Chapter Text
I grew up watching the same movies every other American kid did. The ones with the heroes saving the day, the ones where the monsters stopped coming, where at the end of of it all, humanity emerged triumphant. Independence Day was a big one in my house, once I was old enough. Top Gun was too, but that was less about monsters and more about good old-fashioned American ass-kicking.
Those movies started my quest to be a pilot. I told everyone that would listen that I’d join the Air Force or the Navy and be the next Maverick. Of course, as a ten-year old girl, most people just patted my head and said ‘oh, that’s nice, sweetie’. I didn’t let that discourage me. Piloting was my dream, it was what I wanted more than anything.
I was twelve and on vacation with my parents in sunny Honolulu, Hawaii, when Trespasser crawled from the Breach. My brother had the TV on and was flipping through the channels when we spotted it on the news.
At first, we thought it was a monster movie. Dad came in, intending on dragging us out to the beach again. Instead of telling us to put on our swimsuits, he called for Mom and the four of us sat around the TV. I think I realized before my brother that this was real.
I remember watching the fighter pilots trying to take down this monster and I remember feeling an ache in my chest. I wanted to be there, I wanted to fight with them, to take it down and be a hero. I didn’t say anything though. It didn’t feel right. Mom was in tears, clearly horrified, and Dad was stone-faced. I didn’t remember then, but I do know. Mom had family in San Francisco. Friends.
We stayed glued to the TV for six days. I mean, how could we go on and enjoy our vacation, enjoy the beautiful beaches and culture of Hawaii when the world could be coming to an end? Nobody voiced this opinion, but we were all thinking it. What if the military couldn’t stop it? They weren’t having a lot of luck so far.
Mom and Dad took turns sleeping, both of them keeping an eye on what was happening. My brother and I were forced to go to bed at what they deemed normal times, but I couldn’t sleep well. They watched the tv in the other room of our hotel suite, the volume turned down low, and after they came in to check on us, I’d creep out of bed and press my ear to the door, desperate for any information.
I heard them argue too, about what to do. We couldn’t leave, as all non-essential flights were grounded. The United States Military wanted clear airspaces. Mom was urging Dad to use his old connections to get us on a private transport ship to the mainland, and from there we could rent a car and go home. Dad wanted to stay where we were, as there was no telling if the monster would go South next. We lived on the East coast, but we had no passports so landing in Mexico wasn’t an option.
The second day, the military still hadn’t stopped it. It was marching its way inland. It destroyed so much of the Bay area and didn’t seem to be stopping. The military was throwing damn near everything they had at this beast and nothing seemed to slow it down. The third and fourth day were the same. More destruction, more explosions, more casualties. The Bay area was rubble. Part of Oakland was demolished. Sacramento was ashes, and it seemed like it wanted to go back to Oakland to finish the job.
I remember a chill settling over me when I realized they’d have to go bigger. And if I realized that, surely they had too. All day, I watched that television, waiting for it. Dad tried to get my brother and I to go outside, take a walk and get some fresh air. This wasn’t for kids, he said. My brother took him up on that offer and spent most of that time outside with Dad. Mom and I sat in the room silently watching.
At the end of the fifth day, what I knew was coming finally happened. From grainy camera footage from helicopters and witnesses miles away, there was a brilliant flash of light. I flinched. Mom gasped. My brother started crying. We all knew what it meant. There were still civilians in the area, people who couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. But it seemed like a nuclear missile was our last option. For a brief second, after the flash faded and the cameras began to move in closer, there was the hope that this was finally over.
But the monster continued to move.
Mom started crying then. I didn’t blame her then, and I don’t know. Those were our most powerful weapons, and all it seemed to do was piss it off. What did we have now? I couldn’t cry, although no one would think less for a twelve year old girl for doing so. It wasn’t about that. I wasn’t allowing myself to feel fear. It wouldn’t help anything, just give my parents more things to worry about. Sitting with a blank face while watching this apocalyptic event worried them even more than had I burst into hysterical tears though.
We watched it well into the night, my brother pulling himself away to go hide under the blankets. I watched him go, trying to avoid showing the contempt I felt. We couldn’t hide and wait for a thing like this to just go away. Hiding solved nothing. I kept watching.
At around two-thirty that morning., there was another flash of light. Another stunned moment of silence. Did this bomb work? Or were we just killing more of our own? When the monster kept moving, Mom fled to the bathroom, where I heard her throwing up. I frowned and tried to drown it out, keeping my focus on the TV.
Suddenly, there was a stab of hope in my chest. It was moving slower, clearly wounded now. It was working! The military just needed to hit it in the right spot. We could take this thing down, we could win.
I had my first cup of coffee that night, taking Dad’s when he wasn’t paying attention and drinking as much as I could. It was black and bitter but I knew it would help keep me awake. I wasn’t going to sleep until this thing was dead. It was the least I could do, when so many others were awake fighting it.
And so many others wouldn’t get to sleep again.
The coffee made me restless and I chewed my nails down until they were painful but it kept me awake. The sun rose and with it my brother, begging Dad to let him go outside again. Mom went with him this time, unable to watch anymore. Again, they tried to get me to go, but again I refused. This was almost over. It had to be. I watched as the monster had slowed, gotten even slower due to its injuries. It was still carving a deadly, fiery path through Oakland, but it was slowing. We hurt it. It was time to kill it.
Dad insisted I take a shower somewhere around eleven that morning, and reluctantly I got up and complied. I remember the vague ache from my legs, as I had been sitting on the floor for the better part of six days. I hadn’t bathed either, which was pretty gross, thinking back on it. It was a quick shower , as I didn’t want to miss anything. Today the monster was going down and I didn’t want to miss that.
Emerging from the bathroom with the towel in my hands, I arrived just in time to see the final run. The military was pulling back farther, obviously intending to use a bigger bomb. I stood, riveted, next to my father as we watched the third and final missile detonate.
Was it dead? I clutched the towel tightly, my nail beds sending shooting pain up my hands, pain I ignored. Please let it be dead.
Smoke and ash cleared away and we finally got a clear image of the monster. Laying on its side, its flanks heaving in last, agonized breaths. It was smoking, clearly burnt from the nuclear explosion. And then, suddenly, it stopped moving altogether.
My knees buckled and I hit the floor hard, crumpling in on myself and burying my face in the still-damp towel to cry. It was like a dam burst, and all the emotions I wouldn’t let myself feel came rushing out, but at the front of it all was relief. It was over. We won.
I don’t remember much of what happened the rest of the day. I sobbed into that towel, and then into my father’s shirt when he knelt down to wrap his arms around me. I remember he was crying too, the completely foreign image of the tears on his face burning into my mind. It’s still there today.
I must have cried myself to sleep, because the next thing I remember was opening my eyes and staring out the window of our hotel room. Noise had startled me awake, and I climbed out of bed and walked to the window to see what the deal was.
Fireworks lit up the sky, the amateur kind you can buy at those roadside shacks before the Fourth of July and New Years. People were celebrating.
The celebrations continued through the rest of our vacation and eventually we went home. School was starting, and along with it came the hope that life would continue on now, as normal. After a few weeks, when talking about it got boring and the school stopped pressuring its students to ask their parents to donate to the California relief effort, life did return to normal. Oh, sure, there were still reports on the news every now and then, most of which I didn’t pay attention to. It was all politics. Why were the bombs spaced so far apart? What was the hesitation? Why were we so willing to use weapons of mass destruction in heavily populated areas?
The ones that interested me were the ones about the illnesses and deaths caused not by the radioactive fallout from the bombs, but from the monster’s blood that spilled along its warpath and into the San Francisco Bay. They were calling it ‘Kaiju Blue’, a name that wasn’t creative or unique, but at least we had a name for it. And for the monster. I had to look up what kaiju meant. Monster, in Japanese.
They usually had neat names for stuff, I guess.
The world went on. Nobody really forgot about what happened, but most people didn’t think it would happen again. Halloween came, with several people dressed as the monster. It was certainly scary enough, the whole point of the holiday, after all. Thanksgiving came, with all of us sitting at the dinner table saying that we were thankful we were alive. Christmas rolled around, and I received a copy of Top Gun of my very own, along with a pair of aviator sunglasses and an old bomber jacket. I was delighted.
New Years came and went, and another first for me, as I tried a sip of Mom’s champagne at midnight. She laughed when I made a face and promised me I’d acquire a taste for it when I got older.
With January came more school, but that was fine since I liked school. I wore my bomber jacket, which was several sizes too big, and my glasses. People made fun of them, but what did they know? I’d be a pilot some day while they were busy being accountants and librarians and everything boring.
The kaiju were the furthest thing from my mind when February approached. I was already mentally planning on who’d get Valentine’s Day cards, and trying to figure out if anyone wanted to give me any. Not likely, since I wasn’t very popular, but I was okay with that. I had friends who’d give them to me.
February 5th rolled around and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about Valentines anymore. Another kaiju had emerged from the ocean and was laying waste to Manila. I hadn’t ever heard about Manila before but now I knew it was there. It took another salvo of nuclear missiles to take it down.
It was then I realized that this wasn’t an isolated event. Something was attacking us. What I didn’t know was why, or how. Did they live in the oceans? Had they been there the whole time (impossible we would have known by now) and we just woke them up? What did they want?
The oceans became scary to me. To everyone. Tourism declined on the west coast, and even took a dive on the East, at least until the third attack in June, in Cabo San Lucas. It was only the Pacific Ocean, we learned.
Military enlistment numbers shot up, and I was annoyed. I was still too young to do anything. Sure, I could donate what little allowance I had, but it wasn’t enough.
The fourth attack, in Sydney, came that September and the world was starting to get bad. There were riots I saw when Mom allowed me to watch the TV. She kept it off more often than not now, she hated seeing the news, seeing and hearing about the victims of the attacks. We learned that her family and friends hadn’t been in the direct path of destruction in San Francisco, but they were still killed in one of the nuclear strikes. It didn’t matter which one.
Dad wanted to get back in the military, jump back into the Marine Corps and do what he could to assist. Mom refused. They argued over it many times, their shouting waking me up late at night. I didn’t cry after the kaiju attacks ever again, but I did cry during their arguments. It scared me more than the kaiju did. We needed our family together.
Some of our other family members, Mom’s sister and her mother, moved out to us from Hawaii. It wasn’t safe in the Pacific anymore, and our house had space. I feel like that caused more strain on Mom and Dad, but their shouting matches stopped until the two moved into their own place up the street.
It feels odd saying it, but my life changed two days after my birthday. That was the day I saw a hope for us. A hope for our planet.
It was the day Brawler Yukon defeated Karloff in Vancouver. The kaiju crawled out of the ocean and the world watched in fear, knowing another nuclear attack was imminent. Vancouver had a huge population and my heart ached for the people I knew were about to die.
And then the jaeger stepped into Karloff’s path and stopped it. The world watched this hulking mass of metal fight the kaiju and win. It was then the world as a whole was introduced to the Jaeger program. We had heard about it, sure, with the formation of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, and the massive amount of money the UN was throwing their way. But we hadn’t seen anything about it until now.
We had a way to fight back. Suddenly, being a fighter pilot didn’t seem so cool.
Suddenly, I wanted to be a jaeger pilot. Maverick was a distant memory.
My parents, on the other hand, didn’t seem to think that my new dream of being a jaeger pilot was any better than my old dream of being a fighter pilot. I still ignored them. I had to do something. My mother’s idea of a career for me was a teacher, and she constantly pushed me in that direction. My father’s idea of a career for me was to go to college and become an officer in the military.
They fought over that as well.
High school started that fall, and with it, my determination that I was going to be a jaeger pilot, come hell or high water. The jaeger academy had started that summer, accepting anyone who could fit all the application criteria. I wasn’t about to do that at fourteen. In high school, I joined the Navy Junior Officer Reserve Training Corps. Most kids in it talked about joining the Navy or the Army or the Marines, but I insisted that once I graduated high school, I was going to the Jaeger Academy. Our instructor pulled me aside and told me that he’d help me as much as he could, but he didn’t think I had much of a chance, since I was a girl.
I pointed out that one of Brawler Yukon’s pilots was a woman and he didn’t say much after that.
My brother was in NJROTC with me as well, and for a while he echoed my statements about joining the Jaeger Academy. It was more noticeable when the Academy started calling for siblings to enroll together, as they had a better chance at being pilots. We didn’t know what it meant then, but being twins, my brother and I felt like it was a perfect opportunity.
I ate up anything that had to do with Jaegers. I had posters taped to my bedroom walls of my favorites: Lucky Seven, Romeo Blue, Eden Assassin, Shaolin Rogue, Gipsy Danger. As the years passed, more and more pictures were added to the walls, images of the pilots, of their victories. The pilots became celebrities. You could find pictures of the Gage twins, of the Becket brothers, of Kaori and Duc Jessop inside the lockers of almost everyone in the school. Everyone had their favorites.
Becoming a jaeger pilot became more and more alluring. I took care of myself, trained hard to be in the best shape I could be. I took tae kwon do and aikido, trying to prepare myself as best I could for the combat regimens the Academy would be teaching us. My parents hated it, but four nights a week I was at either class. My brother never came, even though I asked almost every day. How else would he be prepared? With the arrogance of a teenage boy, he insisted he’d be fine.
I met my first boyfriend in my martial arts lessons, a towering handsome blond. He shared with me his dreams of being a detective, I shared mine of being a jaeger pilot. We were together through all of high school, even though he went to a different school across town. We went to each other’s proms, football games, spend plenty of time at each other’s houses, in each other’s bedrooms when we could.
My parents continued to argue, and during my junior year, they divorced. Mom moved two states away, attacking both me and my brother with angry, bitter words when we refused to move. She said hurtful things, things I won’t ever forget, and I haven’t spoken to her in some time, although as the situation in the world grows more dire, I probably should reach out to her.
As high school drew to a close, I started to get more excited. I turned eighteen that April, the age where my parents had no say in the matter of me joining the Academy. Graduating was exciting, with the well wishes of family and friends, although I had to get used to the faces many made when I told them I was skipping college. I didn’t need it, wouldn’t need it if the world was eaten by the kaiju. Someone had to protect the rest of them. I felt up to the task.
Mom was conspicuously absent during the ceremony and after. I was never even sure if she received the invitation.
The day after graduation, when I was starting to fill out the Jaeger Academy application (as I had done so many times, only to find the documents missing whenever I came home from school), my brother dropped a bombshell on the family. He wasn’t the only one spending time in another’s bedroom. He’d gotten a girl pregnant.
I was furious. How could he have been so irresponsible? It’s not like contraception was hard to come by, Dad was even pushing it on me, wanting me to be safe no matter my choices. I was also devastated. He wasn’t going to join the Academy with me, deciding to do the right thing and raising his child. I couldn’t fault him there, but I was concerned about my chances at finding a co-pilot. Not all co-pilots were siblings or family members, but a lot of them were. Some were husband and wife, some were long time friends. I still had a chance at least.
I tell you all of this because I realize now, that the end of the kaiju war is coming, one way or another. I have no way of telling if humanity will come out on top, but I figure I should leave a memoir of my time as a jaeger pilot for future generations, if there are any. My story, my life, really starts when I was accepted to the 2019 Fall/Winter class at the Jaeger Academy.
I’m sure you’re wondering what happened between 2019 and now, but as a favorite character of mine would say…Spoilers!