement beneath until he’s practically beaming. His eyes leave Otabek, going misty as they stare out into the distance, almost wistful. “You know about Astra Nova, then, I guess.”
“Everybody knows about Astra Nova.” There had been no shortage of stories about them at the Academy, in the mess hall, in the barracks. Nadia and Sasha Plisetsky, the first Rangers to lead the charge out of Vladivostok in the earliest days of the Jaeger program, decorated heroes of the Kaiju War. Of course their son would be a golden boy—but Otabek doesn’t have to do much more than turn to the second page of his file to see the caveat. “This range of Drift compatibility, though.”
“Abysmal, right?” Phichit’s already-disheveled bangs flop into his eyes as he shakes his head, pitching his voice high and shrill. “Oh yeah, sure, Vladivostok, here’s your boy back! The best we have! Cream of the crop! Just one thing though, one minor detail we thought you should know about: he can barely Drift.” When he laughs, even if it’s an exhaustion-laugh, a stress-laugh—not a genuine, true, bubbling Phichit-laugh—it shakes his whole body. Otabek almost puts out a hand to keep him from falling out of his chair. “He can’t keep a stable connection, just knocks out everyone who tries to get in.”
“...This wasn’t something you anticipated?”
“He’s always been, uh. Difficult, I guess, is the word. We’d kind of hoped the Academy would teach him to control his claws, but now they’re handing him back to the Marshal, and she’s handing him off to me, and maybe if it also snows in hell somewhere along the way I’ll be able to find someone he doesn’t absolutely hate having inside his head.” Phichit sighs, smiling sheepishly down at his hands. “Can you believe it?”
He can believe it, is the thing. Otabek remembers perusing his own file, reading the assessments of his own poor synchronization rates. The other recruits in his rotation had found the experience of Drifting with him—unsettling, he thinks, was the word the analysts had used, the inside of his head too cold, the silence too absolute. It was impossible, after all, to build the neural bridge without trust, and how could you trust someone who carried nothing into the Drift?
That file sits now in the back of a drawer in Phichit’s filing cabinet. It’s why Otabek had known, almost word for word, how Yuri Plisetsky’s official recommendation would read: Recommended with reservation. A talented cadet with commendable physical ability and a well-rounded skill-set, but impeded by lower-than-average synchronization rates and a generally unstable Drift connection. Potentially high-functioning pilot if a compatible partner can be found. Failing that, highly suitable for a number of officer positions in the J-Tech division.
Six months he’s been sitting on that phrase: “if a compatible partner can be found.” He remembers that file in Phichit’s hands at the welcoming assembly for the new recruits in the big entrance hall, how he had walked straight up to Otabek as the group began to scatter and greeted him like he was welcoming an old friend home: The Marshal showed me your Psych grades. How’d you feel about helping me out in the labs while you wait for a decent placement? I’d love to have you around—but it’s your choice, of course.
Otabek had chosen, and somehow taught himself not to think overmuch about six months of waiting. The psych labs in the J-Tech wing had been, at the very least, somewhere to make himself useful. A place to belong, after a fashion.
“I wouldn’t worry. He’s not the first problem kid you’ve had to place.”
“No, but the other problem kid proved surprisingly helpful.” Phichit winks at him, and extends his hand for Yuri Plisetsky’s file. “God, Beka. I want this guy to ride so bad, but I already know—he’s going to be a headache and a half.”
On the flight to Vladivostok, Yuri Plisetsky presses his forehead to the helicopter window and imagines the world ending in water.
There’s nothing to it. The last leg of this journey is all ocean, hours and hours of it unfurling like a flag eight thousand feet below—an expanse the color of ink shot through with frothy white trails where the waves have whipped themselves to anger, so vast it looks like it covers the whole world. If you’re fanciful you might conjecture that one day the water will take whatever the monsters alive in the depths don’t manage to destroy, the tide rolling in there at the end of all things and never receding, reaching out with spidery, grasping hands to gather the debris.
“How much longer to the Shatterdome, Plisetsky?” the boy in the seat on Yuri’s left asks, mouth to his ear, braying over the noise of the rotor blades above them. Yuri flinches back from the window and whips his head around but can’t match a name to the face—bright, beady eyes like a pair of glass marbles, lips curled in a sneer. Some Mikhail, probably. Some Ilya or Ivan or Egor. It doesn’t matter.
“Hell if I know. I’m not flying this thing.”
“And here I was thinking you’d know the way home. Weren’t you born in the cockpit of a Jaeger?”
Conn-Pod, Yuri almost says, the venom acrid on his tongue. It’s called a Conn-Pod, for fuck’s sake. And he knows he was eleven the year Reckless Light, the first Jaeger ever commissioned, rolled out of the base at Anchorage and took down the kaiju Trespasser off the coast of Alaska, but his temples have started to throb, and there’s nothing he can imagine gaining from a continued conversation with the idiot next to him that would be worth the headache, so he pinches his lips shut and leans forward, elbows braced against his knees.
Everyone and their mother’s mother had gotten on his case about it endlessly at the Academy, this habit he has of armoring up, spines out and ready to impale. Talk to your rotation, Plisetsky. You’re on the same side, Plisetsky. It’s not your partner you ought to be fighting, Plisetsky, it’s the goddamn kaiju.
Of course he’d known. He’d known it all on paper from the first day of Drift training. But the real thing, having someone in your head was different—is different. No one he’d tested with thought fast enough, pushed hard enough toward that point of total synchronization. Worst of all were the nosy ones, who lingered too long over their own memories and probed too much at his. Those were the ones Yuri had no second thoughts about knocking out of his head in a heartbeat, tearing away from the half-formed connection so abruptly the other person came away with a migraine. Even a nosebleed once or twice, a telltale sign of neurotrauma, however minor.
(You can’t fight if you don’t trust your copilot, Celestino Cialdini had told him once after a particularly disastrous test-Drift, as they watched the medics cart the other guy away in a wheelchair, a wadded-up towel pressed over his mouth and nose, sticky red-brown splotches already soaking through.
I can’t trust them not to touch me, Yuri had bitten out, in the haze of pain slicing through to the back of his head, the acid burn in his chest he refused to recognize as fear, so potent he might go blind with it. How the hell am I supposed to trust them with anything else? It had taken another five seconds and as many deep breaths before he’d managed to collect himself enough to add, perfunctorily, Sir.
The guy had gotten better eventually, Celestino had taken care to tell him around a month later, though he’d refused to try a Drift again and eventually dropped out of the program altogether. It wasn’t a great loss, all things considered. Yuri had forgotten his name the day of the accident, as soon as he’d been wheeled out of sight.)
Now there's nothing left to talk about. They are the best the Academy has to offer, or so they’ve been told. Of the sixty or so recruits this flock of birds is carrying to Vladivostok, a good ninety percent will likely be farmed out among the different operations divisions according to the dictates of both skill and need, finding a place somewhere in the tangle of branches and sub-branches Yuri’s taught himself to rattle off in his head without thought—Jaeger engineering, weapons development, psych analysis, kaiju science, neural bridge operations, battle programming and tactics. Only a handful will ascend to on-site Ranger training. Whether Yuri Plisetsky will number among them remains to be seen; at this point he’s heard so much about his “unusual” academic record (the mildest way of putting it by far) that he almost wants to imagine himself past the point of caring. No other cadet in the history of the institution has excelled so thoroughly in all areas but one—arguably the most important one, the make-or-break. There’s no reason for him to fail this hard at this one thing. Yuri Plisetsky should carry the Drift in his blood. He knows, he knows, he knows.
When he turns back to the window, he sees the Shatterdome taking shape, the four towering gates in the seawall that let the Jaegers out into the water, the high domed roof that opens up for the choppers. The gnawing in the pit of his stomach is flight-nausea, the dryness in the hollow of his throat no more than dehydration from being so long at altitude. He doesn’t know how to think of it as coming home.
The new recruits form up on the helipad and file into the entrance hall where they stand at attention, ranged row on row before the base’s highest-ranking officials. The Marshal herself and her second are absent—probably locked up in Central Command, too busy with affairs of state to deal with such trivial matters as making inspiring speeches—but their lead Rangers are here in their stead. Victor Nikiforov and Yuuri Katsuki, pilots of the Mark-4 Harmony Tango, face them shoulder-to-shoulder—arrayed in full military regalia for the occasion, no less.
Yuri falls in with the rear line, and only just barely suppresses a snort. Those medals on their chests look brighter than his future. They must weigh as heavily, too.
“Welcome, cadets!” Victor greets them with what Yuri thinks is entirely too much cheer, given the context. Many things can be overwhelming about meeting the man in the flesh—the height, the stride, the sheer assaulting presence—but more than anything else it’s this uncanny levity of his that disarms. It’s hard to believe anybody can smile like that after ten kaiju kills. “Before anything else, please accept our congratulations on surviving the Academy. We know as well as you do how relentlessly your instructors have worked to break your spirits over the six-month training period, and you can be sure that the kaiju we’ll face down together in the near future will come at us with a similar disregard for mercy.”
There’s no warning, no change in tone that Yuri can hear, but he feels it and knows the others feel it too—that subtle shift in the air like the flick of a switchblade at the mention of kaiju, a razor-edged gleam in Victor’s eye that strips all the hush of its silence.
“You come to us at an especially precarious time in the life of our base,” Victor continues. He must know how he’s stirred the air to life now, must feel it crackling and electric around him. “K-Science tells us that the kaiju are evolving, and the only way to ensure our survival—and that of the rest of humanity too, by the way, don’t forget—is to evolve with them. Every single one of you has a key role to play in that evolution. No one is dispensable. Likewise, no one is exempt.”
“We mean to say that the base needs all hands, so you can rest assured that in the coming days the heads of each division will be doing their utmost to assign each one of you to a post befitting your abilities. Know that any and all contributions you can make to the operations of this base will be instrumental in turning the tide of this war.” Yuuri Katsuki’s been a senior Ranger for four years now; he’s practiced all the lines enough to speak them without stammering, but some things don’t change. Yuri knows him, so he knows all the places to look for nerves—the high lift of the chin, the hands restless by his sides, clenching and unclenching. “You too, now, are the body and blood of the Shatterdome. On behalf of Marshal Lilia Baranovskaya, Chief Command Center Officer Yakov Feltsman, and all on-site personnel: we welcome you to Vladivostok.”
What Victor Nikiforov agitates, Yuuri Katsuki settles, and like this they keep the base alive. Yuri doesn’t need to look around him to see the barefaced awe with which the whole room watches them. He looks down at his shoes instead, scowling, hands fisted into small balls of iron in his pockets as the applause builds to its height and drowns out every other sound.
The assembly disperses after the recruits are dismissed with an official salute. As the lines dissolve around him Yuri glimpses out of the corner of one eye how Victor bends to whisper something in Yuuri’s ear, how the latter murmurs an answer behind his hand and turns to look out at the crowd, searching. Before they can pick him out of the sea of retreating backs he’s already ducked his head low and departed.
They find him at mess that evening. Or, rather, they make him come to them, when Yuri has a full tray in front of him—his grandfather’s shepherd’s pie, a double serving of peas and carrots and an extra roll—and not a single person he’d willingly ask to share a table with in a dining hall full to the rafters. His grandfather will probably have his hands full supervising the dinner service, but he figures he could take his tray into the kitchen anyway and eat at an unused counter, the way he always used to do. Better that than one of the bathrooms, and better that than the indignity of having to ask some stranger for a seat.
He’s just about to turn and march inside, in defiance of the sign on the kitchen door that reads No unauthorized personnel beyond this point, when the voice rings out clear and sparkling, so loud it rises easily above all the noise.
“Yurio! Hey, Yurio!”
It’s impossible not to know that voice. Before he can take another step he catches sight of Victor waving at him from a table on the far side of the room, by the wall, one arm scything through the air—beside him Yuuri does the same, though his raised hand is much more modest—and Yuri has no choice, then, but to approach and take the empty bench across from them. He feels the eyes of the entire base on him as he sits, hot on the back of his neck, singeing holes into his jacket at the shoulderblades, but Victor doesn’t seem the least bit aware of the small commotion he’s caused. It’s also possible he doesn’t care.
“You left the assembly in such a hurry we didn’t even get to welcome you home. Want my pudding cup?”
Yuri’s eyes roll back so far in his head he swears he can see the inside of his skull. “Pudding’s for kids.”
“It was your favorite thing ever until six months ago. Did Jaeger School break your sweet tooth along with your spirit?” Victor shrugs and starts to peel back the plastic seal. His lower lip protrudes in what Yuri realizes, with mounting incredulity, is a pout. “Well, your loss. It’s chocolate today, see.”
Victor Nikiforov had been the talk of the town at the Academy, of course. He and Yuuri Katsuki were the youngest team so far to run point at the Russian base, with a shining record of ten kaiju kills under their belts for the trainees to gush about. Eight solo kills, only two assists. A fighting style so graceful and precise the bond behind it must be deep as the dark sea itself.
Victor Nikiforov is not great. He doesn’t know how to ride by the book. He’s so in love with surprises that no one knows what’s going on in his head but his partner. That’s why the Marshal has him running mostly solo missions; he’s too unpredictable to mount a dependable assist, even with Katsuki to rein him in. Each time Yuri had bitten his tongue. It didn’t matter that telling the truth would have made them hate him—he knew more than a few of them were bent on doing that regardless of anything he said or did—but telling the truth would also have prompted questions, and he’d decided long ago that he hated answering questions more than anything, even listening to the starry-eyed hero-worship of one Victor Nikiforov.
“This isn’t the best place to talk shop, but since we’re all here, the Academy sent us all your records. They’re...” Viewed up close like this, at ground level, Yuuri Katsuki flattens out and all the authority disappears. The man that faces Yuri across the table tiptoes around his words. His eyes shift, restless behind his glasses, left to right and back again. “Impressive, to say the least. Even the Marshal thinks so. Even with your difficulties.”
“My difficulties,” Yuri echoes. It’s childish of him, but Yuuri’s probing has always made him chafe. He has no business being so gentle. “Does the Marshal want me to haul my ass down to the labs and give myself up to J-Tech? Make myself useful now that I’m back here, like everyone else?”
“Someone with your skill-set would be well-suited for almost any position, Yurio.”
It’s the diplomatic answer, Yuri thinks. The safe answer. He’s already heard it repeated, in slightly different iterations, more times than he can count.
“Except the one he wants.” Victor has a plastic spoon between his teeth and a spot of the contentious pudding on his chin, but without anyone noticing he’s banished the warmth in his eyes until his gaze is pure steel. “No way little Yurio’s going to let anyone into his head, no way you can ride without a partner.” When Yuri levels his gaze at him and doesn’t answer, he cocks his head a little and continues, throwing the words over his shoulder: “It’s lucky for you that Yuuri and I enjoy trying to solve seemingly unsolvable puzzles in our free time.”
“I’m not a puzzle.” The acid in Yuri’s tone prompts more than a few glances from the cadets the next table over, who for the past five or so minutes have made no secret of their interest in the discussion taking place between their upstart classmate and the base’s most senior pilots. Their dismayed whispers roll off, though—mere white noise, melting away easily into the ambient hum of other, less dramatic conversations.
“And you’re not unsolvable, either,” Yuuri replies before Victor can say another word. The look he shoots his partner across the table says the rest, firm and fond and reproachful, all at once. “You may not have matched with anyone at the Academy, but Lilia’s hoping we’ll find someone we can work you into sync with here on your home turf. She’s not going to give you up, and neither will we.”
Yuri scratches at the back of his neck, looks away, starts a sentence in a voice suddenly hoarse (“I’m—”), and then cuts himself off. He knows whose investment his tenure at the Academy was.
“In our debt forever, we know.” Victor all but sings the words. The plastic spoon spins between his fingers; for a moment it looks as if he’s going to make it disappear, but the real sleight of hand happens when Yuri looks up and finds, again, the twinkle returned to his eye. “Yuuri’s got Phichit Chulanont putting together a candidate list for you. If he can’t find someone, no one can.”
Phichit Chulanont. Yuri repeats the name silently to himself, listens to the unusual sound of it in his inner ear. Five years ago Phichit Chulanont hadn’t asked him questions he didn’t know how to answer. He’d babbled too much and smiled way more than anyone had the right to in the middle of a war that might end the world, but Yuri remembers how Phichit had sat beside him on the couch in the consulting room, rather than across the desk as the doctors had. How he’d always had food with him for Yuri to share—apple slices or bottles of tea or packs of biscuits—and how between bites and sips and long silences he’d somehow made Yuri talk to him, open up about things the younger boy hadn’t even believed there were words for. Yuri knows he hasn’t talked with anyone like that since; hasn’t wanted to, now that he knows a little about the terror of sharing as well as its hope. He had been fifteen then. He’s twenty now, and doesn’t need to be talked through his days anymore.
Likely Phichit Chulanont still has too-bright eyes and walks with that strange bounce in his step, and knows everything about everyone. Maybe he knows enough to prove to Yuri he’s not a hopeless case, now as before.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Eat well, and get some rest,” Yuuri tells him. He looks, just then, exactly the same way he did earlier—standing at Victor’s right hand in the late afternoon light, back straight and gazing steadily ahead, an aura of unmistakable command settled capelike around his shoulders. “Meet us in the Kwoon tomorrow morning at oh-nine-hundred. Sound good, cadet?”
Something inside Yuri snaps to attention then, so instinctive he can’t even think about stopping it: “Yes, sir.” As soon as he says it he wants to put a fist through the smiles they give him.
Victor and Yuuri make it a point to lead by example; they take their trays with them as they go, to leave the table clear. Yuri watches them go out of the corner of one eye, so fixated on their departure he forgets even to deny it to himself. It’s only afterward, once they’ve disappeared out the door—Victor’s arm flung across Yuuri’s shoulders and one of Yuuri’s circling his waist, so careless, so criminally easy—that Yuri looks down at the tabletop and notices the pudding cup Yuuri left him, untouched, a clean spoon resting on a napkin next to it.