My brain jumpstarted into another weird crossover, this time with a rather small fandom called Captain Harlock. As usual, I have no real explanation how this happened, but it did. One moment I sat flipping through TV channels, the next I stumbled over the 2013 CGI movie with the same name, Captain Harlock.

Then my brain came out of hibernation and my writer's block was gone.

This happened.

No clue why or how.

I apologize to the whole of Harlock fandom for whatever I did wrong with the characters and whatever outrage this might spark. I simply meshed all the various Harlock reincarnations together, used the CGI images from the movie in my head as I wrote him and Yama, and ran with it. I also used some of the 2013 movie English names and mixed them into the originals, because I wanted my characters to have a first and last name.

Sorry.

Then again… maybe not :P

I placed the fic in the Pacific Rim Synergy 'verse, so don't be confused that it isn't a retelling of the Pacific Rim movie. It's a continuity of it within an AU of my own creation.

So, this is a mix of both fandoms to make it work for PacRim.

Bear with me.

You don't need to read the five fics of the Synergy AU to read this one, but you can if you want to :)

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Herc Hansen, Marshall of the Hong Kong Shatterdome, didn't really have to look up from the stack of papers he was currently signing to know who had walked into his office. There had been no knock, and it wasn't required, but it was also hard to miss the thud of a cane hitting the metal floor.

"Dr. Gottlieb," he greeted half of his Lead Kaiju Science Team.

Hermann Gottlieb straightened a little, shifting his weight to rest on his good leg. He looked as pinched as always, lips a thin line as if Herc had called him away from a very important job to talk menial matters. Herc almost laughed to himself. Everything was a menial matter to Hermann as long as it didn't involve mathematic equations of the Anteverse or Jaeger tech.

But they had also known each other long enough that each man knew where the other came from. They had been through the Near-Apocalypse together. Gottlieb and Geiszler had saved their combined asses their own way, and they had stayed on even after the war was over.

"Take a seat, please."

Hermann seemed to just about refrain from huffing as he lowered himself into a chair. "What can I do for you, Marshall?"

"Hopefully a lot." Herc drummed his fingers on the folder on the desk. "What do you know about the Nibelung project?"

The reaction was almost comical as Gottlieb tried to hold back his surprise and failed on all fronts. His mouth opened slightly, then closed and the lips thinned even more. His eyes narrowed and there was a soft snort.

"Nibelung was Dr. Melody Miime's project. It's been a while since I heard anything. About ten years, I suppose. They kept a tight lid on development and research and after it failed, rumors remained. Nothing more."

"Where you ever involved enough to see anything of Nibelung?" Herc probed.

Hermann sighed, leaning back a little. He looked almost pensive. "Nibelung was perceived in the early stages of the Kaiju invasion, Marshall. It was an attempt to blow the Breach using technology way beyond us. Anteverse-perceived technology, based on alien matter. Back then we didn't even call it Anteverse just yet."

Herc gave him a raised eyebrow, urging him on.

"Oh well," Hermann muttered. "There aren't a lot of official files on this, right?"

"There are enough if you dig deep and know where the bodies are buried," Hansen replied calmly. "But I know you were partially involved or at least knew people who were. I wanted to hear it from you, not try to get behind blacked-out data."

Gottlieb's fingers closed tightly around the cane and he was biting his lower lip. Then, like he had won an internal argument, he nodded.

"At the beginning," he said, voice calm and almost like he was giving a lecture," there was nothing known about the other side of the Breach. It was a tear in the ground where something horrible came out to destroy us. Research teams spent months and then years working on finding a solution on how to collect data. As you know, nothing went through into the Breach. Only the other side had access to our world. What those teams gathered was little to nothing, mostly organic matter. Kaiju bodies, no tech. Dr. Miime and her team approached it a different way. They were one of the first to speculate that if the Breach was a door to another dimension, there would be matter, radiation, particles, that remained in our world and could be collected. They scanned and probed for that."

"And found something," Herc added with a nod. "That much I gathered from all the science talk."

Gottlieb wrinkled his nose a little. "They did more than just find things." Hermann grimaced as if he had bitten into something sour. "Matter leaked through the Breach with each Kaiju arrival. It clings to their bodies even after death, and Dr. Miime… well, she didn't send anything down there to get through but to collect what was pushed out of the other dimension."

Herc's brows rose. "Like siffoning out gold from sand?"

"In very crude words, yes. Aside from the organ harvesters, the project team was one of the first to arrive at every kill site. She started to apply the newly discovered particle matter to our technology. She speculated that if we managed to power a Jaeger with the what she called Dark Matter, we could go through the Breach. That's when I was called in. They asked for my input into the Dark Matter drives. I said they were insane, harvesting exotic particles from another universe and thinking they could control it."

Herc folded his hands in front of him on the desk. "Care to give me Dark Matter 101, Dr. Gottlieb?"

Hermann looked drawn between tickled and miffed. Dumbing down anything concerning science was underneath him, but on the other hand, he was the leading expert.

"Well, the visible universe, including Earth, the sun, other stars, and galaxies, is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons bundled together into atoms. In the 20th century a discovery was made that this ordinary, or baryonic, matter makes up less than five percent of the mass of the universe. The rest of the universe appears to be made of a substance called dark matter and a force that repels gravity known as dark energy."

Hermann waited for a moment, gauging Herc's reaction. The Marshall nodded for him to go on.

"Dark matter was and still is one of the more obscure fields of research. Since the dark matter couldn't be grasped and instruments back then couldn't detect it, and since it was apparently invisible to light, it wasn't pursued as deeply as other research. Scientists have a few ideas for what dark matter might be. One leading hypothesis is that dark matter consists of exotic particles that don't interact with normal matter or light but that still exert a gravitational pull. Several scientific groups, including one at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, were working to generate dark matter particles for study in the lab before the Breach happened."

"Did they?"

"I actually don't know, Marshall. With the Breach, things started to change. A different kind of research started. The particles detected on the Kaijus and those emitting from the Breach were different from anything we had known before."

"So, dark matter?"

Gottlieb shook his head. "No. Not in our classical sense. We still can't detect our dark matter, let along use it, though dark energy research speculated that the forces at play would be infinite. What Miime attempted to tame was Anteverse matter. A new kind of exotic. We could see it, read it, harness it. Dr. Miime called the engines she and Dr. Oyama developed Dark Matter Drives. Anteverse Engines might be the better description."

"What powered them then?"

"Very real alien energy and radiation," Gottlieb explained. "Dangerous, unexplored, likely to tear apart our world, but safety procedures were completely ignored." Hermann sounded disgusted and affronted in one.

"They worked."

Gottlieb huffed. "Luck, not science."

"So what happened?"

"They built four Jaegers. Oceanus Elite, Gaia Jove, Kaleido Proxy and Arcadia Zero. They called them Deathshadows. Three were destroyed, one survived," Gottlieb said with a sigh. "It was a damn loss of life! An insane project that shouldn't have been sanctioned!"

Yep, Herc held the same opinion, but the PPDC had been desperate back then. More than before, not as badly as when they had started building the useless Wall.

Nibelung hadn't been just another project. Miime had made sure that she was autonomous in the development of the new Jaeger. She had surrounded herself with people who came from a wildly different area of expertise each and while Herc sometimes thought of his Shatterdome core crew as a dysfunctional family of sorts, Nibelung topped that.

You had to be on the slightly more crazy side of science to think up what they had; and you had to be a lunatic to be the test pilot. Herc had been a test pilot, had driven all kinds of Jaeger generations. Others like him had died of radiation poisoning eating away at their skin, muscles and bones, destroying their cells. He had survived piloting a nuclear reactor on legs. He had survived Kaijus.

An alien matter drive? Herc thought he would have stepped into that Conn-Pod, too. It was the nature of pilots like him. Part of him actually itched right now. He wanted to take a look at that Jaeger, wanted to strap into the Conn-Pod and see what she could do. He also knew at least three or four more pilots who would want the same.

"The first Jaeger, Kaleido Proxy, blew up right away. No one knows the circumstances. I know I was never told." Gottlieb said, anger in his voice. "Gaia Jove didn't make it through the Breach. She and her crew were torn apart through the forces at play inside the Throat. The third, Oceanus Elite, was taken down by a Kaiju on the ocean floor. No survivors either. Number four…" Hermann looked pinched. "Number four survived, but was decommissioned. I wasn't part of the Nibelung project any more, but I heard that Arcadia Zero actually entered the Breach, descended into the Throat, made it out somewhere, but when the Deathshadow returned, one pilot was dead and gone. The other was gravely injured."

"Lost an eye," Herc nodded. "The other pilot was missing, even though the Conn-Pod had not been opened and had not been breached. Lots of blacked out paragraphs here. I'd say no one knows what happened."

"They never did. They didn't know what they were doing from the beginning and it didn't stop with the senseless death of so many good pilots," Hermann groused. "It shouldn't have happened. It shouldn't have been sanctioned!"

Herc sighed. "You and me both know that a lot of things happened that the general public and even we don't know about. Nibelung was only one of those things."

Gottlieb looked darkly at him. "Insanity."

"So what we know," Herc continued, "is that Arcadia Zero was heavily damaged and barely operational, but nothing got in or out according to the data. There should be footage of the descent somewhere, but PPDC is rather… evasive. They have either nothing on those tapes or what's on them is something they don't want anyone to know."

Hermann's thin lips were a tight, white line. "Why are you asking about Nibelung, Marshall? It was discontinued, the final Deathshadow retired and probably locked down. I doubt they took it apart. They hardly understood what they cobbled together. Taking it apart would have it most likely blown up in their faces. Dark Matter is a dangerous material and alien on top of that!"

"Ever since the PPDC decided to keep Hong Kong running and to reopen the other Shatterdomes with a minimal crew, I've been getting lists of recommissioned Jaegers and crews. Just got this one."

He handed the pad to Hermann, who stared at it as if it held a very bad joke. He swiped his fingers over the screen, quickly scrolling through the electronic file.

"That's outrageous! It's… You can't… consider that… can you? Is it even operational?"

"I have to consider it, Dr. Gottlieb. Arcadia Zero is fully operational and has a complete crew of pilots and tech. According to the PPDC they'd been working on the Deathshadow Jaeger, but then all funds were pulled to build the Wall. They had a new pilot pair, but they were never sent out. Might have made a difference a year ago, or they would just have been another casualty."

"It's insane! We have no idea how the Dark Matter drive works!"

"We'll have enough time to learn from those working on it in the past decade."

Hermann's jaw muscles ticked. "It could blow up in our faces."

It hasn't so far. And they've been operating it for ten years."

"Insanity," the scientist muttered, sounding disgusted. "Miime was always prone to skirting along the edges of legal and safe. When she implanted the drive, she skipped ahead a few steps and went right off the deep end."

Herc smiled thinly. "Desperate times, Dr. Gottlieb. And I don't have to remind you of your colleague's attempts to Drift with a Kaiju."

Hermann looked even more disgusted, but he didn't argue.

"Is Miime coming, too?" he only asked.

"No one has seen her ever since Arcadia came back with one survivor. She's been declared MIA, probably dead."

Gottlieb huffed, hands still clenching around his cane.

"They kept Harlock. Gave him a new co-pilot. Insanity all around," he grumbled.

Herc had to agree. Harlock was severely traumatized, had lost an eye, was physically and mentally scarred. He had several notations in his file that read not unlike Chuck's mixed with Raleigh's. Psychologically damaged, physically handicapped, a man who had apparently been to the Anteverse and had his co-pilot ripped out of the Drift. Unlike Raleigh, though, he claimed he didn't remember.

Now he had a new co-pilot, someone who, according to the Psych Eval, gave him a stability that enabled him to function as a pilot and as a human being. Those two had been through countless simulation runs in the past two years and their performance was flawless.

"When?" Hermann now asked.

"Deployment papers have already gone through. I expect them to arrive in a day or two," Hansen answered. "Arcadia Zero will be flown in within in a week."

Hermann rose stiffly, leaning briefly on his cane until his bad leg stopped giving him trouble.

"I'd like you, as our Anteverse expert, to take a look at the Dark Matter drive, Dr. Gottlieb," Herc said calmly. "Give me your assessment. You'll have full access, no matter what the crew might say. Take Newt with you to keep them distracted," he added with a fine smile.

Gottlieb actually cracked a brief smile of his own. "I wouldn't want to inflict Dr. Geiszler on them."

Herc chuckled and watched the scientist limp out, then he leaned back in his chair.

The Arcadia was a wild card. An asset and also a possible nightmare to handle. She was operated by a seasoned pilot with amnesia concerning his last mission, very possible brain damage not unlike Raleigh Becket, and a young pilot who hadn't seen real action ever since being matched to Harlock.

Yeah, Herc decided, veritable powder keg.

He had to wait and see.

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When the Nibelung project had been put on hold due to the loss of three perfectly good Jaegers with their pilot pairs within a very short amount of time, the remaining Deathshadow had been mothballed.

Well, not literally.

Arcadia Zero had been shipped off to an undisclosed location, away from the regular Shatterdomes, to be maintained in a battle-ready condition in case the Academy could find a match for the sole survivor of a hair-raising mission.

For years Nibelung was a myth among the Academy recruits, talked about as a rumor or a legend, as a fantastic tale spread around mess hall tables. The pilots became daring heroes who had ventured into the Breach and remained there.

With each retelling the stories got more colorful, more fantastic. Some were outrageously funny, so far from the truth it wasn't even surreal any more. Even the scientists whispered about Nibelung, about experiments that went beyond human understanding, involved alien technology, and some claimed something other than the Kaiju had come through the Breach. Maybe the Deathshadows weren't even human-built.

Yes, there was a lot of dumb stuff floating around. The grain of truth was in there, but it was only a grain.

No one knew anyone associated with Nibelung, let alone ever trained with anyone who had been asked to try out as a pilot.

So it was just a tale.

The one person who had gone into the Breach long before Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori and had come back out alive wouldn't agree.

Harlock had paid a heavy price for his bravery, for trying to prevent the war from spreading and millions more dying. He had failed like all other Deathshadow crews, but he had made it back. Alive.

And he hadn't been seen by anyone ever since that day, when Arcadia Zero had resurfaced, barely functional, and Rescue had had a hard time getting the Jaeger, let alone the pilot, back to the Lima Shatterdome.

People would have remembered him had he walked into any Shatterdome or Academy facility. He was a very distinctive figure and his appearance had others do a double-take.

Harlock had become a ghost, a myth, had disappeared. Unlike other pilots who had lost so much, he hadn't holed up and started to slide into anonymity, or turned to alcohol to forget.

Nibelung had continued. Under the radar, but with PPDC funding and blessing. Without the head researcher, without the brain behind the Deathshadows, but with determination and grit.

Until now, no one had known.

Harlock gazed out the window, not really looking at the barren landscape around him. Mountains loomed up not far away, covered in thick blankets of snow and eyes, glaciers hanging on to the sides. He had seen nothing but this place for the past years and still, as familiar as it was, it wasn't home.

Nothing had been home since he had woken up and learned what had happened. Or what others told him had happened and might have happened.

Harlock himself remembered nothing.

It was like he hadn't been there, like some other person had been the pilot that day and that person had vanished inside his head, taking all the information with them. No matter the amount of therapy sessions and recall attempts, the past was locked away. That particular part of his past.

Rain was starting to fall onto the rocky ground, splattering heavily against the window panes and starting to obscure his view. Clouds kept rolling in over the mountains, a tidal wave that crashed down on the research station and washed away everything that hadn't been nailed down.

Weather was extremely unpredictable most of the time and a storm front could rush in within minutes. Heavy fog was normal sixty percent of the year, and temperatures were usually below freezing even before summer had officially ended. There were no four seasons, just two states of weather: clear, sunny and cold. Or rain with a heavy addition of fog and hail.

The darkness descending over the observatory spoke of hail for today.

Harlock listened to the first knocks of frozen particles against the metal and the heavy glass. Within minutes it became a loud staccato sound, drowning out everything else.

He turned away from the windows and walked back into the station. Protective panes started to descend and plunged the room into darkness as he left.

Tomorrow he would leave this place, head for Hong Kong. His first deployment to another location in a long time.

The Ranger in him itched to get back into his Jaeger, to take Arcadia Zero out and feel the Drift, feel the massive machine under his control, and just do what he had done so many times before. He hadn't been back to fight Kaiju for too long. He hadn't been allowed. He had been grounded and confined to this place.

Because the Deathshadows were top secret.

Because when they had finally found a co-pilot matching the stubborn captain, the PPDC had pulled all funds and truly mothballed them. Money had gone into building Walls that hadn't held up against the force of a Kaiju attack.

Because no one knew what might go catastrophically wrong with the Dark Matter drive if they went up against the Kaijus coming through.

Because Harlock was seen as damaged beyond repair and even with the only pilot crazy enough not to run from him, he might not be able to hold a steady neural handshake in a battle against the alien monsters.

Countless, endless simulations aside, he hadn't been sent out. They had recommissioned Gipsy Danger, had sent every functional Jaeger to Hong Kong.

Not Arcadia Zero.

She would have been ready. The pilots and crew had been ready.

But the call had never come because the PPDC was too cowardly to use a Jaeger powered by an alien energy source after the two developers had either died or disappeared.

Earth had nearly lost, the last desperate attempt to close the Breach for good almost failing and costing so many good pilots their lives, but Harlock had been forced to watch from the sidelines.

It had eaten away at him.

It had eaten away at his co-pilot, who had been the more outspoken one of them when it came to that decision.

His co-pilot had yelled and ranted at whoever he got his hands on, had sent off scathing mails to the PPDC brass, but they had been ignored. The one defense of human kind against the invasion had retreated, holed up, trusted in building stupid walls around the Pacific perimeter that had been completely useless against the brunt force of a Kaiju.

Arcadia had been sidelined.

Not trusted.

Weak.

Now they wanted him back.

After everything was over.

Harlock's lips were a thin line and he unconsciously curled his hands into fists. He forced himself to relax as he descended the stairs, the hammering sound of hail beating against the roof accompanying him.

The access door to the research station's main building was open and Yama was leaning against the door jamb, all lean, strong lines and ease. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest, eyes on Harlock.

Harlock shot him a quizzical look, but the younger man just smiled and fell in step beside him.

No words were exchanged.

Even without a single real battle outside the simulators, Yama had become quite adept at picking up Harlock's moods.

Two years knowing each other through the Drifts did that. Eighteen months of a deeper relationship added the rest. They trusted each other, needed each other, and they relied on each other.

"Wish they would let us pilot her to Hong Kong ourselves, not lug her to her new station like a piece of dead metal. It's demeaning. And we could use the time to really break her in. I'm sick and tired of simulations."

Harlock didn't answer; not that Yama had expected an answer.

"All those test runs and we never had her take a jog around the perimeter at all." The other pilot sighed. "Damn shame."

They passed a few people, all of them nodding a greeting, but Harlock ignored them. Part of him was excited to get back out into the field, to be on active duty, especially in Hong Kong, who had become the center of all activity concerning the newly formed protection detail of Earth. Another was tense, apprehensive and outright fighting the whole idea.

He wasn't surprised to find that Yama had led them back to their quarters and he was even less surprised to see the packed bags. Plural. His own was there as well, filled with the few personal belongings he had, together with his clothes, spare uniform and toiletries.

He raised his eyebrow.

Yama shrugged. "I was bored. Kept me busy. And it's not like there's a lot to pack anyway."

Right.

Harlock slipped out of his uniform jacked and draped it over the chair. Despite being grounded, he had never dressed in any other way than Arcadia's pilot. All black, some golden or red highlights along the edge. Yama plopped down in front of the computer and went through their inbox, deleting whatever he found was useless or uninteresting. Harlock watched him a wave of fondness stealing over him and the emotions had him twitch a smile.

"You want to head over to the mess and try their version of meatloaf and rice?" Yama asked, swiveling the chair to look at him.

"Not hungry."

"Sure you are. I'll bring you some back," the other decided as if he hadn't even heard his partner.

Harlock didn't even argue. It would be of no use.

"Have a look around if I missed anything. Kei wants to talk to you about Arcadia's transfer and Yattaran has been throwing a fit about something or other. You might want to show yourself to calm the guy down. I think he's making everyone crazy."

Harlock remained silent, but Yama wasn't deterred. He waved, assured that the They addressed him as 'Captain', his rank from his time in the military before the PPDC had grabbed him. Some referred to him like he was at the helm, steering the Jaeger like a pirate ship. They identified with the Jaeger, were proud to be part of the crew.

So Harlock did what he always did: be a quiet presence in the Jaeger Bay, watch the crew work, smile back when they nodded at him. If it helped morale, he did it.

And it had always helped morale.

tbc...

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To everyone who gave this fic a go and made it this far: thank you for giving me a chance :) I promise, I will finish it. I'm not known for starting to post and then never complete a fanfic I write.

So, thank you!