Anchorage.

The old man and the boy found him, saved him. But not really. Raleigh still cannot truly hear anything above the buzzing roar in his head from the noise - explosions - Raleigh Listen To Me -

That too.

Raleigh hears words like shock and traumatized but he doesn't flinch when the Shatterdome medics wrap up his wounds; they are long striated things from the scalding electricity in his suit, far more than the damage to Gipsy Da--Raleigh listen to -- He shakes his head but Yancy is still very loud, very missing, and he keeps scanning the room looking for him. Almost saw him in one of the doctor's faces. That was a bad plan, trying to move to hug the perfect stranger and realizing again for the first time that it hurts to move.

(The doctors take photos of the wounds before wrapping them. Science is science, even when death is involved. Maybe especially then.)

"We're very worried," Doctor Not-Yancy tells Marshal Pentecost when he arrives in the med-unit to see to the wounded pilot. "He doesn't even blink."

"Of course not," Raleigh hears as a reply, all British tone and titanium alloy. "He is seeing for two people. Are you done with him?"

"No, we've still tests to run -- "

"No you don't."








Raleigh refuses the (uncomfortably handsome) survivor's benefits that the PPDC tries to give him. Well, almost - he takes one hundred dollars and gets himself as far away from the Shatterdome and all things Jaeger as possible.

On the day he leaves, Tendo points out the trawler bringing back Gipsy Danger just off the three-mile marker and coming further inland every second. "It's rare lately that a Jaeger could be salvageable. You sure I can't change your mind?"

Raleigh listen to m--

"There is nothing to save there. Let her go to the Bay with all the rest."

"But we need you here, Becket."

"No, we needed her -- " pointing to the eviscerated Jaeger out at sea, " -- and that's not an option. Goodbye, Tendo."

And...that was it. Raleigh was almost surprised at how easy it was to separate himself from being a pilot, but after a while, it made sense to him.

There is no such thing as a one-man Jaeger pilot. All he did was fall down.








Now, from the top of the Wall, he thinks every so often of that big fall downward, alone on the beach with the old man and the boy.

Then looks down from his kaiju-high perch on the useless Wall he's been helping to build for near on a year now.

He's still falling, but he never does quite make himself take a jump towards it.