herc + chuck hansen
pg-13 for language? | complete
Chuck Hansen’s fist connected with the wall inches from the intake agent’s head. With the moisture from the leaks in Striker still in his hair and his drive suit still smoking, he cut an intimidating figure with wild and darting eyes. The one word that calmed him, though? Made him pause?
Your dad. He shook his head and cursed. His father should be living his Kaiju-free life, not mucking it up here with him in what he could only assume was the afterlife. He was in some kind of waiting room, so he automatically assumed it was Hell. As the intake agent skittered out of the door, he bellowed after him.
“Herc Hansen’s here in Atlantis?” he said jeeringly. “Fuckin’ prove it, mate!”
It took some time to track Herc down -- he didn’t work near the base, nor anywhere near downtown, but when word came that he was needed there, he dropped what he was doing to lend a hand. He didn’t think this was normal, for them, to ask for help talking a new arrival down. But maybe it was. He’d gone along with it without complaint because what choice did he have? He couldn’t imagine everyone else doing the same.
Truthfully, it was a bit of a relief to find out that they didn’t just drug everyone until they calmed down.
The sight of his son nearly took his breath away, but Herc kept on moving forward. He couldn’t let his son down now, not after everything. Chuck needed him. “You done trying to make mincemeat of your hand, Chuck?”
When the agent had left him, Chuck found himself reduced to a quivering mass of flesh that simply had to wait their turn. And he did -- in spectacularly petulant fashion. Back to the door, hand against the wall, he breathed quickly. But when he heard his father’s voice he stopped altogether. Turning, he could not help the roundness or the tears forming in the corners of his eyes.
He looked down at his hand briefly, as if he’d just regarded his bruised and bleeding knuckles. (Truth was, he had.)
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m alright.” Herc’s voice came out gruff, thick with emotion he’d held back most of Chuck’s life. He might have held back again if he hadn’t spent all the months since Chuck’s death reliving all of his mistakes. He wasn’t the man he’d been during Chuck’s teenage years and young adulthood. He was wiser, he hoped. He was definitely older.
Then he shook his head and answered truthfully, “bit tore up, seein’ you again. Been a long time.”
Carrying a nuke in a giant robot toward a rift between worlds was old hat for Chuck -- but the idea that his dad would cry, or that he would be cut loose from their time. Time. He frowned.
“How long’s it been?”
Herc really didn’t want to have to say. He didn’t want to have to confirm what Chuck already knew, what Chuck knew the moment he agreed to the mission. That outcome had always been out there, hanging over them, but they’d always evaded it.
He pressed his lips together, debating the answer. “Nearly eight months. Give or take.” That was when he crossed the remaining space between them and wrapped Chuck up in a tight hug before his son could object. “Long enough.”
His father’s arms -- his warmth -- invaded even the cold metal of his drive suit. And it felt right to grasp him tightly, to bury his face in the hollow of his neck, to give himself that moment of grief. There’d been too much loss. It was almost unbearable to consider. And Chuck wasn’t up to being brave. After several long moments, he gave Herc several gruff pats to the back and stepped back.
“ … but we sealed the rift. You survived. And now you’re here.”
The hug wouldn’t have quite been enough before, not with the drive-suit in between them, but Chuck didn’t push him away, so Herc counted that as a win. For just a second, Chuck felt like his little boy again, hiding his face against his dad. It was enough now.
Herc cleared his throat. “Sealed the rift,” he confirmed with a slight nod of his head. A lot more had happened in between that and his arrival in Atlantis: he’d conducted interview after interview about those last few days, he - along with Mako and Tendo in particular - sorted out what the future would look like for the PPDC, he’d bought a ranch with his retirement money. “Max is here, too,” Herc added, because he knew Chuck would want to know. “Back at my house. He hates this bloody cold.”
“Good --” And then Chuck had a hard time forming words. Even his gruff, staccato ones. His face loosened at the mention of the bulldog. Max -- well, it wasn’t as if he needed to ruminate on how much that dog meant to him. To both of them. He’d been the connective tissue linking father to son for so long.
“ … can we get me out of this suit?”
A low chuckle slipped past Herc’s lips, and he nodded. “Sure thing.” He stepped around behind his son to start the process. “Good thing you’ve got an expert at this here to lend a hand.” Though someone there would probably be able to figure it out without him, he thought. Someone in Atlantis would probably want to get their paws on the drive suit to inspect the technology within.
“Didn’t realise you’d come in this,” he continued, because filling the room with the sound of his voice was better than letting it fill with silence like he might have before, “or I would’ve brought some clothes. But I’m sure they’ve got something you can borrow until we can sort you out.” His hands stilled on Chuck’s back. “It’s winter, now. Few weeks before Christmas.”
For a boy that lived his life on PPDC bases, the idea of winter didn’t mean much to him. And he almost said that. But it was his father’s hands on his back -- warm, quiet, full of promise -- that shut him up. Chuck knew as soon as he and Stacker meant to take the shot (as soon as he said goodbye to his father), that these imagined moments were some of the ones he’d desperately miss. It wasn’t like they ever had a chance. Not at home, anyway.
“Those lanky fucks won’t have anything to fit me.” It was easier, of course. To speak but let the emotion go unsaid. It was easier to be a little sacrilegious.
Somehow Herc doubted that was, but he didn’t say so. There was no point in contradicting him, not when he just got his son back. “All right, then you can stay here while I go buy you something,” he suggested instead. “I think I still knew your size.” He patted Chuck’s shoulder. “It doesn’t look like it’s changed. Of course, that means you’ve got to stay here longer…” He let his voice trail off as he continued to work on the drive suit. He had a feeling he knew which choice his son would make (borrowed clothes from the lanky fucks he didn’t believe would fit), because it meant he’d get to leave and see Max sooner.
“Did they explain where we are?”
“Uh …” Chuck didn’t want to say something that felt as weird as yeah dad. We’re in At-fucking-lantis. Because even though his father was beyond him, even though it was strange to be seeing things like sunlight, he wanted to hear Herc’s take.
So he shrugged. “You tell me.”
“When I got here,” Herc started, the hint of a frown on his face as he struggled with the connections on the drive suit briefly. He was used to having someone take care of it for him, not having to do it himself. “They said we were here to save creativity.” His voice was quiet, because he remembered hearing that it was a fight no one had faced before, and that they didn’t know who all of the agents working against them were. They could be anyone. They probably were.
“So they gathered all these people from all across time and space, brought ‘em here to fight back and save their own futures.” He paused and shook his head. “No bloody clue how we’re meant to do that, but I’m retired, as far as I’m concerned.”
Chuck, who didn’t have a future beyond watching Stacker fully deploy the nuke that would end his life, listened to his father quietly. The account of purpose here in Atlantis seemed significant; if Raleigh were successful in closing the breach, he hoped it would never open again. But he also figured that once those weaknesses were identified, evil people would try.
“Retired? You just got conscripted into a new army, old man. Doesn’t sound like retirement to me.” When the chest plate and the arms fell free from his drivesuit, he was able to step out of the rest and instead of kicking the armor (like he almost wanted to), he laid it gently on the table he’d earlier flipped.
Back in their world, before the war ended, Herc would’ve bristled at Chuck’s nickname for him. Now, the words brought warmth instead, spreading out from his chest. It made him smile, now.
“Don’t know what they want with a jaeger pilot who was nearly too old to keep doing that in the first place,” he commented, backing up to give Chuck some space. “Don’t much know what I’d do for them. There are people with better martial arts skills. I’m no engineer, either.”
Chuck scoffed. He believed in his father’s excellence -- and hell, his father’s desire to make things better and leave them more together than he found him. (For his own part, he’d resisted until it was too late.) “Selling yourself short.” A shrug.
“You’re a leader, a teacher, a strategist and you’re damn brave.” That string of words left the corners of his eyes stinging. “You’re a fluid martial artist, a damn fine drift partner and you’re consistent.”
In all the years they’d been drift partners -- even in the years before that -- Herc had never heard Chuck say anything like that about him. Sure, they’d both been complimentary in front of the cameras, playing up the connection that they both knew the public liked. But that had never been real like what Chuck had just said was.
Speechless and struggling to hold back his own tears, Herc cleared his throat and brushed at his cheeks with the back of a hand. “I didn’t…” Know you thought that, but that wasn’t quite true. Sometimes, he brushed up against something in the drift, in between all of the grief and the heartache and the anger, that felt like admiration and pride and love. “Wasn’t fishin’ for an ego boost,” he said finally. “Thank you. Means a lot, coming from you.”
Chuck grunted his reply, throwing a hand toward his father before he let it slide over his back to stretch. It felt like the best stretch he’d ever … God, would everything be like this? Best and glorious and last?
“Let’s get out of here. I don’t like this in between shit.”