Marshall Hansen shouted "Stop the war clock!"
And while everyone around her cheered, wept and celebrated, all she felt was disbelief.
She had been twelve when the first Kaiju attack had occurred. For half her life, she had lived with the inevitability of another attack, always another attack. She had been trained to build and repair, to care for the Jaegers, the last hopes of mankind.
Sometimes, it felt like war was all she had ever known.
And here she was, being told that peace was finally an option; that the constant watchfulness was at an end.
The world inside the Shatterdome, with all of its people and its machines, was all she could remember knowing.
While her world celebrated, all she felt was numb.
They had been told that it was safe to fly again.
He had been part of the original attack on Trespasser in San Francisco during K-Day.
Before that, flying had meant freedom. For all that he was a pilot with the United States Air Force; he had never seen active combat.
But then everything the world had known and believed had been split into two, and the opening of the Breach also meant that his universe had been shattered. The sense of wings and security that being in the sir had once given him was replaced by care and precision every time he flew.
Flying no longer meant independence and freedom. All it meant was danger and impending death, the realisation that another Kaiju attack was not far behind.
After Otachi, the air became just another territory for the Kaiju to conquer.
And then the Breach was sealed.
Unlike the children in the Shatterdome, he still remembered a world without the constant threat of a monster attack from the depths of the ocean. Yet what he felt was not the rush of nostalgia for days that would finally come again, but an overwhelming sense of awe at the realisation that flying and freedom had been returned to him.
As he piloted a helicopter and raced towards the sea, he was finally free again.
He had been born and had grown up in this world, the thriving black market that had sprung up almost immediately after the first Kaiju attack.
When the first Kaiju had hit China, his father had been part of the recovery team. When Hannibal Chou had moved his business to Hong Kong, his father had followed, knowing that that was where the money would lie.
He was a young boy when the inhabitants of the last remaining Shatterdome, the one in the city he lived in, announced that the Kaiju were no longer a problem that the Earth had to worry itself over.
The people of Hong Kong celebrated. Even the ones who recovered Kaiju organs celebrated – by then, they had amassed a fortune that would last them their lifetimes, and that of their children and grandchildren.
But he, not yet a teenager, just an eleven year old boy, only felt a sense of loss at the death of the only world he had ever known.
She had spent so much of the past decade in LOCCENT Mission Control, controlling Jaeger missions that it had become like a second home.
She knew so many people who had forgotten who they used to be in a world that hadn't been ruled by fear of the sea, but she had never relinquished those memories.
She had been one of the people who had watched Stacker Pentecost take down Onibaba, and that had been the incident that had inspired her to join the PPDC in the first place. She had followed him wherever he went ever since he had become Marshall, trusting in his promise that one day, the Kaiju would be nothing but a thing of the past, the way peace seemed to be.
When the war clock was officially stopped, she couldn't help but burst into tears.
Marshall Stacker Pentecost – the greatest man she had ever had the privilege of knowing – had fulfilled his promise to the world, but he wasn't there to share it with them. That had never been a possibility that she had considered.
So even as every fibre of her being celebrated the heralding of a return to the world that had been her home, she cried for the man who had made it all possible.
They would never have stories and legends crafted about them.
At the end of it all, they were nothing but ordinary citizens, the people who had never been truly involved with the Kaiju war. They may have been the ones to suffer the most, but in between attacks, they went about their normal lives, only the fear of the next attack affecting them.
They were housewives and teacher, actors and speakers. They weren't engineers or mathematical prodigies, they weren't Drift compatible soldiers.
They were simply regular people, going about regular lives.
And yet, even in those people whose lives weren't ruled by the Kaiju, the constant threat of the giant monsters and the waves of death they brought with them remained.
The people of Hong Kong knew everything. They may have been a city of over 20 million people, but gossip spread just as well in an enormous group as in a small one. And even though every action carried out within the Shatterdome were supposed to top secret, there would always be someone who would be willing to start the next wildfire rumour.
So they very well that Marshall Pentecost was keeping a war clock running.
Every time a Kaiju was defeated, the streets were filled with the hope that the war clock would be stopped. But every single time, it was reset and time would start again.
And then came the news that the man who had protected them for so long had given his life in one last act of sacrifice, and that the new Marshall had ordered the war clock to be stopped.
For every single person directly involved with the Kaiju in one way or another, their passing and the closing of the Rift brought forward the most complex of emotions. For the people of Hong Kong, all that the end of the Kaiju brought was pure relief.
They were ordinary men and women, with ordinary lives to live. And while they shed tears for the men who had allowed themselves to die so that they could live, the passing of the Kaiju meant mainly that they could finally get back to their normal lives with the sword of the Kaiju hanging over their foreheads.
They were housewives and artists, engineers and Jaeger pilots. They were nothing alike, yet they were all alike.
Because in a world that had been terrorised, captured, and held hostage by the Kaiju for so long, they were the ones who had fought to win.
So yeah...I'm writing this a day after I saw the movie. It just wouldn't leave me alone!
Needless to say, this is my first foray into the Pacific Rim fandom. Please drop a review on your way out to tell me how you felt about this fic! :)