Title: Lessons In Humanity
Author: Prentice
Rating: Teen/Mature
Fandom: Almost Human l Pacific Rim
Pairing: Eventual Dorian/John Kennex
Warning: Canon-typical Violence. Alternate Universe - Fusion.
Notes: I've taken a lot of liberties with canon on both sides but essentially the timelines have been meshed with the Breach having been closed in the mid-2020s and John joining the Jaeger Program years later after it has been decommissioned, re-purposed, and then re-commissioned. Please note that the Breach is *still closed* in this story but the Kaijus are not gone: they, clever and dastardly things that they are, left behind spawn that eventually adapted and grew quickly into fully grown Kaijus. So, yeah, there's still a need for Jaegers and Jaeger pilots but the entire program has changed *a lot* since Stacker Pentecosts day with MXs replacing one-half of the Jaeger pilot-duo and the Rangers being considered police as much as military. I probably won't get into detail about all the changes however so don't worry about getting bogged down by it. I hope you enjoy!

Summary: It was the silence that came after that bothered John the most.

It was the silence that came after that bothered John the most.

They had warned him – warned them all, really – during their training that it might happen. An interrupted neural interface didn't just go away. It left behind scars – deep fissures in the psyche that would take time to heal, even if they got another partner, who would, by virtue of their compatibility, have to compensate for those hairline cracks and crevices.

At the time, still wet behind the ears in his academy blues, John had scoffed at the notion. He'd been in the simulators, had felt the cold emotionless inhuman touch of the academy requisitioned MXs reach inside his mind and initiate a neural "handshake". He couldn't imagine, then, even for a moment that his mind would miss the touch of one.

It wasn't human – they weren't human – and John had failed those tests as frequently as he'd passed them because the last thing he wanted was a damn robot running around his mind. His instructors, a mix of retired and still-active Jaeger pilots, had shaken their heads at his attitude; some exasperated, some amused, and some downright irritated with him. He couldn't blame them – he never set out to be difficult but, goddammit, he'd grown up with his father telling him about what it felt like to be in a drift, not with some programmed sparkplug, but with a human, his mother, and how, barring John's birth, nothing could compare to it.

Who could blame John for wanting that for himself? His academy instructors, apparently. Or, at least, a good chunk of them anyway.

There were a few – mostly the retired ones, who'd been around during the glory days of the Kaiju War and had survived to see the Jaeger program be decommissioned , re-commissioned, and eventually turned into what it was today – that had understood what the problem was for John. They – those retired few – had been the ones who had suggested that John be put into a simulator, one of the older ones that were rarely used these days, with another warm body. A human, to be exact, invariably another academy student, who was having issues with completing a neural handshake with an academy-issued MX but who showed promise with all their other training.

The pickings, at that point, had been surprisingly slim. Most of the other academy trainees hadn't had the same problem slipping into a drift with a glorified computer – it was almost standard practice now, to be partnered with an MX (or, before that, a DRN before they'd been decommissioned for being crazy), and at the rate that technology was growing, John hadn't been particularly surprised to see rumblings about reforms and the possibility of being partnered with an MX as being mandatory. It was easy, most of the trainees had claimed, to slip into a drift with an MX: they were logic based, rule oriented, and calibrated to compensate for any human deficiencies.

Basically, they were walking pains-in-the-asses, at least as far as John was concerned, and gave even the best of pilots an excuse to become lazy and complacent. John was neither of those, never had been, and he didn't want some toaster oven in his head telling him that he already was. He was only human, after all.

Even so, even with the limited number of choices there were, there had been a few trainees at the academy who had fit the bill. For privacy's sake, John hadn't been allowed to view them all. Instead, he'd been given a shortlist of six possible candidates and been scheduled into one of the old simulators for a full week straight.

Three days in and John had had a headache that seemed like it would never end. Not only because a neural handshake with a human was as far and away different from that with an MX but because the last two candidates, a man and a woman respectively, had chased the rabbit: a nearly unheard of response to a neural bridge these days thanks to MXs and their lack of memories, emotion, and overall humanity. It had been a strange kind of torture for John, watching and feeling them get lost in their own minds, not only because it had been something of a shock the first time it happened but because John wasn't an idiot.

He knew if this didn't work out, if for some reason one of these people couldn't work with him, he'd had to face the possibility of being thrown out the program. Not immediately, of course; they'd likely try to pair him with a few more MXs just to see if he'd be willing and able to work with one. John would if he had to; he was honest enough with himself to admit that, but saying he was 'willing' was something of stretch, so this was important.

Important enough that on day four John had woken up early and gone straight to the shortlist of candidates in order to read up on the rest of them in the hopes that it would help; that something in their files or backgrounds would help him help them in the drift. It was a vain sort of hope, he knew; they were the ones who had to stop themselves from losing themselves in the drift. But even so, John was willing to try anything on the off chance that it might help.

It hadn't, of course.

The fourth candidate – a tall thin half-Chinese man named Lei who had at least fifteen years on John and whose test scores were high enough in everything but drift compatibility that they were considering transferring him to the technical-ops training department – hadn't chased the rabbit. Instead, he had bulldozed into the drift hard and fast enough that John had found himself trapped inside a memory that wasn't his own, reliving one of the worst days of Lei's life: the day his aunt had come to collect him from one of the underground safety bunkers to bring to his mother in the Hong Kong Shatterdome.

There John had watched helplessly as Lei's mother had drawn her son close and told him that his father and drift-partner was dead. They'd been killed in the same Kaiju attack that had sent the young boy and his classmates into the underground bunker. Shaolin Rogue, his father's Jaegar, had been almost completely destroyed; bits of it were still being salvaged but they would likely never find the bodies.

John had watched it all, a sort of rolling horror washing through him, until one of the technicians on hand had finally severed the neural handshake and John had found himself back inside his own mind, his own body, trembling with emotion. Lei had been the same, shaking and trembling, jabbering in a mix of English and Chinese until a medical unit had drawn him away, a cotton swab pressed against his nose to stem the flow of blood. It had been horrifying.

But not enough for John to want to stop, though there had been some noise between the instructors to that effect, worrying about what they considered to be outdated software in the neural interface and how it might affect John and the others in the long run. It had been, of all people, the next candidate on the list who had intervened, swearing that they were willing to take the risk, that they wanted to do this. John had agreed wholeheartedly and had added his voice to theirs, promising that he, too, was willing to continue despite this latest debacle.

He should have known then what was going to happen. Should have realized that Martin Pelham's protests had echoed his own so perfectly because they were in sync, drift-compatible. A successful handshake was inevitable.

He hadn't realized, though, and had been amazed when they'd both slipped in a rushing tumble into the drift like two overeager teenagers. Knocking and jostling each other, bumping into random memories, like the day Pelham had met his wife, the day John had joined the academy; the first time Martin had failed to complete a drift, the last time John had wrenched himself out of drift with an MX. It had been strange and thrilling and John had realized immediately how different this was to drifting with those walking-talking-computers.

This was real – this was right – and John and Martin had come out of the drift smiling because they didn't need to hear what the instructors or technicians had to say. They already knew: they were partners. They were Jaeger pilots.

That's why, years later, after they'd graduated from the academy, left for the Los Angeles Shatterdome and become so deeply entrenched in each other's lives and minds it was impossible to think of life any other way, it had been devastating to lose his partner. John hadn't known, hadn't realized, back then what it would do to him. He'd been like any other Ranger: ready and raring to go.

He and Martin had faced Kaiju before. Had been in enough battles and scored enough kills to gain respect of their fellow Rangers. Had even broken the mold and done some good old fashioned police work by tracking down and arresting a few of the black market traders who had come to harvest what they could from down Kaijus.

It was only when a Category 4 Kaiju, a spawn of the original Leatherback, had surfaced off the coast of California to wreak havoc and destruction that everything changed. They hadn't been prepared – despite the improvements made to the warning systems, something had gone wrong and there hadn't been enough time to get more than John and Martin deployed before the Kaiju made landfall. They should have waited, should have concentrated on stalling the damn thing instead of engaging it, but that wasn't John – or Martin.

They had attacked, trading blows and striking at the Kaiju with everything they had, determined to keep the ugly fucker as far away from the people they cared about as they could. It should have ended well; they should have been victorious.

They weren't.

John couldn't remember all of it – he was told later, by his laundry list of put-upon doctors and psychologists, that memory loss was common with these types of traumatic events – but what he did remember was horrifying. Blows traded with the Kaiju, solid hits that pushed them deeper and deeper into the engagement zone, the bright nearly-blinding flash of their Jaeger's plasmacaster, and then…

Pain. Disorientation. The shriek of metal and the pop-sizzle of their Conn-Pods electronics going haywire. The smell of smoke, acrid and choking. Martin's voice echoing inside his head and his ears. Pain – pain – so much pain – and then…silence. Deafening, damning, silence.

John would never forget it. The way it felt. The void it left.

Waking up two years in the future with a Martin-shaped hole inside his head, inside his heart, with one leg missing and a silence so loud it felt like it's caving in his chest. Carving out his soul. Shattering him in a thousand different ways he didn't know existed, with no Anna by his bedside, no Martin in his head, and only the broken remains of his body, his mind, and their Jaeger to keep him company.

No, he would never ever forget it. That terrible all consuming silence. It followed him everywhere now.

Everywhere.