Words: 634
Disclaimer: Not even.
Notes: "PPDC" stands for the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. I told you I did a lot of research for this dumb AU.

(cont.)

February 2016
Anchorage, Alaska, USA

The PPDC gets a lot of flack for recruiting so young, but that doesn't stop Bianca and Nico from ditching their live-in babysitter (Dad calls Alecto their "Special Private Assistant" but Nico calls bullshit, she's definitely a babysitter) and using up every penny of their combined savings to travel across the country - taking a melange of trains, buses, taxis, and sometimes even hitchhiking - in order to train at the Jaeger Academy.

When the attacks happened last year, Nico and Bianca had been relatively safe and sound in Maine where their father had left them before he had to tend to constructing the Shatterdomes in Panama and Mexico, but they couldn't just Wait & See how everything would end. Maybe it had been their combined ADHD or maybe it'd been in their blood (after all, as soon as their dad got the call to help the fight against the monsters, he'd left the following morning), but it had been a no-brainer for the Di Angelo siblings. They'd join the fight, too. Thirteen- and fifteen-years-old is a little young, sure, but if the Los Angeles Shatterdome was putting the fate of the world in a seventeen-year-old's hands, then maybe the world's getting desperate.

At least, that's what Nico thinks since the head honcho of the academy doesn't even blink an eye when he accepts them into his training program.

Deputy Commissioner D (that's how he's introduced and if that's not weird enough, he always demands that recruits call him Mr. D for whatever reason) is average-sized and middle-aged, a little on the pudgy side and might have invented the word 'snarky'. He's always got some poor, overworked intern following him around with a clipboard and a six-pack of Diet Coke so that Mr. D's left hand is never without a can, while his right hand is always pointing at passerby recruits and telling them to "Drop and give me 20, rookie!" or "You wouldn't be laughing inside a kaiju's stinkin' ass mouth, would you?"

He's a little eccentric, to say the least.

Months later into their training, Nico witnesses some stupid, cocky rookie from New Jersey stand up to Mr. D, calling him out for being a "lazy, jacked-up, old fraud" and he notices that the canteen has never been more silent, and Mr. D has never looked more fearsome. He and Bianca remember that day not only because it's the day before their batch would finish their training and graduate, but also because of Mr. D's words right before Jersey boy pretty much craps his pants and leaves the academy without a word.

"Listen, kid, I don't need your sympathy or your admiration. I don't need this. In fact, I probably don't even need you in this rust-bucket. All I need to be is a fixed point. Your trainer. And all everyone else in this hell-hole of a training academy needs to be is a compliant fighter if we're gonna survive the rest of this year. And if you can't be that, then you can get the hell out of my institution, do I make myself clear?"

Nico carries that with him after his six months of training, into the gaping vastness of the Anchorage Shatterdome, and all the way into the cockpit of Stygian Reaper, the Mark 2 Jaeger he and Bianca are assigned a few years later. But when they're launched on their first mission (off the Alaskan coast, Category III), Nico feels less like a 'compliant fighter' and more like a boy of a soldier.

And two hours later, when the kaiju is ripped in pieces, its remnants smoking something ghastly on the shores of the bay, he wonders what happened to the boy that all that's left is a soldier.

Notes: I'm sooooo annoyed at myself for not being more motivated to continue this because I'm soooooo in love with all the jaeger names I came up with, not to mention the entire timeline I've built for this. Do you guys have a favorite jaeger? Mine's probably Crimson Typhoon or Gipsy Danger. #SoNerd™