look, i spent years in the toxic hellscape of pacific rim fandom and have emerged with a single fucking niche truth:

lan xichen is almost universally drift compatible.

he takes nothing with him into the drift except a warm, steady compassion that ripples out in the linkup, the same blue as the drift itself . the images are simple. clear. typically focused on the prep process. he drifts with nie mingjue. he drifts with his brother.

memorably, once, almost as proof of concept, lightcap puts him into the pod with nie huaisang. they're unlikely to ever pilot together, but for years, it's the only time huaisang manages to successfully drift with anyone. it's the only time he manages a kill in the simulator.

lan wangji is not universally drift compatible. he can get along well enough with most lan to get the job done, but when lightcap puts him in the simulator with nie huaisang, the resulting meltdown actually fuses wires and sends smoke drifting from the top. huaisang exits

the pod at speed, as if pursued by a bear.

wangji is perfectly correct in his exit and debrief, but there is a slight, small narrowing in his eyes that xichen takes, correctly, as smugness that he was entirely right and xiong-zhang was wrong.

lan wangji and wei wuxian are, as you might imagine, drift compatible. a late night run-in at the kwoon, wei wuxian with a repurposed fruit juice bottle full of shatterdome hooch, lan wangji narrowing his eyes in a way that means, i'm going to demerit your ass back to tech, and

the fight that spills over to the point that somebody goes to get lan xichen and lan qiren, who are looking over bodies in the morgue on the floor below that display disturbing intercellular incorporation of kaiju material -- think about how hard lwj fights going into the drift

with wei wuxian, but how fast they sync when they do, centered on childhood memories of abandonment and yearning and being walked away from, combined with a present fierce, pressing need to be useful to the ones you love. lan xichen mapping onto jiang yanli, jiang fengmian and

lan qiren. lan wangji only has one brother and disdains at the idea of mapping jiang cheng onto xichen in a way that makes wei wuxian bristle, but they find common ground in a memory of jiang cheng teaching wei wuxian how to swim and xichen coaxing a younger wangji into the cold

pool after a hard beating. madame yu -- a complex feeling too deep for a first drift, and wei wuxian places a pin in it, flashes a moment of his own complex feelings about his father, and they move on to calm, methodical, simulator murder of an entire squadron of kaiju.

meng yao is a tech who gets a chance to jockey after singlehandedly holding down the ops fort during double event, but he never, ever, so much as steps into the drift. the closest he comes is one night with xichen, when they're sitting together in the lan shatterdome. xichen

asks if a-yao has ever wanted to. ever been curious. if he wants to, xichen can fire up the drift simulator then and there. it isn't the first time he has asked, and sitting in that quiet room, pale blue and humming with sound of the lan shatterdome in the dead part of the

overnight shift -- a-yao realizes that xichen thinks his reluctance is because he is afraid to fail in front of others. that's what the offer to wipe the log afterwards means, even though it breaks six different rules. xichen may be a decade out from jockeying, but he is still

a pilot down to the marrow of his bones. to him, there is nothing more wonderful than the drift. it is intended as an affirmation of the bond they have, a statement that there is no part of a-yao that xichen is not ready to love and accept. a-yao takes xichen's hand and they

sit together for a long time in the pale blue light from cloud recesses, the lan jaeger.

xichen never presses the point again, which is a shame, because if he had, if he had ever forced the point, he might have learned about the kaiju implants running throughout a-yao at even a

cellular level.

in some universes, jin guangshan seeks demonic cultivation. in this one, he wants immortality and power in kaiju blood. a-yao will settle for power alone, as long as it won't cost him xichen.

(in the end, it does.)