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Chuck Hansen’s life falls apart when he’s ten and his dad saves his life. He’s kind of a quiet kid, at that point, and he’s not sure who he’s supposed to ask what’s going on.
He wants his mother. Herc can’t get the words out when he asks where she is, although he’s not crying, so his uncle has to tell him, and then be the one to ruffle his hair when he can’t talk either. “It’ll be okay,” Scott says, and Herc’s derisive snort that he can’t seem to help from turning into half a sob tells Chuck everything he needs to know.
He has nightmares, and he doesn’t know where Herc’s room is. The first night without his mother he gets lost looking for him and ends up sleeping in a hallway because even a little boy scared shitless is a little boy.
Herc doesn’t really do hugs, anyway, was never really one for them even with his mother, and somehow the way he looks at Chuck those first few days makes him embarrassed to ask.
Counseling is almost spectacularly useless. Herc tries it once and never goes back, but he keeps making Chuck go, and Chuck is so resentful of the inequality that he stops talking to the therapist in protest.
Herc orders him to stop it when they tell him, and Chuck says, “Stop talking?”, and Herc, stressed and grief-stricken and not in the mood to deal with ten-year-olds who think they’re clever, almost bursts a vein in his temple trying to keep from yelling at him.
Scott claps him on the back and says, “They can’t help you if you don’t talk to them.”
Chuck mutters, “They’re not helping me anyway,” but he doesn’t pull away from his uncle’s hand.
Herc’s away more than he’s not.
Not that Chuck’s not right there with him. He’s barely eleven, Herc can’t just leave him places. But Herc’s busy. He’s away. Chuck, a hyperactive kid on his best days, is bored out of his skull because he does nothing all day.
Then one day one of the techs—American fucker—asks him what grade he’s in, and Herc, a few feet away, listening with one ear to someone droning about budgets, freezes. Three days later, Chuck is sitting in a class of kids with military parents, thinking, with a dull sort of surprise, He forgot about me.
He’s diagnosed with ADHD barely a month into the new school, but when they put him on meds he refuses to take them after only having been on them for a few weeks, because he doesn’t like the way they make him feel. Scott tries to get him to keep taking them, but he refuses to feel like a zombie just to calm down.
Instead he makes himself focus, makes himself sit still. And when he can’t, when it just slips away from him, because he’s eleven and not exactly a paragon of self-control, he feels like he’s failed.
Pentecost terrifies Chuck almost immediately—in fact, the man calls him Charlie for three years before someone tells him Chuck has preferred Chuck since his mother’s death because Chuck himself can’t get the correction out of his throat. There’s something about the man that makes him want to snap to attention. When he and Herc and Scott have their meetings, Pentecost nudges a little girl he knows from his classes out into the hallway to keep him company.
Her name is Mako. She doesn’t speak that much English, yet, but she’s learning. She’s better than him in writing, actually.
They’ve started wrestling on concrete by the time his father and uncle step back out into the hallway, and the sound of the door making them both scramble away from each other and then burst out giggling every time they meet each other’s eyes.
Herc and Scott can pound each other into the mat for literal hours before one of them—usually Scott—has to call it quits. They’re a damn good pair, and frankly, Chuck has never seen anything cooler in his life than watching them lock into flight suits.
He and Mako are the children of the Jaeger program, practically. That doesn’t make it any less totally, ridiculously awesome to watch the two of them moving Lucky.
Chuck smiles at his father for the first time since his mother’s death when he steps out of the cockpit in perfect sync with his brother, and Herc is about to smile back, maybe, when they pull him away for the debrief.
At thirteen Mako hits her growth spurt and spends two years a full head taller than him. He tries not to care, but it’s hard when all the techs and Pentecost and his dad and Scott keep teasing him about it.
He likes Mako, a lot, has since he was eleven and she was pinning him to the concrete floor of the hallway outside Pentecost’s office, but the part of him that needs to be perfect hates how she shows him up in everything, with ease.
(At thirteen, when Chuck dreams about the flash shadow on the wall where his mother probably used to be, he slips silently out of the room and navigates the familiar corridors past Herc’s room to Mako’s. She has trouble sleeping too, a lot of the time. They never do anything that would get them in trouble, just sneak up to the upper levels of the Jaeger bays to watch them being worked on, even this late at night.)
Fourteen-year-old Chuck Hansen, who has practically grown up in a Jaeger, has the world’s most embarrassing teenage obsession with the things. Jaegers, Jaeger pilots, and especially Gipsy Danger and her American pretty boy crew.
He has a fucking poster and everything, knows her specs by heart.
He thinks Herc’s embarrassed of that. Wouldn’t be surprised. But at fourteen he’s done trying to make excuses for Herc not having time for him.
Herc calls him a pain in the ass once, half jokingly, on one of their sort of good days, and Chuck, tired of being mocked, snarls, "Then why didn’t you fucking save her instead, then?" and even Scott’s face twists at that.
He waits a moment for Herc to tell him that he hadn’t made a mistake, even though he knows it would be a lie. But even the false denial doesn’t come.
He thinks, dully, as he storms out of the room, at least we’ve both got the story straight here.
Herc picked wrong, in Sydney.
Chuck looks in the mirror one morning and sees Angela Hansen staring back at him, freckles and a thin, square face, bony height and a blade of a nose. He’s fourteen and he almost raises a hand to touch his cheekbones before he drops it like he’s been burned.
Scott laughs at him a few days later and calls him pretty boy because he keeps touching his face. He flushes and Herc glares at his brother, but he won’t look at Chuck.
Mako is his first kiss. They promptly decide it was weird and that they’re never going to do it again. He thinks about telling her there’s a boy in one of his combat classes he thinks he sort of wants to kiss, too, but then thinks better of it.
At barely fifteen Chuck can write a computer program that will flash an annoying message to the techs’ screen every five minutes and requires a reboot to get rid of. (And boy, does he make the techs regret teaching him that.) He can do Calculus faster than he can read. He follows military commands like he was born saluting, can fix half the parts in a Jaeger with his bare fucking hands, and responds to every alert siren even though he’s just in training, watches Lucky drop even for drills every time she ever goes out. He can speak Russian and conversational Chinese even if his accent is shit and he can’t write either of them for love or money.
And he’s still not fucking good enough for Sergeant Hercules Hansen.
He gets angry when he realizes he can’t win this game.
Chuck’s a pretty teenager, slim and sharp-featured, but in the Academy his exercise routine and the testosterone newly running through his body turn him into a squarely-muscled, sleek machine of a man. His jaw fills out, his shoulders broaden, his chest turns into a barrel.
He’s handsome. And he bloody well knows it, which leads to him bloody well abusing it. He almost sleeps with one of his teachers, but thinks better of it—doesn’t want to look like he’s fucking his way to the top. Getting there any way but pure, raw talent.
Instead he’s careful always to stand too close, always wear clothing a little too tight, bend over a little too slow. Keep the guy on a string.
Herc and Scott fall apart and nobody will tell Chuck why other than that the Drift broke and Herc came barreling out of it at his brother fit to kill him, silent and deadly and it had taken four techs to haul him off Scott.
Herc won’t even let Chuck get a solid sightline on his uncle in the week that follows before Scott is summarily dismissed for misconduct of some sort, and it’s probably the most attention Herc’s paid him, ever, but he’s mad about it anyway because nobody will tell him what’s going on. And it’s—weird, and uncomfortable, that Herc won’t let him out of his sight.
He graduates from the Academy with flying fucking colours, about a month before his birthday, and when he wakes up on the morning of his sixteenth, there is a puppy in his room, which he is about to move out of to start Drift training and compatibility trials.
Herc can’t even give him the thing in person, but since he hasn’t gotten a birthday present on time for six years, he thinks cynically that this is probably a late graduation present instead.
Still, he can’t not smile at it when it waddles around after him, and maybe that was why Herc didn’t bother to do it in person, because when Chuck really smiles, not his wild grin, just his regular old smile, he looks just like his mother.
Chuck, destroys a boy on the practice mats who he kind of wanted to kiss a few years ago, breaks his handsome face with a bo staff and comes up top of his training class and top of his weaknesses. The kid, three years older than Chuck, washes out after that.
Max licks his face when he gets home, and he figures that’s about all he needs, as kisses go.
Chuck and Mako test drift-compatible the first time they spar, but that might just be because they’ve known each other so long they could fight with their eyes closed. And anyway, Pentecost still has a stick up his ass and Herc needs a copilot. So Chuck finds himself facing his dad across the mat with half a class of budding pilots watching them.
At fifteen, Chuck knows probably eight different styles of martial arts. He can bench press more than his body weight and run a six-minute mile. He can and has kicked the asses of every member of this class who isn’t Mako up and down the mats. And even her he gives a run for her money.
But Herc—Herc has him face-down on the mat in under a minute.
Chuck learns fast that the problem is this: he grew up with bo staffs and katanas and techniques and teachers and Herc grew up in barroom brawls. He doesn’t fight clean or fair or easy and once Chuck realizes that the only way to fight him is to stop thinking and just try to keep his chin over water, the fights even up a little.
Chuck has him on weight and speed and Herc tops him in height and strength and he still always wins, but the third time Chuck gets up and they fight, Herc doesn’t take him down for half an hour and they click so obviously that Pentecost schedules them for Drift testing as soon as equipment can be made for Chuck.
Their first drift Chuck has to watch every time Herc has ever been annoyed with him or ashamed of him or just how often he has downright not cared, but just as their Drift begins to shake apart under the weight of his insecurities, Herc—who is so much better at this than he is, fuck—kicks in with the memory of him graduating the Academy, the youngest Ranger to ever pass it. He gets the vague feeling Herc is trying to steady him, and he thinks, hard and vicious and a little petulant, I don’t need you to steady me.
Then he starts laughing, and he realizes that it’s not him laughing, it’s Herc. He clenches his teeth around his father’s laughter and they slip into the stream of it together.
Then he wants to laugh again, because, god, he’s never felt this powerful in his life. They could fucking kill a kaiju, he knows it. He’s never wanted anything so badly.
It kind of makes it harder for them to talk out of the Drift that they can talk so well in it, because when you know everything about another person, sometimes there’s nothing to talk about. Or—way too fucking much.
Chuck has to watch Herc, as a young soldier, make his first kill. (But unlike Chuck’s first kill is going to be, Herc’s was a human being.) He witnesses the ebb and flow of Herc’s drinking, never quite alcoholism, but often heavy. He has to watch Herc, as a young man, chatting up his mother, which, ugh. He also has to watch Herc fuck his way through half the Academy, which, actually, is a hundred times worse than watching him chat up his mother, if that’s possible. The only thing Herc reliably keeps from him, although Chuck knows he could hold more back, is whatever the fuck happened with Scott.
(Not talking about shit runs in the family.)
And Herc has to watch how Chuck, starting when he was twelve, used to scratch the insides of his arms with the side of his room key when his scores weren’t perfect, when he couldn’t focus on the teacher well enough. Even worse, he gets to see how the first guy Chuck slept with, at the tender age of three fucking weeks ago, was probably twice his age, had a beard that left abrasions on his arse, and had made Chuck say please, daddy before he would do anything to him.
Herc has to see other embarrassing shit, too, but literally nothing will ever trump that one.
They can’t look each other in the eye for weeks, but the Drift holds.
Knifehead kills Yancy Becket and Chuck waits for Raleigh to get back up and keep fucking fighting, but he doesn’t, he just fucking disappears, like a coward.
Chuck learns that his heroes are only human beings.
Gipsy Danger is left behind. Chuck leaves his foolish hero worship behind as well. He doesn’t need a hero. He can save himself.
Their first kill leaves Chuck’s blood pumping so hard that the second he steps out of the drivesuit he almost hugs Herc, whooping, but thinks better of it, pink rushing over his cheeks, and runs off to find Max instead.
He sort of doesn’t see how Herc’s arms had come up just the slightest bit at his sides, before he’d broken away from his trajectory.
They ask him in an interview once if he has a girlfriend, or, after a pause, a boyfriend, because he hasn’t exactly been real subtle about who he’s been sticking it to since he started sticking it to anyone, and he slaps his hand on his forearm, where Striker’s symbol is tattooed.
I’m married, he says. To the lady back there. He jerks his head in the direction of his Jaeger, shoulderblade still itching with the ink from the first tally he's put there.
Herc snorts at his whimsy. He’s not even seventeen.
It’s not that Chuck isn’t attracted to women. About as much as he’s attracted to men, he figures, and he has about negative three qualms about calling himself bi when anyone asks, because he reckons if they’ve got a problem with it they can kill their own damn kaiju.
But he doesn’t take women home very often. It’s not that he doesn’t want to, sometimes, but his public image works against him with women, or at least it seems to, because it always seems like what he wants from them and what they think he wants from them are two very different things.
He’s not looking to be cared for, even if he does play off being young a lot. And he’s not looking to toss a bird around even if he does act cocky as hell.
Men are a little harder to hook, but a lot easier to control.
And they don’t pussyfoot around him, not the ones he chooses to take back, anyway. Sometimes he wants to be held down and made to take it. Just wants to be taken to fucking pieces.
And besides, with his body, it’s not like it’s that much harder to hook ‘em, anyway.
Compatibility fights between Jaeger pilots aren’t really supposed to go to the mats, because you can’t exactly down and wrestle a kaiju the way you would another human being. But some days Chuck has too much energy under his skin and he needs a down and out fucking brawl, and Herc is the only person in the ‘dome who can give it to him.
Because even more now than before, nobody else can last long enough on the mats with him to make it worth his fucking while. Mako isn’t around Sydney much, and she’s a much more precise fighter than the sort of hard and fast combat that he wants. Not that she couldn’t take it, but it’s not her style to give it.
So every so often, when he’s getting restless, Herc claps him on the back of the head and says, “Get your arse into the Kwoon, boy,” and proceeds to let Chuck attack him until he’s tired out.
It’s about as close to ‘bonding’ as they ever get out of the drift.
Chuck is good with press. Herc fucking hates it, but Chuck can work reporters like he was born in front of a camera, so Herc lets him do all the talking with the media and Chuck tries to keep his mouth shut in meetings with the higher-ups, by silent agreement.
He never lets the vultures in on any of their problems, because it’s just not any of their fucking business. The only time he ever calls Herc ‘dad’ is when he’s talking with them, because Herc never really raising him isn’t something he cares to have plastered all over the face of the world.
Chuck still has nightmares. But now he bunks with his dad, so he learns to wake from them silently, even though he knows Herc wakes too, every time.
It’s not like Herc never wakes panting, either.
Every pilot has their ghosts. They all wash out in the Drift.
The second time they drop to kill they break the record for speediest kill, but they hit an artery, and Blue pours into the ocean and creates a dead zone. The program gets slammed by environmentalists after that, and while Chuck kind of sees their point, he also wonders if maybe a little bit of dead ocean is worth it, if the monster is dead. Thinks they’re being a little fucking ungrateful.
But new regulations go down.
Max sits on his legs while he’s working out, a fat, panting counterbalance to press against while he’s on the bench.
He’s almost up to two hundred pounds. He’s so fucking close he can taste it. And he’s going to get there. He’s going to be the best. He’s going to—he barely gets the weight up to the hooks before he drops it, panting, and Max crushes the breath out of his lungs waddling up his heaving chest to lick his face.
He loves his stupid dog.
Chuck looks at himself in the mirror and sees Herc, this time. They don’t have the same build by a long shot, but it’s morning and Chuck is growing stupid bright red stubble on his jaw, shades more eye-catching than the stuff growing on his head.
It’s darker on his chest and stomach, but that’s all Herc, too. Ugh.
He rips a little too hard on the techs during a drift test in Vulcan, and one of them snaps back at him that he’s just a little convenient muscle. The room goes silent except for the tech chief, who’s still calmly calling orders, ignoring the building tension, but Chuck doesn’t take a swing like they’re expecting, just laughs, says, “Nah, yeah, just a bit of convenient muscle who could do your job with his eyes closed.”
The guy’s eyes go stony, and he gets up and steps aside. And Chuck, who grew up in LOCCENT tech rooms when he wasn’t in Jaegers, proceeds to do his job without a hitch. When the sim run is over, he swings his chair around, arms crossed over his chest, and smiles pretty at the guy. “Wanna try mine, mate?” He says, something nasty in his tone. “Or don’t you have the fucking muscle?”
Only the chief’s intervention keeps them from a fistfight after that.
Third drop to kill, they’re on loan in Russia, because one of the old Mark I’s is down. He hasn’t seen the Kaidonovskys since he was a sprog, and the two of them take him out the night after like they’re not all exhausted and he genuinely doesn’t remember anything after his third drink the next morning, but he wakes up in some bird’s bed and spends five minutes with a wicked fucking headache searching frantically for a used condom anywhere in the room, hoping to god he hasn’t upped the chances of yet another Hansen in the world. It really doesn’t even need the ones it has.
In the Drift, they pick things up from each other. Nothing complicated, but Herc’s fucking awful Russian gets a little bit better and Chuck learns how to play poker.
He still wonders what happened to Scott, but Herc never gives it away. All he ever gets is from Mako, who doesn’t know the details either but tells him, “Sensei says that the Drift had been disintegrating for a while. They did not trust each other anymore.” He tries phoning up Scott, but he doesn’t answer at any of the numbers he knows, and when Herc catches him at it, the two of them get in a shouting match that almost brings down the ‘dome.
Their next Drift, their synchronicity hits 97%. They break another record with that one and they don’t stop ghosting for days.
The fourth time they drop to kill, Chuck is just getting over the flu. But he’s not letting some other pilot strap in and be Herc’s copilot, because that’s his fucking job, all right, and he’s not letting Vulcan Specter go at it alone, because it’s stupid to send one Jaeger to do the job that two could. That’s how the Beckets got fucked. They just don’t send Jaegers out alone. He can’t be the reason another crew gets killed, it’s his job to be in fighting condition and defend Australia. He feels the operative phrase is 'getting over'.
So he ignores his bone-deep exhaustion and his slightly-shaky hands and dizziness and nausea and they kick ass. Striker snaps the kaiju’s neck so neatly that barely any Blue escapes into the water and they recover the whole corpse, mostly intact.
And the moment Chuck steps out of the conn-pod, he collapses, can’t even get out of his flight suit before he’s crumpling. Herc runs to him before he even starts falling, as if he knows he’s about to, yelling for a medic, but Chuck sees Angela instead. You don’t have to push yourself so hard, baby.
He doesn’t remember it later, but Herc’s face shuts down the second he deliriously says, “Mom?”
Herc has to handle the press on that one. Or he’s supposed to, anyway, but he doesn’t, just sits by Chuck’s hospital bed until he wakes up.
But when he does, there’s nobody there but Max. He finds out later, in the Drift, that the moment he’d started moving again, Herc had left to go get some fucking sleep, job as a guardian done.
He wants to get pissed about that, too, but somehow he can’t. He’s probably too tired.
This reporter tries to pick him up, once, in a dive bar, pretending to be a normal, horny guy--Chuck can tell because he’s just got that air around him, and he won’t let Chuck come back to his place, even though he suggests it, spouting some bullshit excuse about it being too far off. Herc’d warned him about things like this, gruffly—Scott had had female reporters trying to get the inside scoop on his sex life this way all the time—and so he’s determined not to give up anything good, nothing that anyone would find interesting, no “daddy” or pushy bottoming or asking him for anything weird like he might of someone he was actually interested in. Instead, Chuck’s public persona morphs into his private one and he pins the reporter down on the bed, takes control like the warrior he’s supposed to be, and fucks the guy senseless.
If he steals technique from Herc because he’s never done this before, nobody but him and Herc have to know that, and honestly, Herc has had to see him do way weirder things in bed.
The article runs a week later and even the tone in writing is a little dazed. It’s a nightmare for PR anyway, but it makes Chuck smirk, and besides, it would have been a hundred times worse if he hadn’t put on an act. Herc tries to pretend he doesn’t think it’s hilarious, even though he never reads the article, but Chuck knows him better than that. He can practically hear the silent laughter in the back of his own head.
Not one person who actually knows Chuck thinks it’s a good idea to give him a class to teach, but he gets one anyway, every so often, because it looks good to have the Hansen prodigy putting whatever he’s got to good use.
The first time Pentecost, sounding dry and unimpressed with the request he’s making, tells Herc to let his eighteen-year-old teach, Herc sighs and assigns him a class of advanced cadets, because it would be stupid to give him a bunch of rookies, and makes it a mechanics class, not a combat or drift training one, because that sounds like a recipe for disaster.
But this, just like everything else, is a job Chuck refuses to do anything less than perfectly. Not one cadet washes out of the class, even though he doesn’t curb his personality for them, because goddammit, if he’s going to teach they are going to learn, and learn they do. They’re brutal with the reviews, but Chuck tells Herc he can fuck himself with the reviews, because every one of those idiots met the course objectives perfectly when he was through with them.
Here’s something he tells those cadets in class: your Jaeger’s not some suit you strap on your back to fight with, it’s not a car you’re driving or a plane you’re flying—it’s your body. It’s this mentality that makes him so good at what he does. Herc doesn’t have that, he didn’t grow up in the cockpit, he’s a person in a robot. Chuck is the robot. It’s what makes them so good. Striker’s known for her smooth, quick, human action—looks more like she’s got tendons and joints than balls and sockets when she’s moving. And that, that’s all Chuck bleeding into her. Herc’s a fucking great fighter, even Chuck will admit that, but at heart, he’s a soldier and Chuck is a machine.
Their seventh kill comes hot on the heels of the sixth—Chuck’s shoulderblade is still itching from the new tally mark etched into it. It’s the middle of the fucking night and there’s a Cat. III. headed for New Zealand, and when the alarm sounds Chuck reaches back to elbow at the man draped over his back, rocking into him hard, and grunts, “Get off me,” all business now, and flips the guy when he doesn’t obey fast enough, wincing as he lands straddling him and then climbs off his cock, slightly bowlegged as he bends down for his trousers and hops into them, ignoring his erection and the twinge in his lower back and the weird feeling in his legs as he sprints out the door. “Duty calls,” is all he says as his parting shot, and the guy snorts as the door slams behind him.
He thinks Herc is vaguely proud of him for that one, but really, he shouldn’t be surprised. For Chuck, this has always come first.
Mako at nineteen is even more quiet and serious than she was when they were taking classes together, but even though she beats him to the mat with the bo staff with deadly, silent precision—what the fuck has Pentecost been teaching her, and can she teach him—the moment Max trots in, looking for him, she smiles brilliantly and lets him up to go scratch his ears.
Chuck roundly abuses how cute his dog is to get his breath back and take a few experimental, copying swings at the air while she’s busy with him. “That will not work for you with Ranger Hansen,” she says when she turns back to see him at it. “He weighs less than you, the throw will overbalance.”
“Yeah, nah,” Chuck replies, trying it again, “can’t be this exact with the old man anyway. If you have to take time to aim he makes you regret it. Teach me that thing with the one-handed backswing, I want to really fuck up this one cadet who tapped me fencing the other day.”
Herc never gets easy to fight. But it helps once Chuck starts getting into that Striker mindset and thinks of him as a kaiju, which is the most embarrassing mental trick ever, but it works, he actually deals the old man a proper kill blow for the first time in his life the first time he tries it. While he’s sitting there shocked for maybe all of two seconds, though, Herc knocks his legs out from under him and comes up top again.
Getting into that whole Striker mindset too close after a drift, though, and there’s some serious fucking ghosting. Not that there isn’t always a little, but for them it’s never been so strong except when this happens. And Max seems to know something’s weird with them, because ordinarily, given the two of them in a room, he’ll beeline straight for Chuck, but now he just sits there and looks confused.
For his nineteenth birthday, a week late, Herc gets him a pair of the most fucking ridiculous boots Chuck’s ever seen, heavy leather things with buckles all the way up to the top.
He doesn’t say thank you, but from that point on it’s like he only owns one pair of shoes.
At nineteen, Chuck gets profiled by the news again, for the first time since he was sixteen—not that he’s been out of it, but they’ve never followed him around this hard since then, either. So he ignores them, mostly—responds to questions, but otherwise just lets them tail him around because it’s easier than driving them off.
He and Herc have a fight in the Kwoon where he shows off moves he didn’t know when he was sixteen, though, doesn’t let Herc deal him a kill blow until almost an hour in, beating their personal best by almost fifteen minutes.
Herc winces when he bends down to scratch Max’s head vigorously afterwards, and Chuck asks him, jaunty and with one of those wide false grins that the media loves to see from him, “Work you too hard, old man?”
His dad straightens, eyes blank, and replies, “Don’t call me that.”
The last question they ask him is, “What are you going to do when you’re not piloting a Jaeger anymore?”
And he freezes up for a moment, at the one question he hasn’t been asked—ever. Because he doesn’t know. He’s been breathing this war since he was a kid, been living this life as long as he can remember. This is how he lives. Without Jaegers, without Kaiju, without the PPDC—he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know.
Chuck Hansen is a machine. He doesn’t remember how to be a kid.
Their Jaeger is beautiful. Chuck knows every inch of her, runs maintenance checks on her after the crews have finished after every run. There’s a story run about him once, with a candid photo taken in the dim hangar after hours, where he’s looking up at her from the ground, grease all over his shirt and his face and in his hair, with a smile on his face like he’s looking at the love of his life.
He’s the PPDC darling for a long time after that.
The program is winding down sometime around his eighth kill, and when he hears it it makes him so angry he forgets to hold back in the Kwoon with Vulcan’s pilots, who are down to spar, switching out every time he deals a kill blow.
He breaks one of their noses smashing his staff into it, and after that he has to fight the other one for real, because she doesn’t take kindly to her sister’s bleeding face. He knocks her out the moment he realizes she isn’t backing down, and they don’t speak to him again outside of missions.
He spends his twentieth birthday in a dive bar outside Sydney, doing shots until he can barely walk straight—not his usual style, doesn’t like fucking his body up like this but today he is twenty and still the youngest Jaeger pilot still alive and serving and he’s still. Not. Fucking. Good enough. He doesn’t know what else he can do. He doesn’t know what else he has to be the best at before Herc stops looking disappointed at him across the table. He doesn’t know how to make the world stop trying to fuck over the only thing he’s ever been good for. He doesn’t know how to save the program, nobody does, but without it he has nothing.
He lets a big Irish bloke with the world’s greatest eyes fuck him against the wall of the alley behind the bar, which is stupid beyond all reckoning, but it doesn’t appear in the news. The guy practically has to carry him home after, drunk and exhausted, and Chuck thanks him for letting him sleep on the couch instead of just leaving him in the alley the next morning by waking him up with his cock in his mouth.
It’s probably the most gratitude he’s shown anyone in years.
Herc is angry, too. They don’t talk about it. Of course they don’t talk about it. But he doesn’t even need the Drift to tell him Herc is angry, because when they spar the takedowns are harder, they go to the mat more often, and once when he gets too mouthy, his dad catches his staff in one hand, rips it away from him, and tosses both of them away before he’s slamming Chuck into the mat, arms around his waist, and the two of them are wrestling for the top spot viciously and this is how he knows the old man is furious, because usually it’s Chuck who forces them into the down and dirty of a fight when he gets too pissed.
Chuck has to tap out when Herc gets his forearm against his windpipe and growls, “Tap,” almost chokes out Dad but thinks better of it. He hasn’t called Herc that outside of trying to hurt his feelings since he was little. He slams the mat with his palm instead, angry, and Herc lets him up wheezing.
So yeah. He’s not the only one angry that the PPDC is falling out from under him.
The next time they drift the incident replays in their heads, and Chuck can feel Herc’s burning fury, but also his flash of guilt about springing that on him without any warning, about taking it out on his kid. Herc’s always fucking guilty. Always feels bad about something or other. Recently, it’s always this: he didn’t raise Chuck right. And Chuck agrees, he does, because Herc didn’t raise him at all, but all of Herc’s upset about that seems to him to be rooted in disappointment, and he can’t fucking take any more disappointment.
He carries his anger into the Drift, all of his desperate, directionless fury, and Herc takes his guilt. And when they come out the other side Herc is always guiltier and Chuck is always angrier and the two of them always understand each other perfectly and never do anything about it.
The day of their ninth kill, Chuck is curled up in his bunk with a book about quantum theory because his dad is in a meeting and he’s already had his first workout routine for the day, and it’s good to keep his mind busy, anyway. He figures, once they close the Sydney Shatterdome, he’ll need something to do with his time. Without Jaegers. The idea terrifies him, but he solves it with planning. He’s going to go to university. Earn his degree. Or, more likely, the world will end and he won’t be there to stop it.
He’s halfway through the book and Max is curled up by his side, snoring softly with his head pressed up against his leg when the alarm sounds. He swings out of his bunk, throwing on his jacket and tugging on his boots and cap before he kneels down to kiss his dog’s squashed face and say, “See you when I get back, good boy.”
He does this every time they drop—by now, Max knows to come find him at the sound of the klaxon. It’s like a precaution, a promise that he’ll come back. He doesn’t know why he does it. He’s been ready to die since he was sixteen.
The reporter asks him after this one, “What will you do without the Jaeger program?” And he snorts and replies,
“I’ll fucking kick it, won’t I? Not like a wall’ll stop one of these uglies.” It’s the most candid response a reporter has ever gotten out of him, none of his usual swagger and charm present. He’s angry and sick of bureaucratic shit. Herc grabs him by the shoulder and smiles into the camera, not the first time they’ve gotten him to do it but one of the few times he’s done it without prompting, and answers for him.
“He’s going to uni, isn’t he. Study engineering. Maybe make a better wall, yeah?” Then there’s laughter. Chuck almost rounds on him to ask how he knows what he’d study, but the Drift is still there, in the back of his mind, with Herc’s faint calming attempts.
They both get shit for that one, knocking the wall, but for the first time in a long time, there’s a little bit of friendliness between them when Herc is grimacing at the press releases.
The next few months in the Shatterdome seem like they move too fast and too slow all at once. They finally decommission the base and it feels like a blow to the stomach.
Herc has the decency to tell him when the two of them are alone.
Everything that’s mattered to Chuck since he was ten is fucking lost. He goes at a punching bag until his knuckles are bloody and his hands are starting to go numb. Ranger Ranger Ranger he thinks in rhythm as he tears into the thing, dog tags ringing against his chest, one syllable per fist.
“What’d the bag ever do to you, Charlie?” Herc says from the doorway. Chuck doesn’t know how long he’s been there, but he suddenly feels like he’s ten and alone in a military base again, his dad coming through the door with Scott for the first time in hours.
“Don’t call me that,” he says instead of fuck off, old man, like he usually would. To make up for the slip in his hostility, his next punch lands harder, smears his blood across the canvas.
“C’mon down to dinner, Chuck. Mess’s about to shut down.”
“I’m fucking busy.”
Herc steps into the room, shrugs off his vest, kicks off his shoes, and slides into a low, balanced stance. “Take it out. Gotta put on a good face when the press gets here.”
“You’re the one with the stick up your arse about cameras,” Chuck tells him, but he doesn’t object any further, just swings at him and ducks the counter before it even starts coming.
Mutavore attacks, and Striker chases the thing into Sydney as it crashes through the costal wall. Chuck can feel both of them thinking, Told the bastards the Wall wouldn’t work, as they take their first swing.
Their anger all goes into beating the shit out of the monster, and it’s a vicious takedown, really. They put a serious hurting on Sydney and one street gets half-flooded with Blue, but the death toll isn’t serious.
(Any death toll is serious, for the two of them. Even out of the drift Chuck can feel Herc thinking about the families that have been destroyed by the loss of the few people who hadn’t evacuated fast enough. He’s thinking about it too.)
Still, he plays savagely cocky for the cameras, brags about Striker’s tenth kill like almost fifty civilians aren't dead and his world isn't ending. Herc, in the background, holds on to both of their guilt for them.
Pentecost arrives with a second chance, and Chuck says yes like a drowning man before Herc can even open his mouth.
They’re going to the Breach.
Mako looks at him across both of their father’s shoulders when he and Herc arrive in Hong Kong, quiet, but he can see in her face that she feels the same way about this that he does. She’s losing out on her revenge as much as he is losing out on his life. Pentecost’s eyes pass over him like he isn’t there—the man always does this, and he knows it’s Herc’s personal opinion that he does it to try to take Chuck down a peg by making him feel insignificant, but it really just makes him angrier.
The Kaidonovskys greet him with smiles, and he sizes them up, massive and blonde. The final guard. Cherno is a fucking monster, he knows, he’s been in her belly. The Wei brothers greet them by challenging him and the Kaidonovskys to a game of basketball, and despite the fact that he’s never played it in his life, he accepts and the three of them get utterly crushed.
He almost wants to laugh when they do. He doesn’t remember the last time losing a competition didn’t make him feel worthless.
Pentecost makes them all re-test their drifts. “I want you all at top function,” he warns the seven of them. “This is our last shot. If you need a new copilot to carry us through this mission safely, I will give you one.” Chuck and Herc both know this is all for them. They are the doubt. Even though their drift has never been anything less than good, their file says that they need to be monitored closely. Pentecost is monitoring them closely. He’s a cautious man. They can both respect that.
The Wei brothers are practically unfollowable. The three of them are a whirling storm of limbs and jumps, somehow never ganging up on each other, equally attacking and defending. It’s one of the most amazing things Chuck has ever seen, how the three of them move around each other like extensions of the same person, like he can see the Drift around them.
The Kaidonovskys don’t fight—they dance. Herc leans over to tell him quietly it’s because a few years back, Alexis broke his wife’s nose by mistake and has since refused to lay a finger on her in the ring. They both keep up their training with other people. It strikes Chuck as stupid, because god knows Herc has hurt him before and the two of them never stopped fighting—but he guesses that’s love. They’re elegant even without music, though. They move without a hitch, even when they pick up the pace, putting on a good display. Chuck only knows the kind of dancing you do in bars with dance floors, but he can appreciate how beautiful it is, the way they’re moving.
When the two of them are up Chuck thinks the both of them feel imprecise—although he knows from watching the Kaidonovskys in action that they’re no less users of brute force than him and Herc. But, as usual, they go hard and fast and brutal and neither of them gets in a kill blow before the Marshal stops them, drily, “I think we’ve seen enough, gentlemen.”
They don’t know what they looked like, but it appears to have been good enough.
The first time they do a drift test in the new Shatterdome—get them used to the area—the LOCCENT chief introduces himself as Tendo Choi and Chuck promptly starts referring to him as Elvis, but he kind of likes the guy. Then they get hooked in and become one person, familiar with their girl like they are with nothing else. “Looking good, boys,” Tendo says into the microphone, and Chuck grins, proud. “Don’t get cocky there, Baby Hansen, or I’m going to throw you a nasty sim for your first go ‘round.”
“Don’t call me that,” Chuck tells him, but he’s still grinning, because he wants a nasty sim. The display flickers on, displaying a computer-generated Hong Kong, and Tendo starts narrating. He’s funnier than their chief was in Sydney, but it is in fact a nasty sim, and Chuck is too distracted to laugh.
“Watch your side, Daddy Hansen,” Tendo tells them smoothly as they’re looking for the kaiju, which has disappeared. Even as the two of them turn in unison to catch it as it roars out of the water at them, Chuck can feel Herc thinking about the man with the beard pressing Chuck into the pillow by the back of his neck, saying come on baby and Chuck finally capitulating and whining daddy please. Even as they’re putting all their strength into wrestling it off them, he growls, “Don’t call me that,” so aggressively that Tendo whistles.
Fucking Raleigh Becket, the fucking coward, shows up at the base a week after the lot of them have been there, and Chuck is so pissed off at Pentecost for letting their hopes rest on this useless fucking deserter that even Max can’t pull him out of it.
He doesn’t, strictly speaking, need to make it so clear to Raleigh that he doesn’t like him, but he wants to. If the fucker can’t handle him, he can’t handle a kaiju. Chuck is not giving up the world after all these years because he had a dinosaur flanking him. Failure, always one of his worst fears, is no longer even an option. Not for his sake, not for the PPDC’s sake, for the world’s sake.
Herc finally comes out and tells him he’s a disappointment not long after that, asks him how the hell he’d raised such a shitty person. And Chuck bares his teeth, truly, for the first time in his life, and cuts him deep. Because he’s good at it. Because it’s all he’s good at, aside from his job, is hurting people.
Because Herc’s right. He’s not a good man. But he is a damn good Ranger. And that’s all he needs. It’s all he can do now.
He says I quite like my life and knows it doesn’t matter. He’s not coming back from Pitfall.
Becket and Mako almost fucking destroy the complex, almost destroy everything. And Chuck can’t let that slide, even though his dad and Pentecost probably will, because they’re all that’s left. He doesn’t know who to blame, but he’s talking to Raleigh when he snarls out the word “bitch”, and sees Mako flinch at the word, regrets it a little even as Raleigh’s fist is connecting with his face.
“Apologize to her,” he says, and Chuck wants to, on a certain level, but on another level he doesn’t respond well to being punched in the fucking face, and he takes another swing.
He knows how Raleigh fights, watched him in the Kwoon. Used to know all his moves because he was a stupid little kid with a stupid hero crush on him. The way Raleigh slides under his arm and flips him isn’t Raleigh Becket, that’s all Mako Mori. It’s a throw for a smaller person to use on a larger one. The two of them take him down together, as one person.
He catches hell for that, from both his dad and Pentecost, but he’s good. He’s good and they know it and they can’t get rid of him because he’s fucking aces at his job.
Mako glances at him in the mess, and then glances away, head falling. He wants to tell her he meant Raleigh, which he’s not even sure is true, but he suspects she wouldn’t take too kindly to that either.
As he’s sparring with cadets, hitting them a little too hard and fast to be fair, he wonders why he always has to ruin everything, then shakes the thought off and decides not to care anymore. They’re all going to be fucking dead soon. All he cares about is if the two of them can get their shit together and run flank with Cherno and Typhoon.
The alarm sounds.
Chuck and Herc strap into their places and they drop. A double fucking event, they’re both thinking, and they can’t even do anything about it. They’re not allowed. They can’t take damage. At a distance, they watch as the Wei brothers and the Kaidonovskys lose, and then they can’t anymore. “We’re coming, Cherno,” Chuck yells, like they can even fucking hear him, and watches them die anyway.
He doesn’t even second-guess Herc’s ridiculous plan when he comes up with it. It’s all they’ve got. It’s all they’ve got.
He doesn’t know how to be afraid, so he screams at the monster in the dark.
Gipsy saves their asses. And that should be a hard pill to swallow, but Chuck’s just glad Striker’s damage is relatively low. Because Pitfall is coming up, and Striker has to take point. They have to win this thing.
So when Becket looks over at him when Herc tells him he’s grateful like he can’t speak for himself, he grimaces through a nod. Because he is.
But he doesn’t have a copilot, anymore. What is he going to do without a copilot? He panics about it, a little, on the inside, but just plays casually angry about it when they tell him to suit up. He’s expecting them to assign a cadet, which would be fucking stupid, but it would be something. He’s not expecting Pentecost, except—he’s somehow not surprised.
The speech gives him an idea of what their commonality to drift on will be. Determination.
But he picks at it anyway, because he’s Chuck Hansen, and he can’t not. And Pentecost finally takes him down a peg properly. He can survive the words egotistical jerk with daddy issues—it’s not like he’s never heard them before. But it’s a mark of his respect that they don’t make him flinch or try to snap back.
“But you are your father’s son.”
He can’t feel proud of that, not so soon after that last cut-down. But he can feel Herc’s pulse of pride through the ghost drift, faint, but there, and it steadies him.
“So we’ll drift just fine.”
He almost chokes up saying goodbye to Max. He doesn’t say goodbye to Herc, because of course he doesn’t. But he can’t not say goodbye to his dog. Everything is final. He will not be coming back, he knows that even if he wants to pretend to deny it. They will die at the bottom of the ocean. The way he always knew he was going to, in the end.
(There’s a boy in university, a few years from now, in the engineering program, who is disappearing. Who never got a chance.)
“That’s my son you’ve got there,” Herc says, and he freezes, has to turn back and stop himself from saying something back. “That’s my son.”
The words Chuck swallows are like knives in his throat.
They would be softer out loud.
Drifting with Pentecost is about the same as drifting with a brick, for the first couple of minutes. He wasn’t kidding when he says he brings nothing into the Drift—Chuck doesn’t get shit from him except the here and now. If he disapproves of anything he sees in Chuck’s there and then, he doesn’t say it.
But he does feel a little understanding come across the Drift when they’re heading towards the bottom of the ocean. A little calm. A little quiet. Pentecost is the eye of the storm, and Chuck is grateful for that as they descend.
This is the final battle.
This is all there is left.
This is the end.
“Well, my father always said,” Chuck says, and this, this is all for Herc, waiting in the control room, this is all for his father, ”he said, if you have a shot, you take it.” He pretends Pentecost’s faint pride in his soldiers’ bravery speaks for his dad, too. He has spent his life hurtling towards this moment. He has been destined for this since he was ten. All of his training. All of his choking fear of imperfection has been for this very second, so he could do this perfectly. So he could clear a path for the lady.
His life amounts to nothing more or less than this. He trusts Raleigh and Mako to save the world—he has to. He will not be there to make sure. They need the chance. They need the path. They need this sacrifice. The world does.
At eleven, if he had had the chance, Chuck would have made this same choice. He would have made it at twelve. At thirteen. If his father were standing beside him like he should be, he would still be pushing the button. “It was an honour serving with you, sir,” he says, and means it. Death humbles everyone.
Striker makes her eleventh kill.