#i will never shut up about ac/pacrim when you get me going so i'll stop there asjksjksjs

[reiverreturns]

us 🤝 gratuitously talking about our wips instead of actually working on them

i NEED to know about this ac/pacrim nonsense 👀

it's a hard life in the trenches (doing nothing productive whatsoever)

EHEHEHE okay so my nonsense file is basically all @alethiometry's fault and is more or less a dumping ground for assassin's creed PacRim AU stuff that i write odds and sods for when i don't feel like writing anything serious. it's mostly hytham/jacob frye where hytham is an ex-ranger who designs jaeger weaponry and jacob is an active ranger alongside evie. idk i think they'd have SUCH good chemistry and i know in my heart i'm right on that one. i have zero intention of ever making a real publishable story out of the stuff in there but i have lots and lots of little bits! it's very much ignoring quality, just having fun stuff.

anyway for context i've pulled a bit where jacob gets injured before the big mission to close the breach. furious and upset that he'll be sidelined, he ends up running his mouth to the press about how the world governments and their wall building plans are all stupid as hell and hytham sneaks him out into a hong kong hotel to screw some sense into him before marshal aya can find jacob and beat his ass six ways to sunday. i'm also dropping a cut in because it's a chonky bit!

send me a title from my wip list and i'll post a snippet and some thoughts

---

“Where will you go when this is all over?” Hytham asks.

Jacob turns, attention turns sharp, but Hytham isn't looking at him. He’s leaning against the edge of the window, arm resting across the top of the frame, eyes locked on a lonely hulking mass fuzzed in the heavy, sodden mist of the bay. A Jaeger on reconnaissance and repair. Odin’s Sight, if Jacob remembers the assignments. He can’t think of anything more pointless than checking the walls now.

You pilot a Jaeger for long enough, you come to understand that Rangers come in two flavours. The first are the sort who fight for an after. Eivor and Vili, with their dream of a patch of land and animals aplenty in the far flung reaches of Norway. Connor being reunited with his family back home. The second kind of Ranger fights against. ‘After’ isn’t exactly a worry when you're trying to wrestle a Kaiju’s lower mandible from the rest of its jaw. ‘After’ doesn’t mean anything if the chances are you’ll end up going down with your Jaeger. 

Before today Jacob had always considered himself firmly in camp two. Even now, with his Jaeger miles away, he can feel the mechanical click and whirr of the gears in his wrist as he sits up on the bed, pneumatic pressure falling when he adjusts his bad leg. It’s raining and the machinery aches. Evie's running through her tests with Henry. She's worried about him. His mind is hers and hers is his; no start and no end, a complex knot of flesh and metal that cannot be divorced. Jacob's future is a blue-tinged meld of past and present. It does not - can not - exist without Evie or Rook Empire in it.

But that had been then. Hytham turns, sighing, and the realisation hits Jacob like a bullet to the chest.

Jacob might die. He might live to see the whole world fall. He might be crushed beneath a warm body like he was half an hour ago, panting into Hytham's mouth, sweat-slick and needy for more time. But he also might live. There might be an ‘after’ after all.

More silence. Jacob wishes he had Hytham’s comfort in it. Maybe the roar of blood in his ears wouldn’t feel so intrusive.

“I hadn’t thought of it,” Jacob eventually says in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own, hands absently gripping the sheets, mind scrambling and overshot to somewhere far, far away. “I could go back to London, I suppose. Would be nice to go somewhere where I could pretend the world didn’t completely go to shit. But it’s…” He looks at the condensation on the windows, mouth dry. “I don’t think there will be a place for me when I go back.” 

Stupid thing to say. London’s a big fucking city. It still is, despite the attacks and riots and civil unrest that has destabilised its boroughs over the years. Hytham tilts his head thoughtfully.

“There will be no Rangers anymore,” he says, and Jacob nods.