TITLE: Gridlocked

Sequel to Shifting Perspective

AUTHOR: Macx

RATING: R-ish

DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belongs to me, sadly. They are owned by people with a lot more money :)

FEEDBACK: Loved

I blame certain fanart for this.

The actual birth of this fic was because of Siriniel's adorable artwork (which I can't link here due to FFNet policy)

I looked at Chuck perched on Raleigh's head and my brain started to sputter and grind and steam. I wanted to find a way to make this happen.

And then there are the gifs. All over tumblr. Of koala!Chuck. I'm a sucker for this.

You can find a few references made here to there to other koala fanart.

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Life had been good.

Maybe a little too good.

At least for the past months.

The Hong Kong Shatterdome remained open and active. The Breach remained closed and inactive. The PPCD had agreed upon a Jaeger guard over the closed Breach, which meant repairing at least two of the decommissioned Jaegers of Oblivion Bay. A new Mark-VII had been commissioned on top of that. K-science was a flourishing new branch, which meant Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb now had a full staff again.

Yes, life had been good and busy and so much better for all involved.

That was the only explanation for the events that kind of suddenly turned Raleigh Becket's own life upside down.

Not to mention that of everyone in his immediate vicinity, starting with Chuck Hansen, who was actually right in the middle. And the cause and reason.

Since Operation Pitfall Raleigh had been overwhelmed by the revelation that Chuck was a Shifter, a human being with that odd genetic defect that no one really understood and that enabled him to change his shape.

He shifted into a koala.

A koala!

Life sometimes threw you a lot, but a koala?

No, Raleigh wouldn't really have pictured the younger man as an Australian marsupial. Maybe a dingo. Or a wolverine. If anything, the Tasmanian devil would have been a perfect fit. But no, he was a koala.

Chuck wasn't a happy camper when the fact had come out to Raleigh. Others had already known, but Becket had been kind of stumped, seeing a small, gray marsupial with ginger tinges to the fur, wrapped in bandages, healing from the near-fatal injuries he had received.

It had been love.

The attraction had been there before, but in the weeks after the closure of the Breach the two men had gotten closer and closer. The instinctual trust Chuck had shown in his altered shape had helped bring down walls and cement something that had been slowly developing already.

The next six months had been a flurry of activity, of interviews, talk shows, representing the PPDC, and generally trying to get their lives into order. One Mark-III Jaeger had already been brought to Hong Kong and the new Mark-VII was almost ready for launch. Raleigh was looking forward to taking her out. Mako, who was overseeing reconstruction and repair, was just as excited. She had been designated Paradox Delta and she was a beauty.

Another fact was the ongoing research into Kaijus, which meant their leading K-scientists were up to their eyebrows in work.

Just why that work happened to cross paths with Chuck was a mystery.

It happened.

And Raleigh looked at the result of a lab accident that had him want to laugh and cry in one.

No, he thought almost desperately. No, no, fuck no! This can't be happening!

In Newton's case, the sheer horror written all over his face came first.

Hermann was simply stunned, leaning on his cane, for once speechless.

As was Chuck.

Koalas couldn't talk.

Raleigh stared at the small bundle of fur, sitting in what were his human clothes, covered in a slimy gunk that was mostly blue-gray with the odd fluorescent orangey yellow here or there. The slime matted down the fluffy fur, turning the normally chubby looking koala into what could be called the wet cat equivalent of the marsupial world. The expression in the small face was a mix of outrage, disbelief and murderous intent.

The latter was aimed at the K-scientist still staring at him with dread and the realization that something had truly gone FUBAR.

"Fuck!" Newton breathed.

Around them, the alarms were blaring, calling attention to the mishap. Biologicals were out in the open and decontamination protocols would have to be observed.

Chuck glared at the three humans, then transferred his glare to the Marshall who had stormed into the lab on Raleigh's heels.

A lab that had by now been sectioned off by the transparent walls that had slid shut, that sealed in the koala, the two scientists, and a lot of slime. People in hazmat suits were running toward the airlock, carrying decon gear and what looked like a box that had an eerie resemblance to a cat carrier.

Yeah, Raleigh was really close to laughing now. It was sheer desperation and the need to wake up out of this ridiculous dream.

"What the hell?" Herc demanded, jerking him out of his thoughts. "Turn off that blasted alarm!"

It took three more blares, then the noise died down, though the blinking lights remained.

Herc's eyes fell on his son, his Shifted son, and they widened.

"Hell, no!"

Chuck made a noise of outrage, the black button eyes so full of venom as they looked at Newton, Raleigh was convinced that if koalas could jump that far and tear anyone's face off, Chuck was very close to doing so.

"Newton!" Herc yelled, his voice carrying over the intercom between the sealed lab and the outside world.

"I don't know what happened!" the scientists exclaimed. "It… exploded! And he… simply… I mean, I didn't think there was anything that could make a Shifter change unwillingly!"

By now the hazmat guys were inside, swarming around the lab. Hermann was snapping at the one trying to get him to step away.

"Gottlieb, behave!" Herc ordered sharply. "Geiszler! What the bloody hell happened in there? Why is my son Shifted?"

"I don't know!" Newton cried, gesticulating wildly. "And he wasn't supposed to be here!"

Raleigh caught one of the hazmat team trying to touch the gunk covered koala and he nearly had his hand bitten off for his troubles. Well, not really. Koalas weren't vicious predators, but this wasn't a normal marsupial. This was a pissed off Chuck Hansen with a temper the size of a category-4 Kaiju.

He had teeth.

They hurt.

"Chuck!" Herc snapped.

The button eyes flashed and the koala snarled.

Yes, he was as sight to behold. All he needed was to be frothing at the mouth and someone would shoot him, Raleigh mused.

"Don't make me come in there!" the Marshall bellowed.

Maybe it was his imagination, but Raleigh thought he saw Chuck give them the finger. The staring contest was probably one for the annals of Shatterdome Incidents That Will Only Be Talked About In Whispers, but Chuck finally relented and got into the carrier, leaving a puddle of slime behind.

In the meantime, someone had ushered the two scientists into the decon area. They were out of sight, but not out of earshot. Hermann was complaining loudly about the indignity, the ineptness of his colleague, and the situation in general.

Herc turned to Raleigh. The American pilot just shrugged.

"Let's hope this isn't worse than it looks," Herc muttered.

"How could it be worse?" Raleigh asked, sounding almost philosophical.

Herc snorted. "He could be stuck like that."

Becket felt a flash of real fear. "He what?!"

"There are wild tales about it. Don't tell me you haven't read about it?" Herc asked tiredly as they walked toward Medical where Chuck would be.

Of course Raleigh had read a lot about Shifters. His partner was one. He really wanted to know all there was, even if it wasn't much. One of the wilder, more outrageous tales was about Shifters who stayed in their animal forms for too long and forgot how to become human again. Or that they were human at all. Science had no evidence for that ever happening.

"You think that might… happen?" he asked tentatively.

Herc laughed roughly, running a hand through his short hair. "With Chuck? Doubt it. He knows what he is. But something triggered a Shift. He was forced into this and that's really not good."

"Maybe it was just the same reaction like after Operation Pitfall?"

"He isn't injured, Raleigh. He isn't dying." Herc was clearly pushing back those terrible memories.

No, Chuck wasn't dying.

Hopefully.

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Chuck wasn't dying, but someone would soon be dead if the Shifter had it his way.

Sitting in decon, his fur a mass of blue and orange-blue gunk, unfamiliar hands trying to scrub him clean, Chuck Hansen was pretty close to ripping someone's arm out.

Or bite a finger off.

Or just sink his teeth in whatever body part.

He might not be able to do a lot of damage, but he would leave a bruise.

Or two.

And if death glares became a weapon, the Shifter would be unbeatable.

The hazmat-clad team was moving busily around him, hosing him down, removing the rest of the substance that had covered him, and generally making themselves into very viable targets for bites and scratches the moment Chuck was over his shock.

He had Shifted.

By force! No free will! It hadn't even been a reaction to a threat, to a physical injury. It had just… happened. One moment he was in the lab, the next he was his koala Shifted self, staring up at the men around him, who looked as thunderstruck as he had felt.

And then he had been whisked off to Quarantine.

Well, fuck.

He wanted to know what had happened to him. He wanted to know how to reverse this. He wanted to know whose bloody fault it was that he had been forced to Shift!

And if one of the guys in the full body condom fuzzing about him touched him like that one more time, limbs would be torn off!

He snarled at a woman holding a sponge. She gave him a calming smile as she proceeded to wipe him down.

It was humiliating! It was embarrassing!

She gently took a paw and cleaned off the slimy stuff from his fingers, always slipping samples into a dish to be analyzed.

Someone will pay for this, Chuck decided darkly as he let them work.

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"We don't know exactly what triggered the change," Dr. Rudy Seyfert said, looking calmly at Marshall Hercules Hansen, who was trying not to show how tense and furious he was. "My team is still removing every last trace of it from Ranger Hansen. Samples will be turned over to K-Sciences. What I can tell you is that it isn't poisonous or harmful to humans or Shifters in any way."

"It triggered a change," Herc growled. "I call that harmful!"

"That is the interesting part. The compound is completely neutral, Marshall Hansen. Dr. Geiszler has kept meticulous logs on his experiments. He distilled the gelatinous substance out of Kaiju Blue, removing the acidic, poisonous substances and breaking down the blood into its basic components. What Ranger Hansen came in contact with is a neutral substance, actually. Neither Dr. Geiszler, nor Dr. Gottlieb, show any effects."

"They aren't Shifters," Raleigh said softly.

"That seems to be the only difference," Seyfert agreed. "I have no experience with Shifters, I am sad to say. I've tried to reach a colleague of mine who has researched Shifter physiology, but she seems to be unavailable. My best guess is that the distilled blood reacted with the one thing in a Shifter that makes him different from the rest of us. We all know that the trigger in their genetic make-up isn't hereditary, which makes it so incredibly difficult to draw any kind of conclusion. This might just be something uniquely to your son, Marshall Hansen. Or it might be something affecting all Shifters. Or just those who Shift into a marsupial. Maybe only those who grow fur."

"So you have no idea what to do, how to reverse it, and if it is permanent," Herc summed it all up.

"Sadly, yes."

Herc looked past Seyfert to the room they were currently keeping Chuck in.

"You can see him," the doctor offered.

"Damn right I can," Herc muttered.

"There is nothing we can do for now. He is free to leave," Seyfert went on. "The mood he is in I'd prefer it even."

Raleigh could very well imagine the mood his partner was in. Chuck was temperamental and mouthy. This… whatever this was… would have him livid.

Herc nodded and walked toward the door, Raleigh in tow.

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Chuck Hansen might be an arrogant ass sometimes. Ornery as hell. Opinionated. Raleigh himself had once thought him to be an egotistical jerk with issues that would keep a whole team of psychoanalysts happy for the rest of their lives. Books could have been written about him.

All that had changed within the past months. He had gotten to know the man behind those shields, behind the mask he had so carefully crafted, and he had found so much more. Chuck was all that and he was also someone else. He was a damn good Jaeger pilot. He was one of the best, actually. His intuition was spot on. He knew his machine and he did so because he enjoyed working with the mechanics, taking apart pieces of his Jaeger and understanding what made it tick. There was nothing he didn't know about the machine and about Drift technology.

He was well-liked, actually loved, by the Jaeger mechanics. They knew he understood what they were doing and his feedback on their work was valued. He had a soft spot the size of Mutavore.

And when he got invested, he was there one hundred percent.

Be it anger or love.

Raleigh had made it past the anger. Their relationship had started out in the worst possible place and it had developed into what they had now. Raleigh couldn't really put it into words, but he knew he was invested, too. Very much. They lived together, they worked together, they fought and loved together.

And he knew that his partner was a Shifter.

A Shifter who was sitting dejectedly on a too large bed, looking small and almost terrified of what had happened to him. The gray fur with its delightful, ginger highlights was clean, but it didn't look as fluffy as usual. The large ears drooped left and right of the adorably fuzzy face. Chuck had curled up, making himself even smaller than he was – and he was actually rather small for a koala male. Raleigh wanted to do nothing more than walk over there and pick him up, hold him, give him something to hold on to.

Chuck Hansen was a very tactile person, even if he would fight that description tooth and nail, would rather bite his tongue off than confess that he loved be touched. Maybe it was his Shifter heritage; maybe it was something lingering underneath the arrogant sob shell.

If Raleigh had learned something in the weeks after Operation Pitfall when Chuck had been a charred looking, thickly bandaged koala it was that he healed faster when he was in close contact to someone he trusted.

He wasn't physically injured this time, but it was a wound nevertheless.

Raleigh held back, though. Herc was Chuck's father, his family, and he had been the person Chuck had always trusted in that Shifted state.

So he stopped a few steps into the room and let Herc walk over to his son, talking softly to the dejected looking koala.

"Hey, kid."

Chuck glanced up, not moving a lot, actually, and one ear flicked.

"Doc's saying you can leave."

Another flick of the ear.

"They're working on finding out what happened," Herc added, reaching out to brush a gentle caress over the large, fluffy ear.

Chuck grumbled something, but it didn't sound pissed off. Simply… resigned.

"C'mon," Herc coaxed and scratched him a little. "I know how you hate this place." His large palm stroked over the bowed back, soothing, reassuring, fatherly.

It looked so easy as the Marshall hoisted the small bundle of misery up against one shoulder. It was a practiced move; not something he had done for the first time. Chuck just buried his face against the jacket, eyes closed, trying to shut out the world. His paws buried in Herc's worn jacket and he made soft little noises that were a mixture of complaints and pleading.

Something inside Raleigh constricted, seeing the other so open and vulnerable. Chuck never let his guard down, never showed what he truly felt, unless you looked close enough.

Unless you knew how to take his taunts and the arrogance and the snipes.

Unless you were his father or his lover. And for the latter it had to be Raleigh Becket, who had known the younger Hansen long enough, intimately enough, to understand what went on in that thick head of his sometimes.

Never show a weakness, never give in, never surrender, always come out on top and be at the top.

Now he had been forced into his koala form, a shape where he was of no use at all, had no fighting potential and couldn't even communicate.

Raleigh pushed away the doctor's words rising in his mind again.

What if this was permanent?

Herc's intensely blue eyes met Raleigh's. His face reflected Raleigh's fears.

"C'mon, let's go," the Marshall rumbled.

It sounded as close to an order as such soft words could get. Raleigh followed, glad no one gave them more than a fleeting look.

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Dr. Newton Geiszler, six doctorates, genius scientist, foremost researcher into the field of Kaiju biology, sat in his lab and stared at the screen in front of him.

He didn't really see the letters and numbers, or the diagrams accompanying the results. All he saw was what had been burned into his mind: Chuck Hansen, koala, covered in distilled Kaiju blue. Forced to change shape because of some inexplicable reaction.

No! his brain growled. No, no, NO!

There was nothing in any journal, research text or publication about Kaijus that suggested that their bodily fluids could trigger a Shifter.

Just be glad he's still alive! a nasty part of his brain that sounded suspiciously like a certain colleague of his told him viciously. He could be dead! He could be a puddle of goo! What were you thinking, Newton Geiszler?

Not much, apparently. He hadn't even really given the holding tank much thought. It had been one of many projects running in his labs.

As the head scientist of Biological Kaiju Research you should know about ever project going on!

Yeah, well, so sue me! he thought rebelliously.

And maybe someone would. Like a koala-shaped Chuck Hansen or his father, who happened to be the Marshall and, technically, Newt's boss.

He was so screwed!

Newton didn't know all too many Shifters, but he had talked to a Dr. Leslie Winn in the past. He had no idea where Winn was now, if he was actually still alive, but the man had been a Shifter. A thin wisp of a man, but his alternate form had been that of a huge, black bear.

And he had been studying Kaiju Blue.

Newton entered Winn's name, running a search, but it didn't pop up in any of the Shatterdome's files on PPDC personnel. Winn had been affiliated with the Shatterdome in Lima, but that had been closed down, and maybe he had simply retired.

Not that Newton could understand the concept. Kaijus, man! He would never retire from that!

With a sigh he slid off the chair and paced around the lab, stopping in front of the still closed-off section where Chuck had been drenched in the distilled blood.

Newt still had samples and he would get blood samples from Chuck. He would find out what had happened.

"Why are you still here?"

The voice was filled with so much snark and underlying criticism, it had Geiszler smile automatically.

"Hey, there, Hermann."

"Dr. Gottlieb to you," was the automatic answer as Hermann limped closer.

He looked pale as usual, maybe a bit more tired and his clothes a bit more rumpled. To Newton he was a sight for sore eyes and when Hermann stopped next to him, the biologist wrapped an arm around the slender waist and rested his head on one narrow shoulder.

Hermann stiffened.

"Dr. Geiszler!"

They had an agreement. Well, Hermann had an agreement with himself that somehow included Newt to a degree. Well, it involved him all the way, he had to correct himself. It had always been with him, all the way, ever since Gottlieb had let his guard down and accepted that their bickering and fighting was more than just that.

It hadn't been any less explosive in the labs since that fateful night when Newt had taken matters into his own hands and had told Hermann how and what he felt. It had just gotten more… intense. And intimate.

One rule was: no public displays of affection.

Newt argued that all they did was PDA, from the looks to the gestures to the arguing.

Hermann usually countered that with scathing looks, a twist of the mouth, and making a strategical retreat to his work station.

"Relax. No one's here and no one actually gives a flying whatever, dude." Newton sighed and closed his eyes. "I screwed up, Herm."

There was a tentative caress over his back and he smiled a little. The smile grew when Gottlieb wrapped his free arm around him, returning the hug, and then pressed dry lips against his neck.

"While I'm inclined to agree to your last statement most of the time," Hermann said, voice holding a little aloof note, "you never broke lab protocol in all the years we worked together. You might be a bit lax in your work ethics, but you wouldn't endanger anyone, let alone a Shifter."

Newton felt something inside of him warm a little, then unravel from the tight knot it had been in. Hermann delivered a little kiss to the tousled hair.

"Have you looked into lab protocols? Who worked on that particular project? Who was in charge of securing the storage tanks?"

Newton suddenly straightened, almost dislodging Gottlieb. "Fuck!" he breathed.

"Dr. Geiszler, please…"

"Lorse!"

Gottlieb frowned.

"Dr. Roman Lorse!" Newton exclaimed. "The guy with an ego the size of the Shatterdome, who knows everything, who can do everything, who has connections in all the right places!"

"Oh. Yes." Hermann grimaced. "Him."

Lorse had been a pain for all the three months he had been at the Shatterdome. He had never worked in one before, knew next to nothing about rules and regulations concerning Shatterdomes, and he had been in very loud and harsh arguments with most of the staff. When he had gone head to head with the Marshall, Lorse had found himself on the next plane out. Herc was a calm, reasonable, level-headed Marshall, but Lorse had really made it impossible for him to ignore all the complaints any more.

And Lorse had been the one working on the Kaiju Blue distillation.

And he had been the one to store the results in the tank that had exploded and showered Chuck in the slimy result of the distillation process.

"I… I never signed off on that," Newton suddenly whispered, horrified.

As head K-scientist in the biologicals department he had to approve and supervise whatever happened inside his labs. Their team was small and, aside from Lorse, competent enough that Newton felt he could leave them to their research.

Hermann frowned and nudged him over to the computer. He called up the files.

Newton paled. "Fuck!"

There, on a digital report copy, was his signature.

A fake one.

Lorse had faked his signature.

And now Chuck was a koala.

tbc...