Actions

Work Header

Rating:
Archive Warning:
Categories:
Fandom:
Relationship:
Characters:
Additional Tags:
Language:
English
Collections:
Our Fandoms: Legendary
Stats:
Published:
2013-08-22
Words:
1,576
Chapters:
1/1
Comments:
60
Kudos:
551
Bookmarks:
164
Hits:
9,567

Doorway

Summary:

The medical doctors tell you it's probably PTSD. Newt and Hermann run a battery of increasingly bizarre tests and don't find anything conclusive.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Work Text:

You are born in Anchorage, Alaska. Your name is Raleigh Becket. Your eyes have always been blue.

---

8.10.2013 [K-DAY] - Trespasser (uncategorized, pre-PPDC)
2.5.2014 - Hundun (uncategorized, pre-PPDC)
6.1.2014 - Kaiceph (uncategorized, pre-PPDC)
9.2.2014 - Scissure (uncategorized, pre-PPDC)

---

You turn Gipsy Danger into a perfect infinite moment nuclear fire. You close the breach, and you make it back to the surface, to Mako, to the cheering crowds at the Shatterdome. To celebrate, you get to spend the next 36 hours in a medical isolation chamber.

You are scanned and scrubbed and decontaminated. Mako is nearby, going through the same thing. She'll be lucky if she gets out before you do - you may have traveled between worlds, but she just had to take a swim in the Pacific. The two of you are ghost drifting pretty hard during this despite the physical separation, and for a day and a half your minds sing back and forth with the grief and joy. You saved the world. You still carry the dead in your hearts.

The lab techs finally turn you loose in a set of sterile scrubs, and they're nice enough to give you back your boots. You don't need to worry about alien pathogens or radiation sickness or acute toxicity. According to Dr. Esposito, you're all clear.

Mako is waiting for you in the hallway. You look at her and smile. She smiles back. The two of you go to back her quarters and sleep for eighteen hours, curled together with your boots still on.

---

9.15.2014 - Initial conference of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps

---

The press tour lasts for nine months.

Mako vehemently advocates for the continued funding of a defensive Jaeger program to every reporter within striking distance. After the first time, she isn't interested in answering puff piece questions. What it was like to Drift together for the first time? How did she feel when your escape pod surfaced? Every interview is calmly but relentlessly steered towards the importance of PPDC preparedness.

Whenever an exasperated interviewer tries to ask you something unrelated, you lob the question to Mako, put the focus back on her. You are awed by her deft hand and determination. You are more than a little bit smitten, and make no effort to hide it.

It's fun at first, when the thrill is still new, but soon you are tired all the time. Ever since the breach you haven't been dreaming. At all. It's not a big deal, you tell Mako, as the exhaustion catches up to you. And it isn't. One of the lines that gets used a lot in interviews is that you are so thrilled to have actually literally saved the world (Mako rolls her eyes every time), yet within a couple months you find that you are trying to count down the weeks when you once looked forward to each new city.

You smile and you wave, you pose at podiums, you are awarded keys to to cities that you can't even remember the name of. There are so many memorials to dedicate. Things start to blur together. You are pretty sure that every hotel uses the same laundry detergent and that overexposure has made you allergic. When you say that on air it's a joke, but you itch, just a little bit, all the time. First just on your skin, but then- Deeper?

Nothing more than a minor annoyance, really, it's not like you're breaking out in hives. The handlers bring you some Benadryl. It does nothing for the itching, but you do doze off in the middle of a New Zealand morning show. You make a startled noise when Mako nudges you awake. Someone autotunes it and the video goes viral overnight. This is your life now.

Newt calls out of the blue one day. He says that he had to steal a cell phone because him and Hermann have been in totally super secret government lockdown. Building a Pons drift system out of trash put them on a lot of radars, who knew, not to mention the whole drifting-with-the-Kaiju-hivemind thing. He is, he tells you, kind of a big deal now and has been trying to talk the government guys into letting him pose shirtless on the cover of Rolling Stone oh and by the way, could you get the press people to call Rolling Stone?

There's a lot of scuffling, then. Hermann comes on the line with Newt loud and brassed off in the background. He tells you to ignore Newton. Hermann was the one that stole the phone and he wants to know if you're alright. They haven't been allowed access to outside media and have missed most of the press tour. How is it going? Where are you? Have you been feeling well recently?

Are you sick?

---

4.23.2015 - Karloff (Category II)
12.16.2015 - Hardship (Category II)
5.15.2016 - Onibaba (Category II)
9.12.2016 - Reckoner (Category II)
10.17.2017 - Yamarashi (Category III)
11.6.2018 - Raythe (Category III)
7.22.2019 - Clawhook (Category III)
2.29.2020 - Knifehead (Category III)
1.31.2022 - Spinejackal (Category III)
9.7.2022 - Tentalus (Category III)
8.13.2024 - Biantal (Category III)

---

The press junket ends. You go back to the Shatterdome. Mako's fierce campaigning did not go unnoticed - Herc shoulders most of the administrative burden, but you and Mako are still very busy. There are a lot of meetings and conference calls, plenty of people who still want interviews or signatures or brain scans. It turns out that doing a favor or two can go a long way.

(There's less government funding than before the original program was decommissioned, but corporate sponsors have been pouring support at PPDC. Anything you are seen with in public flies off the shelves almost instantly. A corner of the room that you and Mako share is stacked with cases of Coca Cola products and boxes of tactical outerwear. It's like that all over the Shatterdome. There hasn't been time to organize it yet.)

It's been a long time since you've drifted, but now that you're back in familiar territory the connection makes itself known in subtle ways. You bring Mako glasses of water in the middle of the night before she even realizes she's thirsty. Mako knows when you want pushed around in bed without you having to ask. Sometimes she makes you ask anyway. She knows what you like. But the connection also means that Mako knows something is still wrong. Her nails chase up and down your spine when you sit on a case of Fanta to pull on your boots - she doesn't feel the itch, but knows that you still do.

You wish that scratching helped. You wish you knew what was wrong. Mako knows that you would tell her if you knew. You would. You swear would.

Sometimes you have to lie down for hours in the middle of the day, insides twisted into a knot of nearly transcendental pain. Your blood itches all the time. You sleep too much or not at all. You still don't dream. The medical doctors tell you it's probably PTSD. Newt and Hermann run a battery of increasingly bizarre tests and don't find anything conclusive, but you can tell that something is troubling them. You would help them if you could. Anything. You would do anything. You are almost at the end of your rope. Then, inexplicably, the physical symptoms start to fade.

Personnel stop you in the hallways and tell you that you're looking better. And you are, on the outside. What's left behind is worse. At least before you could give name to the pain and physical discomfort. But now -

One night you find yourself wandering barefoot through the empty Jaeger bays, looking for diesel fuel. The ultra-low sulfer stuff with the red dye. You stop when you realize that you are looking for it because you want to drink it. Gallons of it. You don't know why.

Mako doesn't seem to pick up on your mental distress. You keep it to yourself. It's not that you want to hide things from her - you genuinely don't. You would tell her everything if you could. You just can't describe it. How can you say that you have an oil slick of sickness at the edge of your brain? You simply don't have the words for the feeling that -

That there is heaviness, a great size deep inside yourself, more massive than is possible. That some days you have many hands inside your hands and there is nothing that you aren't capable of doing. That sometimes you see are colors that don't have names. That there is something that is both far away from and sliding sideways into you, day by day.

There's nothing strange in the mirror. You look exactly the same.

You look exactly the same, but sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, you swear that you see strange parts of yourself that didn't used to be there, hovering just beyond your ability to perceive them. You are scared. And then you are not.

---

1.2.2025 - Mutavore (Category IV)
1.8.2025 - Otachi (Category IV), Leatherback (Category IV)
1.12.2025 [KV-DAY] - Raiju (Category IV), Scunner (Category IV), Slattern (Category V)

---

Your eyes have always been blue, Raleigh Becket. But you haven't always had so many teeth.

---

3.19.2026 - Doorway (Category VI)

Notes:

tumblr

Babby's first fic on AO3, all comments welcome! This is a continued/expanded fill of a kinkmeme prompt I can't leave alone- http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/1613.html?thread=2675277#t2675277

Un-betad, some of those kaiju categories are assumed and at least one of the dates is made up. Title inspired by a Stephen King story of a similar nature

Works inspired by this one: