Title: The Camera Down Shatterdome Road
Summary: "What started as a way to keep the then-only child occupied while his parents drove around or preoccupied themselves with adult problems, turned into a full blown hobby by age ten." Yancy Becket headcanon: Yancy was the photographer in the family.
Disclaimer: Pacific Rim and all things related is property of Guillermo del Toro and Legendary Pictures.
Author's Note: Inspired by the "Raleigh's Wall" challenge on Tumblr, which in turn inspired the admittance of this headcanon (which appeared earlier in "Raleigh Raleigh, Raleigh, 2020" of Pilot Under Grace) and proceeding discussion about the rarity of camera film in the wake of digital camera and formats. Happy 1st Anniversary Pacific Rim (July 12, 2014).
As a kid, Yancy took to the camera like second nature, especially during the Becket family's travels. What started as a way to keep the then-only child occupied while his parents drove around or preoccupied themselves with adult problems, turned into a full blown hobby by age ten. There were so many places to take pictures of and then was a little brother fuss over or run from. Film wasn't too expensive, but the rate Yancy went through his cautioned his Dominique to put limits on how much film he'd get a month (or weekly). Her hope was to teach him moderation. It worked… sometimes.
He plastered photographs all over "his side" of the bedroom that was hardly separated by pirate ship-themed bunk beds, just above the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets that crawled up onto the ceiling, and stopped a few feet shy of the ceiling fan. Most of his photographs were blurry, catching mere impressions of his Maman's face, his uncle Charles's standing next to Richard, the squishy and irritable face of his brother on the toilet just before he tossed toilet paper at him. Broken wind up cameras sat in the box of any given closet whenever they moved to and from Anchorage on vacation or familiar visitations.
Disinterested in school sports and looking to spend his extra time elsewhere besides detention, he landed the position as the photographer for the school paper in high school. He needed a new camera. He wanted to graduate from his fashionably outdated wind up camera, so he put up his allowance for a Polaroid camera. He got it and struggled with it despite its apparent simplicity. He got a digital camera for his sixteenth birthday, an "Easy Share" if one recalls correctly.
Now the occupant of a single room, in light of his age and growth spurts, his wall was something of a semi-mosaic of his adventures or people watching. Repetition and practice make perfect. Using both the Polaroid and the digital camera, pictures were clearer and varied from something other than the blurry faces and figures standing in the distance. Landscapes, vacations, animals, social gatherings, spur-of-the-moment photos (his favorite), they captured the things he thought he wanted to remember and hold onto. He left most of them on the wall of his old room (now Raleigh's) in light of his brother's wishes to keep the wall in a room, now a might to spacious for him (at the time), from looking so vacant post-move out.
When the Kaiju appeared and everything functional in their lives just seemed to crash into the other, corroding like a battery, the camera became an act of relief, almost in the same capacity traveling did. He never used it to escape. Cameras captured memories - things past, he reconciled he could never do that. Downside he'd never complete his senior year in Community College, whatever he planned on doing with a photography major gone down the drain in the professional sense. Personally, what he used he put to good use for personal gain.
He kept the hobby up as much he could. He plastered his and Raleigh's sleeping quarters in the Shatterdome with pictures he'd taken in the last five years together as pilots, but hid the ones of Naomi sleeping in his jeep and attempting to drink coffee (the morning after) in his old scrapbook of retired pictures. Film for camera was becoming a literal collector's item, scarcer and scarcer in light of camera's advances from the "dark ages". It was even harder to try and keep the film preserved in cool places, let alone attempt to develop film.
Once he started living in the Shatterdome "increasingly difficult" didn't describe the lengths he went to preserve what film he had left, expired or otherwise. The one time he couldn't sleep and he decided to use the bathroom to finish up a roll of film. ended in a comical fit of silent anger at the sudden emergence of bright lights and a Kaiju alarm. A warning of the arrival of Malus and the death of his hard work. The only thing that survived was a picture of his brother with bare back turned toward him.
Photographs of him, taken by himself or others, were rare. Ever since they moved out of their old home following Dominique's death, all of the family pictures had fallen into the possession of their Uncle Charles or their absent father and sister, Jazmine. He never let Raleigh touch his cameras to take a picture of him. They usually ended up broken in Yancy's efforts to reclaim it from Raleigh or Raleigh broke them by leaving them unattended on the edge of a table. (He paid every single time he did, though.)
He went to comic book conventions on his own. The superhero genre wasn't Rals scene anymore, he preferred museums and WWII encyclopedias, so whatever pictures of characters he cosplayed showed up everywhere but his online accounts, but found their way to him anyway when their Jaeger crew felt like making fun of his hobby. They got a real kick out his Alan Wake and RE2 Leon Kennedy outfit.
The last picture he ever took was a selfie that wound up on an Instagram account he barely used since joining the Jaeger Program. A picture of himself and a bob-haired girl, a friend Raleigh never got to know outside of impressions in the Drift, eating chocolate cake on his birthday. "Hanging out with jesminderbhamra the cake thief!" the caption read.
Raleigh never found it until he considered closing whatever online accounts he remembered Yancy had.
FIN.