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There’s only so much shit a man can take before he needs to take a break and Raleigh Becket needs a fucking break. Tendo is leaning against the wall of the hallway that leads to the conference room, the lanky man looking like he’s falling asleep where he stands. Behind him, Raleigh can hear Mako yawning and Raleigh frowns and looks down at his watch. Twenty two hundred.
“Seriously man, you don’t have to wait for me every time,” Raleigh says. Tendo gives a half shrug and a small smile.
“No problem here, Becket boy, I was just waiting for the lady,” Tendo says and wiggles his eyebrows at Mako who laughs at him even as she takes the leather folder from him. Raleigh leaves them to it. Mako is Marshall of the last Shatterdome in all but name, and with Tendo’s help and a few others in the LOCCENT hierarchy, she deals with everything from public relations to personnel to security to securing supplies.
The official Marshall, in name only, is still Herc Hansen. The battlefield promotion from Pentecost still stands. Herc is better off being the sword rather than the pen, something he agreed with when he suggested Mako for the job. Herc spends most of his time with the cadets and, strangely enough, with the k-sciences. He’s developed a knack for keeping cantankerous scientists on task.
Today, for Raleigh, was ‘charm the press with your smile or I’ll tell the tabloids you wet the bed until you were thirteen’ day. He’s ninety percent sure that Mako would never tell something like that to anyone, but then again he’s seen her have to deal with people on ‘yes please, complain to me about your co-workers, I have nothing better to do’ day.
Today for Herc, Raleigh knows, was ‘keep Gieszler on track while Gottlieb skypes research’ day. From all accounts the two scientists are worse to deal with now that Gottlieb has gone home to his wife and their new baby.
Predictably, Raleigh has just exchanged his dress blues for track pants and a tank top and pulled two beers out of the fridge in his room when Herc knocks once and then lets himself in. The other man looks like he’s on the ropes so Raleigh doesn’t hesitate to pop the cap off a bottle and hand it over.
They sit in silence for awhile on the couch Raleigh had blackmailed Tendo into helping him obtain.
“Kids fighting again?” Raleigh asks. Herc sighs and tips his head back, fingers restlessly picking at the bottle label. They’ve been doing this so much lately that it’s practically choreographed.
“They just can’t help it, they’re so, so petty,” he says. “Those bludgers at the associate press run you through the ringer?”
Raleigh rubs at his forehead with the back of his hand and shrugs before taking a mouthful of beer. “You know how it is.” The questions are always the same. How are the UN and the rebellion PPDC employees merging. How is the Shatterdome justifying all of the aid expenditures, will he and Mako ever put the relationship rumours to bed? Fucking piranhas.
“They’re sending me on some sort of victory, aid relief tour,” Herc says. “They think it would be for the best if they send a known face out and, lets be honest, all I do lately is yell at the doctors and the cadets, I think it will be good for me.”
Raleigh isn’t surprised, an internally he agrees with the decision. Herc has been stagnating here in Hong Kong.
“Well, I’ll save the beer for you,” he offers and the grins. “Are you taking Max with you?”
“I’ll take the bugger with me, he’s great for press reactions,” Herc says. He gets three swigs of beer before he finally makes a face at the bottle in his hands.
“Yeah,” Raleigh agrees to the voiceless complaint. “I can’t wait until the brewing companies start up again, something better than this horsepiss.”
“Mate, even your American brewing companies produce horsepiss.” Herc replies. “Maybe you were too young to know better, but American beer is shit.” Raleigh laughs because they always have a variation of this conversation and when Herc heads back to his own room for the night Raleigh puts it completely out of his mind.
***
Herc goes travelling, as part of PPDC relations he’s touring all of the surviving Shatterdome sites, bringing aid relief, much needed supplies and a camera crew to show off to the rest of the world, safe and secure inland just what the former PPDC employees did when they didn’t join the wall or journey to Hong Kong.
In Sydney, as it turns out, the former command structure no longer exist. Instead the former PPDC employees have turned the Shatterdome into a refugee centre. Rather than continue on with his tour as scheduled, Herc ends up staying and getting his hands dirty. It doesn’t hurt that the Sydney Survivor Centre is headed up by his brother Scott. Drummed out of the PPDC in the Lucky Seven days when he went out of alignment and just could never get back in. Neural pathways were irreparably damaged from being ripped out of the drift.
It’s safe to say that, with the exception of the stupid questions that he gets asks, and the updates he gets from Mako, Tendo and the occasional news piece, Herc Hansen is the farthest thing from Raleigh’s mind.
It’s with mild confusion and then amusement that Raleigh regards the shipping box sitting on the desk of the office Mako insists he use at least for ‘go bother Raleigh with these media requests, I don’t have time for this’ day. The box has his name in loopy scrawl, black sharpie, and is postmarked from Herc, from Australia.
Raleigh opens up the box up in trepidation, there are plenty of things that Herc could send from Australia and some of them could probably kill him, the man has a sick sense of humour according to the grape vine.
The box has another box inside, a six pack of beer declaring itself to be Redoak Bitter and an index card in Herc’s handwriting.
Put them in the fridge until I get back.
/end