Written for Jagercon over on tumblr.
Alright, so all I know about Pacific Rim comes from watching the movie once (in a wondrous morning/afternoon of glory) and whatever I can scrounge up on the Pacific Rim wiki. Therefore, if what I wrote conflicts with anything, sorry~
I was fifteen when the first kaiju wrought its fury over San Francisco.
Back then I lived with Tetya Lyuba and her Finnish husband Tarmo in Yekaterinburg. I went to school there; the schools in Rostov-on-Don, Zvenigorod, and Perm all said I was a no-good student, caught up in fantasies and children's tales and a knack for problem-causing. I got into fights and ignored my coursework. My height made me stick out and therefore everyone expected me to do great things. Everything bored me instead, and it showed. With each school that ejected me I got sent further east to relatives who thought they could whip me into shape. Tetya Lyuba was the last person they could send me to, whether I liked it or not—no one else could take me. Banished to the edge of Asia… I romanticized I was testing out some modern form of gulag.
Things were not that horrible, of course, yet they were still far from ideal. Tetya Lyuba lived in a Soviet-era apartment building on the top floor. All the buildings in our block had been prefabricated and thrown up in less than a month one summer in the late 1960's. There were no elevators, the roof leaked, it was drafty, and the neighbor on our floor played French arthouse movies very loudly every night. While Tetya drove a delivery truck, Tarmo stayed at home with a bum leg and played house. He did the cooking and cleaning and even watched over the little children from the rest of the building. Climbing the stairs was difficult for him, so he rarely left. When I first got there, I rolled my eyes and cursed my luck—they didn't even try to discipline me at all. To me, it was just a bed and food and a man who talked slowly in a thick accent picking up after me.
Yekaterinburg had been my home for less than a month when the kaiju attacked. I was just getting ready to leave, careful not to knock my head on the low-hanging door frame, when I heard one of Tarmo's charges scream. "Izverg! Izverg!" she cried, and I heard the scraping of Tarmo's cane against the floor as he went to investigate. He cursed, and that was how I knew something was really wrong.
The television was small and older than me, but I could still clearly see the image of that monster tearing through thick-made buildings as if they had been made as shoddily as our apartment. The children thought their puppet show had been replaced with a monster movie and quickly began to play fairy games. Tarmo and I stared silently at the television screen, both too shocked to speak; we knew what this meant. Something dared to attack the Americans earlier that day, something not of this world. We were still standing there, watching, when Tetya came home.
I stayed in that night and ate dinner at the table for the first time since arriving. We did not speak. I kept on thinking of how to break the silence—Tetya and Tarmo were always so cheery and chatty—when Tarmo slammed his fist on the table and cursed.
"Perkele! Damn my leg!" he shouted before breaking out into tears. Tetya Lyuba muttered something in Finnish and Tarmo stormed off to their bedroom. The French porn began playing in the apartment next to us, causing Tarmo to curse again. His blood did not often run hot but when it did I hid the vodka so he didn't hurt himself.
Tetya told me that night that her husband had always been a frail man, and whenever he saw something he wanted to fight for he became upset. A dear friend of his from university had settled very near San Francisco and there was nothing that could be done. He ended up crying the entire time the kaiju tore through the Americans. He never heard from his friend again, so whether he died or not we never knew.
After K-Day, rumors began to spread. I heard everything from that the kaiju was a weapon of the American government gone rouge to that the creature was a byproduct of the nuclear meltdowns from when Japan was hit with an earthquake two years earlier. Once I got to school, my classmates avoided the subject. One of our instructors, "steeped in the old ways" as we called it, kept on running her mouth about how the Americans deserved their fate at the hand of the "overgrown zilant" or whatever she called it. She would sneer and look down on you if your opinion differed. Not one of us said a word, yet somehow a few of us would get singled out and punished for eye-rolling and rebellious thoughts. I still don't think she was allowed to do that, but got away with it because of her age and station.
Soon, the rest of the attacks came, and with them came more whispering and more lectures from those steeped in the old ways. Instead of dropping my things off at home and leaving right away, I helped Tarmo with the children. I did housework. I did odd jobs and things for others on our block. I read online first-hand accounts of kaiju attacks, all of which correlated so well that there was no way every single person made it up. I began researching the places, the people, the creatures, as much as I could without remotely breaking into a government database. I actually did my coursework for school, because Tetya Lyuba was the last relative that could take me and the prospect of a military school in a closed city was not my idea of a productive time. It was during this time that I grew to realize that none of this was going to go away unless we did something about it… all of us.
That was why, after a year of worry and stories and biting my tongue, I finally stood up in the middle of a lecture and told that old bag that she a horrible person. She was used to putting us in our place, so she whipped out her sternest sneer and said I was nothing but a vagabond child with no real home or place in the world. She claimed to know her place because it was shown to her by something we were never privileged enough to have, something we were too young to have ever known. We were, according to her, doing nothing but playing catch-up.
I snapped and threw my history book at the wall. "You are lower than the frontovichka," I screamed, knowingly dropping a term she knew as a young girl to carry weight. "You are a hag, a beast, a human kaiju. You care for yourself and outdated ideals. You may not want to care because they are so different from you, but I am ready to help those who are just like me." With that I stormed out and never entered that school again.
That was September 15th, 2014. I was sixteen.
That very day began the first session of talks concerning the attacks and what could be done about it. Tarmo and I watched on television while the children ate their lunches. He said he was proud of me, and that I should be paying close attention to the conference. We saw as a man presented the blueprints for a massive machine—a thing that only seemed possible in science fiction and cartoons—and proposed we build it. A giant man of metal and rockets and nuclear power, making it so that we could look the monsters straight in the eyes and laugh as we defended our home.
Tarmo must have seen the look of hope and excitement in my face, for at dinner that night said he would sign any papers that would allow me to join the Kaiju War. Tetya Lyuba, who had been having a bad day already, began to cry. She understood though, because there is nothing wrong with standing up for yourself, and it is just as so for standing up for people who cannot do so themselves. Doing something to help was better than waiting for the kaiju to learn how to navigate rivers and destroy us too. I was going to be useful for the first time.
Tetya Lyuba, Tarmo, and I boarded a passenger train on the Trans-Siberian Railway a week later. While nearly everyone was running away from Vladivostok, we were some of the few drawn towards it. Tetya Lyuba drove more trucks, mostly medical supplies. Tarmo got an administrative job in a jaeger plant. I lied about my age and was selected to join the first group of Russians entered in the Jaeger Academy. It was my height, I know it was. Most of the other entries were conscription age and the rest were older—men and women who would not want to serve if it were not for the monsters in the ocean.
We didn't know about things that were to come; that did not matter. I met a woman on the airplane. I did not know it, but soon I would know that she was the youngest of five daughters, the last in her family to be born in the Soviet Union, and fiercely protective of what she saw was hers. I would soon know that I loved her, and that she found me endearing enough to give a shot. She kept up the lie about my age once we gave our first neural handshake, and all the way to the wedding altar three years later. I took her name. It's still a mystery if Tarmo cried because he is a slow drunk of a Finn or if because I referred to him as my uncle to my superiors. We did not know about our kaiju kill count, or when the kaiju would finally come down on us.
All we knew is that we were doing what we could.