The clouds lazily strolled by above, their various shades of grey making it possible to distinguish them from each other. I felt my clothes and the back of my head getting damp due to the to the wet grass underneath me, but it bothered me little. My mind drifted away from my body, like a kite floating in the wind, washed away by the same currents that carried the clouds onward.
The lack of bright light, the feeling of cold and foggy air running back and forth in my nostrils, the gloomy ambience, the humidity clinging to the skin... Most people would rather contemplate a clear blue sky while bathing in warm sunlight. Not me. That I could find such serenity in an otherwise typically depressing atmosphere puzzled most of those who knew me and, all things considered, this preference wasn't fully understood by myself either. Not that I had ever bothered giving it much thought, such unconscious tastes were best left without much reflection in any case.
"You're going to catch a cold." — aloof as I was, I had fail to notice the girl standing crouched by my side, waiting to get a reaction out of me from some time. Her face was all blurry and her voice sounded more like a faint echo than anything else, but the distinct red scarf waving in the wind was a dead giveaway of who she was.
"I'll be fine, thanks for the concern." — it's not like she was particularly preoccupied with my health. I couldn't get sick even if I wanted to, and she was fully aware of that. She was just tired of watching me lie down on the grass and wanted to leave.
"How long are you going to keep doing that?" — yep, definitely bored.
"You don't have to stay here if you don't want to. You can go home, I'll catch up later." — I wanted to stay like that for a bit longer, without a care in the world.
Gazing the great vastness of the sky, without barriers or boundaries, allowed me to escape, if briefly, from reality and all the nuisances that come along with it. It was rather hypocritical of me to delude myself with such escapist daydreaming, but at least it was always temporary. Not a constant fantasy perpetuated by that gilded cage like with the rest. That's why I could only truly relax by staring at clouds; it was the one place I could look without having that gigantic eyesore in my line of sight.
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"There's no place to go to. It's gone."
"Gone? What do you mea-?" — the ground began to shake violently, shifting as if it was an ocean wave. I promptly jolted to my feet once it calmed down a bit.
Atop the gentle hill that dominates the (mostly deserted) small park I like to frequent, one could get a decent panoramic view of the city below. The familiar skyline filled with a plethora of toneless rectangular buildings, perpetually blanked by light fog, dotted with several spots of light here and there, and the faded glow of numerous vehicles moving down the busy streets surrounding them. But now, looking down at the city I grew up in, that wasn't the case anymore.
First were the screams; thousands upon thousands of voices clamoring for life, only to be shot down and silenced shortly thereafter amid horrid wails.
Then came the thunder; razing the soil beneath, spewing noxious smoke and dust that blanket the landscape and saturate the air, burning my lungs.
Finally, the laughter; as I saw the city, my home, drowning and burning, helpless against the deluge, I heard the jubilation of its slayers. The maddening cackle signalling the end of times. The veritable trumpet of the apocalypse.
The image began to sink in and all came rushing forward from the depths of my mind.
"W-What... what... what... happened?" — in utter disbelief, I violently shook the girl by her shoulders — "TELL ME, WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED!?"
"It all came tumbling down, just like you said it would." — she explained with an unnatural calm as a colossal blood red hand emerged from the shrouding mist, veiling the same sky I was gazing just a few moments ago in its entirety. Slowly, as it began descending upon us, the palm tore itself open akin a gaping mouth, revealing a bright blue gash that irradiated the surroundings with an alien glow.
Too aghast for words, I collapsed onto the ground, now devoid grass and replaced with stinging cold asphalt, as the strength of my legs first faltered and then left them entirely. When I managed to look up again, the girl was gone. In her place stood a small crowd of people, each one looking down at me with an unmistakable accusatory glare despite their faces being just as blurred as hers had been. I raised my left arm in a pathetic attempt to plea for their help, only for it to blister and melt off into a thick pool of liquefied flesh and bone. The pain was unbearable, but no sound escaped my throat when I tried to scream, not even a gasp of air, as it was swollen shut.
Amid the agony, out of the corner of my eye, I was able to see the farthest of the bystanders hastily shoving its way through the rest of the apathetic and unflinching mob towards me. Much to my baffled horror, this one was definitely recognizable to me. My mind screamed.
No... no... no... not you! Why did you came!? Get out of where!
The figure fell to its knees next to me, bending over to pull my broken self closer.
I'm sorry! I didn't mean it! It's all my fault! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!
I felt a warm embrace closing around me, a welcome reprieve from the shivering cold ground.
Run away, damn you, run! Just leave me here! Run! Ruuuuuuun!
My blood soaked hair was gently stroked, as the person's chin rested on the top of my head.
"...rrrruuu...rrr...ruuuuunnn...ruuunn...rrrunnn..." — somehow, out of desperation, I managed to force out a barely audible whimper. The caressing hand reached the back of my neck, which burnt on contact as if the fingers were branding irons.
"How can you ask your mother to do such a thing?" — that was all she said before we're consumed by the blazing void.
/-/-/
/-/-/
Eren Jaeger woke up for the first time in what it felt like a really long while.
A bad dream?
The darkness remained. He could not perceive the world around him, his entire existence felt like flickering static. Slowly, his consciousness started to crawl out of the bottomless pit, compelled by an innate desire to escape the emptiness. His body stood inert, wholly unresponsive to his commands.
A really bad dream.
As the lingering panic from the nightmare subsided, his senses began to return. Eyes still closed, as his eyelids were lead shutters at the time, he first noticed the warm smoothness pressed against his exposed neck and head, something soft and cushioned holding him afloat. He was lying down on a bed it seemed.
With some effort, he managed to expose his right eye, to the blinding bright white light that bathed him and his surroundings. The other one remained firmly held shut despite his insistence.
Where am I?
He tried to put his thoughts into words, hoping someone would listen, but a large foreign object shoved deep down his throat kept him from talking. Warm air rhythmically came and went out of the plastic-like tube, forcing his lungs to mimic the tempo, which he suddenly found lacking as the rest of his lethargic body stirred up.
Still too weak to simply grab the tube and pull it out in one go, he used the weight of his right arm to press the base against his stomach and attempted to dislodge it with a couple of swift jerks. The abrupt movements left his muscles further aching from the soreness, accentuating the sharp and throbbing pain making itself manifest wherever sensation returned to his lethargic body. The scraping sensation in the back of his throat also had the unfortunate side effect of triggering his gag reflex. He nearly asphyxiated when the awfully bitter bile came up from his stomach with the tube still halfway out his mouth.
Finally managing to spat out both the object and the rancid liquid unto the sheets by the edge of the mattress, he let himself back to the same semi-reclined position he had awoken in, worn out by the effort. Like in the dream, nothing other than his frantic wheezes escaped his chapped lips, his throat too sore and dry from the forcible removal of the breathing apparatus and the coarse vomit to make any other sound.
His exposed pupil had finally adjusted itself to the ambient light giving him a view of the virtually featureless space he found himself in. A grey ceiling with a square fluorescent light fixture in its center, white floor and walls save the one to the right which was almost entirely made of clear glass, through which the intense sunlight entered the room. Between the pungent smell of disinfectant, the incessant beeping of the a nearby monitor, the assortment of medical equipment that flanked him, the numerous wires and tubes connecting him to those machines, it didn't take him long (even in his state) to figure out what this place was intended for.
What am I doing in an hospital?
The miserable state he was in had probably something to do with it. Most people would be glad to be in one if they ever felt like he was doing, but he was never a big fan of such facilities. A place where people went to get healthy, yet it was always so sullied and stale with death. Thankfully, he never had the need to visit these facilities often. In fact, he came to think of it, the last time he had set foot on one was when Father had to take him to work one day, on account of an emergency, all those years ago in Zhigan-
"It's gone."
The girl's ghostly voice echoed from the depths of his psyche, causing him to shudder.
"It's gone."
The dream had been very real. His home had long been gone and he had a firsthand account of its fate.
"It's gone."
The beginning of the very real nightmare - THAT day - still vivid enough as if it had occurred yesterday. Uneasy by the rush of emotions, he pulled himself into an upright position, with considerable effort as his muscles were still unduly stiff.
Something immediately felt wrong. It was if one side of him was heavier than the other, making it difficult to stand straight due to the lack of balance. Bent over his stomach, he took a peek to his left... and just like that, all semblance of sluggishness disappeared.
There was nothing attached to that side of his torso.
W-W-Where...? No... No... NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo...
Removing the white cloth covering the lower part of his body revealed that everything below the left knee and right ankle were also poignantly missing. Everywhere else he checked - the remainder of his legs, his waist, his chest, his neck, a good portion of the skull (including his left eye) and his now single arm - his skin was totally sheathed in bandages. The veins in his scalp pulsated viciously from the unpleasant memories that surged forward. To his unending dismay, it all pieced itself together in his head.
"She's gone."
I...
It wasn't the sight of his wrecked body that abhorred and frighten him.
"She's gone."
I...
That dreadful day hadn't been the only thing he recalled during that dream.
"She's gone."
I...
Everybody else was in fact... because of him.
They had paid the ultimate price for following him in his lunacy.
I
k
i
l
l
e
d
h
e
r
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" — the soothing silence of that morning was interrupted by the resonating cries of a guilt-ridden young man.
/-/-/
/-/-/
Once, Mankind looked up to the heavens, the endless frontier, and wondered what could lie up there, among the starry sky. Undisputed masters of our home, perhaps it was only natural to see the vast reaches of the universe as the greater foundation of our young species' legacy, an evolutionary drive to explore and expand towards the unknown. The inescapable draw of the beyond feed our collective imaginations, filling legends and theories alike, in anticipation to what was going to be next great odyssey, when we would commit ourselves to transverse the cold void.
Once, before our throne was usurped.
The first one ascended from the depths, the very pits of our realm, making landfall in one of the many vibrant metropolis that covered the planet at the time. When the weapons we had created to use on each other took it down, on the sixth day, there was nothing left but smoldering ruins devoid of life, a landscape straight out of an apocalypse. We mourned the dead, helped those that had survived, rebuilt what was destroyed and, above all else, prayed that such fateful carnage wouldn't repeat itself, that we would be allowed to move on.
If there was ever a God, he paid no mind to our pleas. It was not going to stop.
More kept emerging, individually and sporadic at first then as an unrelenting tsunami, a veritable torrent of desolation razing everything in its path. Millions perished as cities and, soon afterwards, entire nations were overrun by the unspeakable monstrosities. The rest of the world looked on in horror as the bloodletting escalated to a magnitude unmatched by even our most destructive conflicts, believing it wouldn't be long till such butchery would come for them as well.
Yet, it was this very fear that drove Mankind to strike back.
They had counted on the humans to hide, to give up, to fail, but we weren't known to passively wait for our demise, to left such affronts go unchallenged. Those lost souls became our rallying cry, a single banner under which the entirety of our race, for the first time in its history, came together to wage war. Not for power, not for resources, not for an ideology but for our very existence. With the entire might of the world behind us, we believed we could grind their advance to a halt and then, bit by bloody bit, begin pushing them back towards the sea. We would purge the foul monsters from our lands and ravage their lairs beneath the waves.
On those violet tarnished battlefields, the beasts revealed how naive we really were.
Time and time again, they demonstrated their aberrant ability to adjust themselves to our weapons and strategies, forcing us to pay an excruciatingly high price with each confrontation. Any advantage we might have had, any painstakingly achieved gain was viciously nullified forcing us to resort to increasingly desperate measures, which further deteriorated our already precarious situation. Our early drive began to falter under the weight of the many sacrifices we had to endure to keep on fighting, just to delay what to many was becoming the unavoidable.
We were a dune, gradually washed away and swallowed by a stormy sea.
But at the same time, we couldn't stop, we couldn't throw down our arms and solemnly wait for death to come by. We had to keep going, on the off chance that there was still a way. That even if we couldn't win, we could still deny them victory, we could endure the tempest.
One answer stood above all.
A concept in some way, shape or form known to every civilization throughout History, despite the chronological and geographical barriers separating each. It was perhaps an intrinsic reaction built into every human's subconscious, a lesson embedded through millennia of struggles against nature and ourselves. On those dark days, it became the only hope for our continued survival. Such was our salvation.
We built a wall.
As our world collapsed, we pour our dwindling resources and energies into the greatest architectural undertaking to date, erecting the greatest fortress ever known to Man. A modern day Ark to whether the flood of destruction that came crashing down on us. The monsters found it impregnable, vastly dwarfing their most imposing specimens, much to the rejoice of those safe within its boundaries, secure in the knowledge that they could deny them a complete triumph. Those outside could only look in envy, anger and despair as they were left to be systematically eradicated, both to buy us precious time for the Wall's completion and to ensure the future sustainability of our species inside of it. Lives forfeited for the greater good of Mankind; that's what its remnants, nested inside their stronghold, told themselves.
A century has come to pass since what left of the human race found itself trapped in a cage of their own design.
Protected by our Citadels, we lulled ourselves into a false sense of security, a fake peace. The monsters that had robbed us of most of our home became almost myth-like; a distant threat of a distant past. We strove to forget the terror that had beleaguered us, seeking to relive the glory of a bygone golden era, convinced that our fortress would keep them away forever.
In the end, we did forget.
No wall has ever keep an enemy at bay indefinitely. One's strength simply determines how long it will delay the inevitable when pitted against an unwavering foe, as History itself can certainly attest to. It's also said that those that cannot learn from the past are ultimately doomed to repeat it.
On that day, our folly caught up with us. We remembered.
We were no longer the masters of our planet.
We had been disgraced to live like cattle trapped in a corral.
We would suffer the same fate as all those we had to leave behind.
On that day, Mankind received a grim reminder: we lived in fear of the Kaiju.
/-/-/
/-/-/
First, let me start by thanking you for taking your time to read this story and hope it's to your liking. Second, I'm a long time reader but first time writer of fanfic, so by all means feel free to critique my work. All constructive criticism is profoundly welcomed and appreciated.
So what's this all about? As anyone who saw both Attack on Titan and Pacific Rim, I inevitably started drawing parallels between the two; Jaegers, giant monsters attacking out of nowhere, walls that don't work, closing breaches, fanboy scientists, badass Asian girls, all that jazz.
The idea of a crossover between the two is nothing new by the time I'm typing this. There's in fact a good number of stories and fanart lurking the internet (and this very site) revolving around this concept. But one thing I noticed is that all of them (or at least the ones I saw) follow the same formula of "take characters from AoT, put them in PR's setting".
As you can likely tell from the intro crawl right above, I'm trying for something a little different than that. I won't go into more details, as they will be fleshed out during the story, but for now think of the premise as a bad ending to PR turned into a AoT style scenario set in a near future.
Also, it goes without saying that AoT and PR are the property of their respective owners. I claim nothing.