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In one world, you are both tired and spent and sweaty. Your hair sticks to your neck. He wraps his arms around you, scarred and heavy across your thin and wiry frame. You tangle your legs into his, the roughness of a bandage around his ankle brushes over a scab of yours. His head is firmly nestled into your neck while he mumbles little promises into your neck. His hair, unbrushed and wild, tickles your chin. A warm flush spreads across your face.
It’s nice to see him like this for a change. Really, it is.
You have seen him in almost every way he could be. For you, since day one, he has been a problem easily solved, a puzzle you already put together, an open book. Like father, like daughter, they’ll say years down the road.
You have seen him weep, gasping for air like he’s drowning, into small bruised hands after dreams that cause him to scream so loudly half the Shatterdome comes running down the hall you two share at three in the morning. You have seen him laugh and smile over a bottle of Australian beer with men who are twice his age. You have listened to him issuing threats while his pubescent voice cracked. You have seen him when he channels his anger, folding into to something sharp and lethal and terribly beautiful. You have picked up the pieces after his own anger concaves in on him. When he has blood under his fingernails and fourteen stitches under his left eye and has no one to blame but himself.
This side of him, a softer, gentler side, is something that he keeps well hidden from everyone. Well, almost everyone. There was always you and the dog.
“Aishiteru, Mako Mori.” He whispers into your neck in clumsy Japanese, unaware of the gravity of the words he just muttered. His chapped lips are rough and his accent is comically thick, but it’s not something you mind. In fact, it’s something that you almost kind of enjoy.
“I love you, Chuck Hansen.” You press a small kiss to his forehead.
You are not sure if this is love. You are both sixteen, and if it had been another time, the world would have been laid out at your feet, yours for the taking. Had this been another time, another place, you would think eighteen year-olds professing their love for one another would be silly, stupid. In another time, you would be in Japan and he would be in Australia. Your parents would be alive; his father would have never had to make the choice between his wife and his son. You would have never met each other.
You stare up at the ceiling long after you start hearing his gentle snores and wonder if that would have been better.
+
In the next world, you get your wish.
The kaiju never attack. 2013 comes and goes without an supernatural, paranormal, or extraterrestrial event.
Your parents live. So does his mother. So does Yancy Becket, Tendo’s grandfather, the Wei Tang Clan, Stacker and Luna Pentecost, Tasmin Sevier, and the Kaidonovskys. They all live. They all die at ripe old ages. They live normal lives. They are no longer heroes.
The rest of you, the ones who made it, you live too. Well, most of you do.
Yancy and Raleigh grow up in the normal way that brothers do. Yancy gets married, has a kid or two. Raleigh is the best man at the wedding and devoted uncle to his kids. He has a string of girlfriends over the years, much to the amusement of his older brother, but he never marries. He always feels like something is missing, like there was something that was supposed to click, something never did. They end up opening a construction business together, best in all of Alaska. Yancy gets prostate cancer at 76. Raleigh has a stroke at 85. They never become soldiers. They never save the world. They just slip silently out of existence.
Chuck and Herc have a great relationship now. They're both completely different people, people you wouldn't have recognized otherwise. Herc is still a military man. Chuck goes to college and becomes a doctor, of all things. He marries a nice girl from New Zealand and gives his old man a brood of grandchildren. Herc still outlives his son though. Chuck dies in a car accident at the age of 53, three years before Herc dies of a horrid case of pneumonia.
Hermann lives a long, utterly boring life tucked away in a quaint section of London. He still marries Vanessa. He still has a daughter. He still hobbles with a cane and sneers angrily at undergraduates. Yet, he stands on his balcony and wonders late at night if he had missed his chance something great. In his bones, he knows the answer and the answer is yes. That scares him.
Some of you don’t make it out of this world alive.
Tendo spends the majority of his life in jail. No Allison, no PPDC to give him an opportunity to make his life better. He thought he was hard, he thought he was bad. The law quickly reminded him that he wasn't. He was just a kid who became a man without a future.
Newton fares the worst. He still ends up in San Francisco in 2013, but he doesn’t witness any aliens, just a lot of dope dealers. He talks like an addict and a Ph.D because that’s what he was. He could tell you the chemical makeup of heroin, could tell you the history of it, and then he would turn around and tell you that he could stop whenever he wanted. He was a man without purpose because his purpose never actually existed here. He lives like the rock star he always wanted to be. He drinks hard, parties hard, and crashes and burns hard In 2025, the same year he would have stared down a kaiju and lived, he jumps off a bridge under the manic delusion he could fly.
Thousands of miles away, Hermann wakes up screaming. Some relationships transcend worlds.
As for you, you live a quiet life in Japan. You go to school, top of the class. You make friends, boys and girls with hearty laughs and quick smiles. You become an engineer, your love of machines carries over. You marry a man with gentle eyes that remind you of your father. You have a son with him. You name him Raleigh. You don’t really remember why, but you have always liked it. It’s Western and strange and something that reminds you of someone you once knew, if only in your dreams.
Your life is completely ordinary. You should be happy. But you're not. You can’t help but look in the mirror and ask everyday: is there something more than this?
+
Somewhere else, you and Chuck are the drift compatible ones.
You are the ones who head to Sydney to protect it. You are the ones who step inside Striker Eureka when you are just sixteen. Words like “child soldier’ and “didn’t have a choice” are tossed around, but you don’t care. You’ll show them all.
Nineteen hour stable neural connection and twenty kills for twenty drops prove your point.
From there, it branches off in two separate worlds. There will always be a Hansen/Hansen team. You are young and in love, so fuck the war. Mako Mori-Hansen has an awful ring to it, but you love it just the same.
But the ending for the Hansen/Hansen team is different. Either you die in Sydney Harbor when you are both eighteen or you live long enough to stare down the monsters in Hong Kong when you're twenty one and die there.
Either way, it doesn’t end well for you two. It's a damn shame. You could have been happy.
+
In another world, he comes back.
You don’t.
+
In this world, he dies.
He dies. Your parents die. His mother dies. So does Yancy Becket, Tendo’s grandfather, the Wei Tang Clan, Stacker and Luna Pentecost, Tasmin Sevier, and the Kaidonovskys. So do millions of innocent people. They’re all dead.
The press is intensely interested you what designer you’re wearing.
You spend your nights screaming into your pillow.
+
In this world, you fan out for press interviews.
Tendo and Raleigh head to North America. They become America’s darlings. Charming, good-looking, smart, everyone adores them.
No one really adores the rest of you.
Newton and Hermann’s first interview is in Germany, their home country. It ends with shrill screams and muttered curses as the two of them start to bleed from the noses. Hermann subsides in a few minutes. Newt’s goes on for nearly an hour. Blood pours down the front of his face until everything he’s wearing is stained.
It’s their last interview, orders from the newly minted Marshals Mori and Hansen.
You and Herc interview in Australia first. Of course, they ask you about Chuck, Sydney’s greatest son. Of couse, of course. The more they prod, they more irritable Herc becomes. The more irritable he becomes the more reserved you become.
The hostess, a young woman, blonde and thin, asks you if you want to get revenge, if you’re angry that everything has been taken from you. She even has pictures of you, of you and Pentecost, of you and Chuck, of Tokyo and Hong Kong to prove how much you've lost.
You say in a voice that is not your own, “Vengeance is an open wound.”
The silly woman doesn’t understand.