TITLE: Bring the Rain
AUTHOR: Macx
RATING: PG-13 to R
DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belongs to me, sadly. They are owned by people with a lot more money :)
FEEDBACK: Loved
NOTES: just before I went on my annual Ireland vacation I saw a picture on tumblr (and I can't post the link because FFNet won't accept it). It triggered this new interpretation of koala!Chuck.
So much Irish landscape got my dormant braincells going again.
This happened.
So sorry!
I'm not on tumblr, so I can't respond to all the wonderful koala art I see out there. So if any of you, who put such great art out there, read this, let me thank you for inspiring me to write more koala fic! You're amazing and talented and always, always manage to jump-start my brain out of writer's block and hibernation!
Thank you!
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1.
Science had determined that about 9.5 % of the world's population were Shifters; humans with a slightly different genetic code that allowed them to change their shape into that of an animal.
Throughout history, the Shifters came and went in society, just like any group or part of the population. There were those that sought solitude; others that mingled with humans. Some societies made no difference as to what a child was born as. Others raised a Shifter child's status to that of a gifted or chosen one.
In Ancient Egypt, Shifters had been believed to be gods. Today, centuries later, historians believed all the Egyptian gods to have been Crossbreeds; unable to Shift completely.
Some societies shunned the Shifters as cursed and evil. They were made into roadshow freaks and gawked at.
Times changed.
Shifters surged in numbers or suddenly disappeared. New subcategories came and went; older ones reappeared or could never be proven.
Water-bound groups only existed near or close to water; their kind reduced in numbers as time went on. Soon they were only found on remote islands or in areas where Man hadn't tried to form nature to his will.
Land-bound was the group with the highest variation in shapes. They flourished. The wolves were the strongest and most numerous, closely followed by subcategories of the lupine or canine nature.
No one had ever seen or heard of an air-bound form that was truly flight capable.
Even Shifters had myths and fairy tales. Some of them involved winged Shifters.
Shifters weren't an aberration or a mutation of the human form. They were just a variation like skin or hair color.
Each Shifter had only one Shifted form and it wasn't predetermined by nationality, gender or preference. While the form mimicked an animal and they had those instincts, some Shifters displayed a greater control over their physical forms than others. Tales and lore called them Weres.
Like wolves. Bipedal, fur all over a heavily muscled body, the head of a wolf; the werewolf myth had stemmed from that until Man had understood what Shifters were.
Sometimes, even with two Shifter parents with the same animal form, the child could become something else.
Just sometimes.
It was really rare.
They were fast healers and could come back from serious injuries with almost no permanent disability, had a high threshold for pain, and they were enduring.
Many were soldiers, officers of the law, worked in security, and went into jobs that suited their sometimes primal nature. It wasn't uncommon for those with a predator alternate form to be found at the frontlines.
Some nations or countries had a higher or lower percentage in Shifters. Some had whole tribes that had never had a human child in generations.
Some families were purists. In either direction.
Some families didn't care.
Like the Hansens.
A family of wolf Shifters, a pack that had formed around an alpha and his mate. Wolf genes were dominant and all children had always been wolves.
No exception.
Ever.
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2.
He had known.
He had known he had sent off his son, his only child, his only family – family that counted, Scott be damned – on a suicide mission.
Herc Hansen had known and it had taken everything inside him not to scream out his pain, grab Chuck and order him to stand down. The alpha in him had howled and demanded he protect his only remaining pack.
But he had let Chuck go.
He had forced himself to watch Chuck walk after Stacker, into the Conn-Pod, into quite certain death.
No man should have to watch his child die.
No man should have to go through the pain of survival at the cost of his family.
No man.
Herc Hansen had gone through it and it had torn him apart, had shredded his soul and buried a cold, sharp dagger in his mind.
Chuck had sacrificed himself to close the Breach.
No father should have to live with that, his son a hero, when it should have been both of them piloting Striker.
His arm.
This stupid, bull-headed decision to disengage from the feedback cradle, to try to reach the emergency power…
And he had paid for it.
Twice.
Herc had carried that weight, had lived with it through the tense hours of preparing for the final mission, Operation Pitfall, and there had been nothing he could think of to say.
All had been said.
All had been done.
He had demanded that the doctors help him with the injury, but even an alpha of his caliber wouldn't be able to heal a break on top of a dislocated shoulder like that.
Two days to get the bone hard enough to endure the stress of a Drop, three to make it last through a fight, though it would most likely break again.
They hadn't had that time.
Chuck had known.
Always known.
So had Herc.
It had made it so much more painful. Eyes swimming, the grief overwhelming. Herc had soldiered on, through it all, as the deputy Marshall in Stacker's absence
He had people to take care of.
He had a Shatterdome to run.
He had to.
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3.
Sasha Kaidonovsky was born into a pack of ovcharka and had all the instincts of the protective and guarding nature of these Shifters. It was only natural for her to follow family tradition and become a soldier.
She met her future husband Aleksis when she changed careers to a prison guard.
Like her he had been a guard.
Aleksis was tall, strong, silent, fear-inspiring and not the type of man Sasha had gone for in the past for hot, fast flings.
He was a Shifter. Not a dog or a wolf or a large cat. More like a weird mix of all. A Crossbreed. Neither one nor the other, but unlike other Crossbreeds able to fully Shift, fusing both sides into something new that didn't look like any animal to be found on Earth.
Human myth called his specific appearance crocotta.
He was an Ultra.
Aleksis had a temper and it showed in the flash of curved fangs, the change of his features as the Shifter pushed through. With Sasha, his aggression was finally under moderate control. She had calmed him.
He was a rock in her stormy sea.
She loved him passionately.
Their marriage only cemented the fact that they belonged together, that the pull they had felt from the first moment was more than a brief explosion of passion.
In 2015 they joined the Jaeger Academy to become pilots.
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Cheung, Hu and Chin Wei had always known that they were different, even among their own kind. Naturally born triplets were rare; for Shifters they were an exception. Their parents, both Shifters – both jaguars – had accepted their gift.
Cheung was the first to find his form and everyone expected his brothers to follow soon, to be a jaguar like him. Like his father, he was dark in color.
Chin came next, two months later, and his maki shape had others blink.
Hu completed the confusion by ending up a blackbuck antelope.
It only proved that origin and family didn't predestine the shape of a Shifter child. Nor did personal preference, temper or character.
Their parents loved them, no matter their forms.
They became famous street-fighters.
In 2015 they joined the Jaeger Academy to become pilots.
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When the Kaijus came, almost all pilot teams were made up of Shifters, Crossbreeds or those with the ancestral heritage of one. Stacker Pentecost was one of the few humans. He was a born pilot. Tamsin Sevier, his co-pilot, was the child of two Shifters who hadn't inherited the traits; born human.
They were one hell of a team. They kicked Kaiju ass.
In the end she lost the battle to cancer, not to a Kaiju.
Stacker got his diagnosis years later.
Bruce and Trevin Gage had been humans, too. Their grandparents had been Shifters, but their father had been born human and their mother had never had a Shifter ancestor. They were strong pilots.
Their loss was felt.
The Kaidonovskys went into the annals of history as the one team that held the longest neural handshake. Fierce and proud and dangerous.
The Wei Triplets were renowned for their fighting style that translated smoothly into Crimson Typhoon's battle moves. Enduring, fearsome, relentless and cunning.
The Shifters had had all those traits.
Drifting made them even stronger.
Still, death was something they couldn't beat either.
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4.
Finding a mate wasn't a primal instinct.
Finding a pack wasn't a necessity either.
Wolf Shifters, like other Were, were perfectly able to live normal lives even without a partner or a mate.
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Herc had met Angela in a bar. She was visiting with a circle of friends, apparently having a ladies' night. Herc had been enjoying his time off from the base.
They had hit it off.
They had talked all evening and he had walked her home.
Angela had given him her number and the weeks after, calls were frequent.
They had started dating.
He hadn't cared that she wasn't a Shifter. She was human, though she had Shifters in her family, but it had never taken with her. She had been born without the ability to change shape or even just a part of herself, like her eyes or skin.
Herc hadn't cared.
The wolf hadn't cared.
He had fallen hard for her and she had loved him, too.
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His parents loved Angela. She fit in seamlessly, uncaring of the fact she was becoming part of a pack of werewolves.
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They married a year later.
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On August 14th, 2003, Chuck was born and it was the happiest moment in Herc's live.
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When Chuck was a year old and showed no inclination to Shift, Herc couldn't have cared less. He knew there was a chance that he might not be a werewolf, that he might be something else because of his mother's side. Or that he could be a Crossbreed, able to never fully Shift into one form or another. Then again, he might have inherited more of his mother, might just be human.
The alpha wolf hadn't agreed to the last possibility. His son smelled like a Shifter.
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Chuck never had a problem with his father Shifting and never tried to copy him. He squealed when the huge wolf was with him, small hands clutching at the thick fur, loving it when his dad carried him in his arms in his bipedal form.
He was just as fond of his uncle Scott, who, a beta of the pack, was darker in color and slightly smaller. Scott lavished attention on the little boy and Chuck had him wrapped around his little fingers in no time.
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When his little boy grew strong enough to hold on to Herc, the alpha let him ride on his back. Herc could feel the joy, feel the strength in the small hands, in the young soul.
Chuck wasn't human. There was a wolf in him; it just hadn't found a way out.
Angela watched them with a fond, loving expression. When Herc curled up, the infant against his chest or between his paws, she laid with them.
Pack.
His mate, his son, his pack.
The alpha was proud.
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By the age of ten it was clear that Chuck had inherited the temper of the wolf, the fierceness, the fighting prowess. His instincts were spot-on.
He simply didn't Shift.
Until the Kaiju.
Until Angela's death.
It was the day that his eyes changed, that the wolf shone through.
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Herc had saved his son and lost his mate.
It took him almost a day to make it back from the abyss, from Shifting into his alpha form and snarling at whoever dared to come close.
There was no body to bury, no grave to mourn at.
Something inside Herc broke that day.
But he had a son to care for.
He had to go on.
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He would never have thought what came next was possible or that a Crossbreed like this could happen.
Because Chuck changed shape – into a koala.
Not a cuddly little koala bear, a marsupial that slept a lot and moved little, but something that would happen if you mixed wolf into the koala genes.
A sub-category of Crossbreed. A full Shift and still not a shape that was either a koala or a wolf.
Chuck was koala shaped, but a little larger than the average male koala. He was gray with a ginger back. He had big, fluffy ears, but he also featured something of a bunny-like tail. His paws showed claws that belonged to the wolf-side, with four fingers and a thumb, as opposed to the two thumbs a koala had. He was rather fast and agile on his feet, well-muscled, lean underneath the thick coat of extremely fluffy fur, and he had a set of fierce canines. His eyes would flash to wolf when he was furious and his bite was fearsome.
When a doctor examined him, he claimed that the trauma, the loss of his mother, had been the trigger.
Chuck Hansen was an Ultra.
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Herc and Scott joined the Pan Pacific Defense Corps not much later.
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Herc was among the first generation of Jaeger pilots. It was where he met Stacker Pentecost.
tbc...