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Katya has been dead for eight months, and Sasha is fine.
Marshall Orlova is by no means comfortable with putting Sasha back in the cockpit so soon, but Cherno Alpha is empty, and they cannot afford that, and there is no one on the base that can see that lumbering titan running again without a Kaidanovskaya sister in her chest. They begin compiling a list of candidates for drift compatibility.
Sasha does not like the idea of drifting with a man, and informs Orlova of such. The marshall looks Kaidanovskaya in the eye, cocks a brow upwards. The base is running on a skeleton crew after the last Kaiju attack. There were few enough women to begin with, fewer still who’d come out of the jaeger program. Sasha knows this, and Orlova waits silently, patiently for her to remember. After a moment, Sasha says that maybe she can try drifting with a man.
The auditions begin. Sasha is wearing her red lipstick, her battle paint, hoping no one notices how tightly she clutches her sparring rod. She has a reputation to maintain. Two female candidates first, Chan and Zelenka, both good, both on completely different planets from Sasha. They hit the mat. Then a small, sinewy man with a shaven head. Markovic, who she remembers from the training program. Not a bad man, she could deal with him. But he’s down in two moves
Now the giant. Vasilyev. She doesn’t like him. Not that they’ve ever spoken, but he doesn’t do much of that in the first place. She doesn’t like how quiet he is. She doesn’t like his beard. She doesn’t like that his first name is Aleksis. Why can’t he just be Alexey, like a thousand other men she knows? Obviously, this won’t work. He’s got a foot and a half on her, and about a hundred and fifty pounds. But then she shifts her weight, and he changes his grip on the sparring rod, and together they move. There’s the snap of wood on wood, she retreats a step, but is at his neck with the next move. He turns her own speed against her, moving in an unexpectedly elegant circle. Sasha had pegged Vasilyev for a brawler, for obvious reasons, but this fight felt like a dance. Sasha is eight years old, and her father is teaching her to waltz, letting her lead because she doesn’t know how not to. She is twelve, choreographing a dance to some stupid American pop song with Katya. She is twenty-eight, sparring with her co-pilot. Orlova informs them of such the moment they finish their number, and Sasha keeps her poker face. Vasilyev sees this and smirks. He isn’t handsome enough to smirk, she thinks. Sasha makes sure he hears her telling Chan how she doesn’t like big men.
Sasha’s protests fall on deaf ears. Vasilyev - Aleksis - is now her co-pilot. There are no worrying readings from the breach, and it will take a day or two to cobble together a flight suit big enough for all seven feet of Vasilyev. Orlova suggests they use the time to get to know each other. Grudgingly, Sasha invites him to spar again. He says nothing, just nods, as if he knows how much his silence vexes her.
Cherno Alpha’s pilots meet the next day, and they dance again. No words. Aleksis knows when she is going to move before she does. She sees where he’ll be before he’s there. Her body flows like water, and she hates it. Hates it with everything in her because Aleksis is a man when he should be a woman, and he is silent when he should be talkative, and he is not Katya. The thought hits her like a kaiju body slam, and she trips. Cheeks burning, she tosses off the gentle bear paw of a hand on her shoulder, and stalks from the room.
The next day, Sasha arrives at their sparring session with her thoughts of Katya tightly, deliberately tucked away. Unfortunately, this leaves room in her mind to notice that her co-pilot is wearing a wifebeater. It had been t-shirts before this, and she’d pictured him as a squarish gorilla-like block of muscle underneath. This is not true, apparently. Aleksis has a tapering waist and a flat stomach under that gigantic chest. Shoulder muscles shift interestingly under sweat-slick skin. Sasha is reasonably sure he can’t tell she’s staring.
Aleksis arrives at the following session without his shirt, growling something about laundry day that they both know is bullshit. Sasha tries to call his bluff by staring openly, but he only drinks in her attention, wiggling his eyebrows and pulling a circus strongman pose. And even though it feels a little like blasphemy, Sasha laughs. When he sits next to her in the mess hall that night, she doesn’t move seats, and greets him with something like a smile.
The day they are supposed to test their neural handshake is the day the kaiju codenamed Raptor decides to visit. There is no warning, no thought, just the familiar feel of Cherno’s cockpit, a few barked orders, and she is in Aleksis’ mind. She sees a farm in the middle of nowhere, a worn copy of The Martian Chronicles, a tall woman with crow’s feet smiling. Aleksis hides nothing because he has nothing to hide. No regrets. No secrets. She sees a place in his mind that is put aside just for her. He shows it to her proudly, as if he hasn’t considered that she might not want it there. But then there is no time because raptor is on the horizon. Ready to dance? Aleksis asks. As if I have a choice, Sasha says. Cherno Alpha’s waltz partner lunges, and the music starts to play.
Almost without knowing, almost behind her own back, Sasha finds herself knocking on Aleksis’ door a couple nights later, pushing it open without waiting for a reply, seeing him lying on his back on the floor, because the bed feels too cramped. And then she’s straddling him, and he isn’t stopping her, and he feels vast and topographical and warm under her spread hands. He’s smirking, and a voice in her head is saying again that he isn’t handsome enough to smirk, but Sasha can’t hear it over her own heartbeat.
I thought you didn’t like big men, he begins to rumble, but Sasha’s lips keep him from finishing.
The women on the base had mostly avoided Aleksis before now. But now that he’s a hero, now that he’s been seen making Sasha Kaidanovskaya smile, they seem to like him a bit more. Sasha sees Chan sitting next to him in the mess hall, talking, gesturing at something in the technical manual on the table, resting her small hand on his boulder of a bicep. For a moment, Sasha forgets how much she likes Chan and sees red. Aleksis was hers. Her freakishly large co-pilot. She comes to his door at midnight, toting rubber gloves and the bleach bottle she uses for her own hair. Aleksis’ smile cracks his face wide open.