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1
Eliza is so young the first time it happens.
The news station their nanny has left on plays the horrors out before her eyes, San Francisco, a place that seemed to be worlds away, falling into rubble at the hands of the sort of monsters she only saw in her darkest of nightmares. Before the details can be given, the television is snapped off and everyone’s talking in a nervous flurry of voices.
It’s not until weeks later that the truth comes out; their father, home from the senate for the first time in what feels like months, sitting before his daughters as he tries to explain what has happened on the other side of the country.
Angelica is the one that speaks first, her voice quiet but sure in a way Eliza strives every day to emulate, “We should help them,” she insists, before their father hushes her concerns.
This is a war fought between monsters and men. There’s nothing a young girl can do, not yet.
2
She barely convinces Angelica to wait for her, before enlisting in the academy. Only holding her off till her eighteenth birthday, when Angelica’s gift to her is the hefty application packet, the one her father would happily burn if he discovered it.
Under the darkness of night Eliza holds her phone up like a candle light and scribbles every fact she can remember onto the lines of the pages.
That is until she reaches the last question – the words staring up at her from the far too white sheet – dark print that will linger on the back of her eyelids.
Why do you want to enlist in the Jaeger Program?
3
The program sets out to break her. To break them.
The first women to successfully complete the first round, it seems as though the world has its eyes on them, simply waiting for them to fail. If nothing else, it inspires her to push herself harder, to go further than those before them had ever dreamed of.
Everyone who has gone before them speaks of their first drift, when the compatibility on the mats turns into combat ready compatibility. Some wax poetic about the experience, others describe the jumbled rush, but none of them can put into words exactly what it feels like.
To give yourself fully to another with the trust that they will return the sentiment.
“Aren’t you nervous,” the other recruits ask of them.
But it is Angelica who has the answer for them. Angelica, who has always had the answers.
“I know my sister like I know my own mind.”
Simple words, an insistence of everything that they knew, that they would ever know.
Their first practice drift seems almost effortless, one mind melding into another as if they had always belonged together.
Eliza echoing the sentiments expressed by her sister just before the drift, loud enough that it cannot be ignored.
4
Distractions are not allowed when it is the fate of the world at risk.
She knows this, it’s a mantra that was drilled into her head since she first stepped into the doors of the academy, since she had her sister rose out as the only pair of female Jaeger co-pilots in the rather short history of the program.
But there standing before her is a man that could make her break those vows, the man standing right to the Marshall’s left, a stylus pen tucked behind his ear, and a soft hopeful grin on his face. The every busy secretary, whose very impression stops her in her place each time he passes by.
He makes her feel hopeless in a way that a Kaiju attack never could.
She’ll hear the whispers later, of the boy that had survived a Kaiju attack, that grew into a man wanting nothing more than to get out there and fight for himself, but unable to find a compatible co-pilot.
Eliza cannot help the feeling of relief that washes over her at the knowledge of that, foolishly believing that she will not lose the light of this man, when the war is done.
She kisses him like the world is ending.
Perhaps because for them it is.
5
Angelica feels the same.
Though she hides it well, the drift reveals all, and Eliza sits silently as the lingering want of her sister’s desires wash over her, nearly pulling causing her to chase the rabbit and fail a drift for the first time in the history of their partnership.
“Why didn’t you tell me,” she’ll ask later, in the privacy of their bunks, when they’re both only pretending to be asleep.
“It’s nothing,” Angelica insists, but it’s a lie. Perhaps the first lie she has ever known her sister to tell her.
Instinctively Eliza reaches downwards to the bunk below her, her fingers searching for Angelica’s, and knowing her as her sister always has, it only takes a moment for Eliza’s silent request to be fulfilled. The hand held within hers, is strong and steady, guiding Eliza as she always has.
“You promise you’re doing alright,” Eliza says, begging for her sister to simply return her sentiment, but there’s a long pause between them before Angelica says anything.
Eventually when she does speak, her words offer Eliza, only the barest of illusions of comfort, “I’m satisfied.”
6
They fight together as one, with each step Angelica takes Eliza follows right behind her. The men who run the program claim there’s never been a pair more in sync than the Schuyler sisters.
It’s only after her first kill, watching the blue of the Kaiju blood stain the water that it really hits Eliza how serious this is. There’s no going back now. She’s going to win this war, for everyone.
Eliza plasters a smile on her face later as the Marshal pins a medal of valor to her chest, her fingers laced with her sisters as they raise their arms proudly to the sky.
7
The Marshal goes first, an attack on their base that nobody is entirely prepared for. A double event, unpredictable and unprecedented. Their Jaeger is too far away to make any difference, not until it is too late and blood stains the ground.
In the midst of it all she finds Alexander.
Bleeding out from his own recklessness, she stands back as the final blow is delivered, unable to watch as Burr performs a mercy kill to put him out of his misery.
It’s Angelica who finds her later, her arms wrapping around Eliza in a comfort that she had so desperately been craving.
“We won the war,” they’ll say later.
But nobody ever mentions the cost.
8
She publishes a tell all years after the Jaeger program is locked up and forgotten, a mere footnote in the history books, a vague memory of the time where people had to come together to fight an alien invasion.
A vague memory of all the people she’s lost, to the attacks and to the passing of time.
The first words on the page, still echo in her head, even though she’s no longer able to drift.
“I know my sister, like I know my own mind.”