"The Eight-Span Crow, an omen of divine interest. Some people think the kaiju--"
"I know. But it's a weird name for a Jaeger. I mean, they all have two-part names. Coyote Tango, Cherno Alpha--"
"My parents named me Yatagarasu for good luck. Does this name displease my rangers?"
"No, no, it's a good name! But I would've gone with something like...Solar Corvax."
That was because Maighread always tried to rename everything. Everything. After he got to know her better, he would join Marcela in teasing her about it. "Are you sure you like this kaiju's name? We could give it a different one!" They'd settled on four or five alternatives on average. For the one that killed both of his rangers, there had been ten. Almost half of them had been made up by Yatagarasu to comfort them while they died. He'd made up the last two while he finished it off, blinded by fear, hatred, sorrow, and blood. Neither of them were printable, because neither of them were pronounceable except in that state where your mind had been ripped into three pieces, and you couldn't remember which one of those was your own. Yatagarasu had limped back to the Dome, where after delivering his report, he'd curled into a ball. It had taken twenty-six hours for the medics to get a look at him, but while their work was done in just a few hours more, the psychs couldn't do much for that broken mind.
There just wasn't a lot you could do in that situation. The psychs had never felt it--never felt the loss of a partner. Never felt the people they'd lost. Never felt...never felt...never felt... Yata shut his eyes tight against the dimming twilight. Most jaegers were never given new rangers if they lost their first pair. It wasn't considered healthy for anyone involved, and most people balked, anyway. Even those few rangers who'd lost partners rarely re-assigned. Too difficult to find partners in the first place--to find more people who were drift-compatible after the first time was too much to ask. Yata had never bothered asking. He didn't want to go through it again.
Ice_Dragon_Demon