Zoe and Wash, while deeply forever ridiculously in love, are not drift compatible.
Zoe and Mal are drift compatible.
Kaylee and Wash are drift compatible, and they have the best piloted, sweetest running jaeger ever been seen in the ‘verse – the best piloted, sweetest running jaeger ever to run away from a kaiju.
SECONDED
(also, the sudden thought of River Tam in a jaeger is rutting terrifying)
She hung from the ceiling, a perfect, motionless sculpture of a girl in the process of becoming a fruitbat. Simon glanced up at her periodically, both checking that she was still present, and reassuring himself that the grind of the machines overhead would keep her from hearing what he had to say. It wasn’t that he was keeping secrets from her; River knew everything about her condition, sometimes more than he did. It was that she didn’t like being talked about, and he respected that.
“They weren’t trying to unlock psychic powers or anything like that, no matter what the rumors say,” he said, his voice shaking slightly. Kaylee shifted her weight from foot to foot, disturbed by that tremor in his words. Simon Tam was the best K-scientist she’d ever worked with. For him to sound scared…
“Those people, those monsters…” Simon paused to take a deep breath, relaxing a little at the taste of oil on his tongue. Enough time spent with Kaylee had turned grime into perfume. “They were trying to set up a neural bridge inside a single mind. They wanted to do away with the need for drift compatibility, and privatize the Pilots. Imagine being able to market Jaegers for domestic and commercial use, because you only needed one Pilot, and that Pilot was so doped and dependent that they could never leave you.”
“That’s horrific,” whispered Kaylee. “They…they messed up her brain tryin’ to do something as can’t be done?”
“Oh, it can be done,” said Simon grimly. “They succeeded.
“My sister is in constant Drift with herself.”