When the Becket brothers were chosen out of nearly 200 other candidates, Yancy wasn't surprised in the least. You didn't need a genius level IQ or a football scholarship to pilot a jaeger. All you needed was a good partner. And Raleigh was the best.

"I can't even TELL you how incredibly insanely JEALOUS I am of my own daughter."

Stiles turns to look at her, schools his face into an expression of exasperation, but then there’s a rush—a current, a wave, a familiar tendril of smart, precise, hot pink and sharp heels and wicked smartness—and—

Mako Mori and Sasha Kaidanovsky bond over being some of the only women in the Hong Kong Shatterdome. A short piece exploring that friendship.

I’m talking about daemons as in the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman, or the Golden Compass movie if you’ve seen that. What daemons do everyone have? What happens to daemons during a drift? How do pilots’ daemons act around each other? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.

Raleigh comes home with Mako for O-bon.

Fuyumi can read between the lines of Mako’s file. The justification for having Mako on the base is paper thin -- strings have been pulled and favours have been bartered, and somewhere along the line someone decided Fuyumi was the perfect combination of talent and expendability to be brought into this mess. It’s only slightly closer to a compliment than an insult -- the balance tipped by the child at the centre of this, nine years old and heart-breakingly brave. -- Scenes from the year after Stacker and Mako first meet.

Ranger Mori and Ranger Ackerman are drift compatible, but outside the Jaeger they rarely exchange words.

"Let's go steal a Jaeger," Parker said, smiling a wolf's smile.

The SNK characters' happy reincarnated life is rudely interrupted by kaiju marching out of the Pacific. They are 100% done with this crap.

They move together as one. He’s never felt something like this before, not even when he piloted Road Warrior. It’s easy to fall into a rhythm of sorts when the person next to him is just as broken as he is, her shattered pieces aligning just so with his. That he can make sense of, that he understands. The more they fight together, the more they pilot War Rig, driving the jaeger like it’s an extension of them both, the more he feels whole. [Or simply, the Mad Max: Fury Road/Pacific Rim AU that no one asked for.]