Work Text:
18th of July, 198118th of July, 1981
Cadiz, Third Spanish Republic
Hayley Morelli’s morning started the same way all her mornings had started for the last few months. She was woken by the morning’s first sun rays, courtesy of the open window in her apartment’s bedroom (a necessary arrangement thanks to southern Spain’s scorching summers) and lazily made herself a cup of coffee (a luxury she had dearly missed until rationing had ended with the start of the general cease fire) while she listened to the latest news and squabbles around the hundreds of issues being negotiated in Madrid.
Today, it seemed, all eyes and ears were centred on a breakthrough in negotiations. Apparently, the Bunker (what remained of Franco’s old guard) had agreed to a series of progressive demands in exchange of Catholicism being enshrined as state religion. That had in turn caused turmoil on the African territories. For the fifth time that month, Hayley noted, it had seemed as if negotiations were going to break down and the cease fire was going to have a bloody end.
And once again, things had somehow worked out. This time the Africanists had somehow managed to broker a deal, the bunker had agreed to a special status for regions with Muslim majorities and in exchange the militias who held power in those regions had agreed on their forces being absorbed into the regular army when (or if) the almost mythical “Unificación” came through.
Unification... Hayley happily admitted to anyone who asked that she had never seen that coming, especially when she was offered a post as one of the war correspondents being sent by NBC to inform on the burgeoning Second Spanish Civil War.
That had been in 1975, six long years before.
“God, I’ve been here for 6 years.” She lamented to herself while she grabbed her wallet in order to head out and buy her groceries.
Her original plan had been much simpler: go to Spain, get famous by professionally and memorably reporting on a quick and bloody conflict, and return to a good position back home. Instead, after three years of the stagnation of a conflict that refused to be won by any side, she and the rest of the team had been disbanded and she had been forced to either go back home jobless and a no-one, or try to somehow keep building up the pitiful reputation she had barely managed to create.
War journalism had paid much better, it had done so even when NBC's backing went the way of the dodo. In the past had especially paid much better than the freelancing she was stuck doing now. But at least with the peace she no longer needed to worry for her life 5 times a week.
Now... Now whenever she wasn’t doing translation work for the Spaniards, or writing dull articles for whichever media group was still interested in the iberian situation she dedicated her time to mulling over what she had seen during those 6 years, more specifically, the craziness of them.
It had taken less than a year after Franco’s death for the peninsula to implode. But to give credit where it was due to the Spanish, the rest of the world had expected for the shooting to start in less than a week after the man had kicked the bucket.
Instead, when the incumbent government Franco had left in charge tried (and failed) to bring some manner of reform, it had been the King who had set the proverbial oil refinery on fire by rejecting every candidate or option for a transition government. Things had festered and festered for months until someone (every faction blamed the rest, no one had claimed authorship) decided to introduce the indecisive monarch’s brain to a very decisive bullet.
Three weeks later, she arrived at Zaragoza.
At first, the war had been exciting. There were more factions than she could name and the frontlines and power balance had changed almost daily. The entire team had spent those first months constantly on the move. One day she could be interviewing a captured war criminal only for him to be liberated the following day and offering to continue the interviews in his opulent offices. From Bunker command posts in Leon to tank factories in the Cartagena SSR, from battleships in ports commandeered by Galician nationalists to Saharawi war camps in El Aaiún. Hayley was present when the third republic “heroically” (their words, not hers) retook Madrid, she had also been there when the Spanish State had retaken it three week later… She was also there when the third republic had taken it again … And when the State retook it again …
That should have been her first warning. Because the one thing American viewers were less interested in than a complex war? A slow war.
Eventually their entire team had just stopped going out to look for the few active frontlines in the peninsula or North-Africa, they installed themselves on Cadiz (far away enough from any frontline to sleep peacefully) and just started compiling reports which read like the most boring action thriller ever written.
By the time the team was officially disbanded halfway through the conflict, half of them had already resigned and moved onto better options. Afterwards? Only she and James Green had stayed: her to salvage her career, him because he was a hopeless romantic. Even after their relationship failed, his romanticism and “passion” (his words, not hers) forced him to stay, to “keep being part of a conflict that so perfectly encompasses human nature.”
Clearly his words, not hers.
Years later she still wondered how much of that had been real, honest idealism and how much had been a well-played role… But real or not, his poetic retellings and memoirs about the war had landed him a good publishing deal and a studio apartment in New York, so it really didn’t matter.
Because of that, the lack of interest from the world, her breakup with James and a myriad other coincidences, she had been the only English-speaking reporter in the Straits when one of humanity's greatest achievements was made.
Of course, things hadn’t started in the Straits, oh no… Things had started 3000 years before. Or at least, that was how old the scientists had pinned Nidhogg to be.
Nidhogg, a marine Kaiju the length of almost two football fields. Covered in plate armour-like scales as black and reflective as tar and with elk-like horns long enough to hold up ships with them. The serpent had had teeth as tall as a man and talons like an eagle. Details on her from before the events in February had been sparse, at most the eggheads at the KDF had been able to pinpoint that the Kaiju had been hibernating under some fjord in “Nordland,” which was somewhere in Norway. But what really mattered about Nidhogg wasn’t as much her origins, or how dangerous she had been.
What really had mattered about Nidhogg was what the beast had done, and what it meant for human history.
Nidhogg, less than a day after she was detected heading southwards through the North Sea, made landfall in Galicia and attacked Santiago De Compostela.
Thirty-five thousand people died that day, and one of the holiest places in Catholic tradition, the very home of Spain's patron Saint, was reduced to rubble.
What Hayley saw after that would stay with her the rest of her life. She had tried describing it as a process, but it really hadn’t been, for the very moment that the news of the attack spread through the peninsula, the nations, the peoples who called it home froze .
From the fighting in Lisbon to the factories in Tabarnia, it seemed as if time had been stopped, chained in place and forced to kneel by a monster greater than any Kaiju.
Officially, all the factions in the civil war would go on to claim that it was everyone else who asked them for a cease fire.
But in reality, no one did.
The fighting, the fighting simply wasn’t happening anymore.
And then, the preparations started.
The communists and the syndicalists started pulling so many strings that in less than a week every dockyard from Barcelona to Malaga was housing more than half of the USSR’s Black Sea Navy. Cuban warships and cargo ships arrived all over the Atlantic coast, loaded with weapons and munitions.
The independentists, until then brutally protective of their homelands, gladly started marching south, leaving their fortifications unmanned.
The monarchists and republicans started coordinating the use of infrastructure in order to swiftly mobilize their troops and call in aid from their respective international allies.
What remained of Franco’s Bunker and Salazar’s Estado Novo gladly cooperated with democratic movements to build forward camps and use the same vantage points.
Even the Africanists gladly abandoned their prized colonial holding and packed their bags, heading towards Tanger.
All with the same intent.
Revenge.
Ms. Morelli herself was a woman who came from a nation as divided as this one. And so this insane situation gave her pause. Even all those months after the battle of Gibraltar, she still could not understand how people who had happily spent half a decade slaughtering each other had just… Had just decided to band together?
Absolutely insane.
But it happened. God it did.
On the 23th of February, 1981, after weeks of lightly prodding into the Portuguese coast, Nidhogg entered the Strait of Gibraltar, probably intending to enter into the Alboran Sea.
And Hayley saw the Ocean burn all the way from Tarifa.
Thousands of tons of oil and petroleum set ablaze to confuse and corral the beast.
And the mountains cracked .
Hundreds of self-propelled artillery vehicles and rocket launchers fired from vantage points at either side of the strait, maybe thousands of howitzers and mortars added to the symphony of war. She had seen them being brought in for weeks in advance, from models old enough that they must have been relics from the first civil war to brand new models and from all corners of the world some she even recognized from back home.
And the sky slashed .
Fighter planes and bombers by the dozens strafed and harassed until they ran out of munitions or depleted their payloads.
And the sea rose .
Ships flying dozens of flags blocked both sides of the strait, constantly firing their shells or deploying mines to cage-in the “northern demon” (Their words, not hers, but she found herself agreeing).
Hayley Morelli watched, almost in a trance, as the massive reptilian shape was assaulted from all sides. She was there to see a lucky missile leave Nidhogg blind in one eye with an explosion of gore. She was there to see the shells break the dragon’s antlers. She stared dumbfounded as mortar rounds broke teeth and almost dislocated the colossal jaws of the beast. She flinched when ships loaded with ammonium nitrates and other volatile substances were piloted (sometimes with radio-controls, sometimes manually) towards the beast, detonating them on its sides, shattering scales and tearing muscles...
The Kaiju’s iridescent blood would go on to cover the ocean’s surface for weeks.
The fighting, the slaughtering to be honest, lasted hours. And she stayed there, with her binoculars and her notebook for the entire operation.
Operación Revancha they had called it, Operation Rematch …
The first time in human history that a human army had managed to push back, nay, kill a Kaiju with conventional means. The first time in history humans had unequivocally won against the monsters that had assailed them since 1954.
And the Spaniards and Portuguese had seen it as nothing more than the settling of a score.
After that, the different factions had really not seen a point to continuing the fight, so, Reunificación started. It was a tedious, strenuous and demanding process, one that she had never expected to work. But the Iberian people seemed adamant on their desire to finally get their shit together and conquer peace. Their last opponent. The one who had eluded them for centuries.
What remained of Nidhogg had been split between the slowly disbanding factions. The Galicians had taken the Ribs and backbone to use them on the superstructure of the new Cathedral of Santiago. The nationals had taken the plane-sized skull to turn it into a monument in Madrid. And she had lost track of how many bone splinters and scales had been taken by soldiers and sailors as trophies and brought back to their hometowns.
And that, that was why she was still there. She had been the one to see it, the one who truly brought the event’s full unravelling to the rest of the world. She had given dozens of interviews and had been offered hundreds of book deals and contracts.
But she was a journalist, and she hadn’t found her great story. Yes, the Civil War had been the bloodiest and most interesting of plots (despite what others had said, something she used to agree with), and the herculean effort made on the Straits had been the most brutal and fulfilling of climaxes.
But she was there for the resolution, and she wouldn’t have that until the flags of the Iberian Union started flying.
And most importantly, until she had her answer to what had made these people so different from each other unite with such might.
A soldier from the Asturian monarchist forces she had interviewed a few days after the battle had offered her his personal explanation.
“Nos odiamos pero odiamos más al resto del mundo y nos matamos, pero solo nosotros nos hemos ganado ese derecho. El resto del mundo, bestia u hombre no lo tiene.” He had said with a dark smile.
“We hate each other but we hate the rest of the world more, and we kill each other, but we alone have won that right. The rest of the world, beast or man, has not.”
And maybe that was the explanation. Or maybe it wasn’t and the boy just had a dark sense of humour.
But that was why she still lived in the shitty apartment in Cadiz.
To find out.