Archive of Our Own

Three weeks after the clock stopped, the headaches started.

It was nothing at first, just a dull ache at the end of the day that Herc put down quite rationally to lack of quality sleep; after all, the breach was sealed and the world was saved but that didn’t mean there wasn’t still work to do. The shatterdome was still full of people, all technically under his command with Stacker Pentecost dead and gone by that particular point, and they were looking for direction - looking to him for direction. He looked himself in the eye in the mirror up above the sink in his quarters one morning, while Max butted his calf as if he hadn’t just been fed fifteen minutes before, and he told himself he could do it. They were already calling him Marshal Hansen and he thought maybe it would help take his mind off everything he’d lost. It was better than heading back to Oz and hoping he didn’t end up with a pistol in his mouth one sunny Melbourne morning, and so he brushed his teeth and he dressed and he went to work, and he didn’t just go back to bed like he really wanted to. His sense of duty wouldn’t have let him even if he hadn’t believed he might have leadership in him.

His broken arm improved day by day but his headaches didn’t. A couple of weeks later he was swallowing so much damn grunt candy on an absolutely daily basis that he was pleasantly surprised he hadn’t fallen down dead just yet and the day when what was left of the PPDC pulled their last half-wrecked jaeger into the hangar out there in the Hong Kong shatterdome - that made six of them in the end, and the sight was moderately impressive if also verging on sad from the state of them - Mako and Raleigh were both eyeing him nowhere near subtly as he popped yet another pill. Just like Pentecost, the look on Raleigh’s face was damn near screaming at him, and though it wasn’t like Herc had come out of his jaeger the last time with radiation sickness and not just a broken arm, he had to wonder if the marshal’s job wasn’t the bloody kiss of death. After all, the pain in his head was nigh on constant, throbbing behind his forehead, putting him on edge. Pentecost had made it all look a hell of a lot easier and he’d had real illness to deal with, not to mention the bloody kaiju on top of it. Herc was really bloody pleased he didn’t have the kaiju, at least.

He was barely sleeping a week after that and the ibuprofen just wasn’t cutting it anymore; he went back to his quarters, his steps clanging heavily on the shatterdome’s worn metal gangways, a mechanic and two techs spilling out of the way before him on the way, and he popped a codeine he still had hanging about from some low-level knee injury he’d got over months ago. It helped. He slept, at least for that night if not too many after. But another couple of weeks and the codeine couldn’t shift the damn pain, either - he hadn’t been completely injury-free in years but this was getting to be bloody ridiculous.

Of course, he knew it wasn’t exactly helping anyone for him to be running around like a bear with a sore arse, scowling when he meant to smile, snapping when what he’d meant was a totally sincere pat on the back for a job well done, but work was getting finished on schedule or even early nonetheless so he guessed at least his bark and his sour expression were good for something. Now the breach was closed it was hard to scrape in any funding for the jaeger project at all except someone had to help rebuild the world out of all the damn Pacific ruins and frankly, day by day, Herc had a growing feeling functional jaegers were going to come in handy once the kaiju-inspired global camaraderie eventually wore off. The UN seemed to agree because somehow, after a couple of weeks of frustrating video conferences, they’d come up with the cash to put six whole jaegers back together under his command. Cynically, Herc wondered how long the PPDC would be peacekeepers and not something hugely less friendly. He heard Raleigh and Mako wondering the same damn thing in a corridor after lunch one day in June and while he knew if he’d heard it then anyone could have and he ought to stamp that crap down if just for the sake of general morale, he didn’t have the heart. It was what they were all thinking and they were probably all right.

July came round, time wearing on before he’d realised it in his haze of days that blurred together, and he sat himself down at a table in the mess hall, alone and the way he’d been acting all gruff and short-tempered and ready to blow his top he couldn’t blame anyone for keeping their distance. He guessed most of the fellas thought he’d got a couple of roos loose up in the top paddock or maybe he was just pissed off about Chuck and he was, he was, but it was in a sort of abstract way where he knew he was gone but it was like he was there, somewhere, right around the next corner, in the gym, off walking Max, pissing off mechanics in a hangar, somewhere. It was like he’d left with Pentecost that day with a bomb the size of a tank strapped to the jaeger Herc should’ve been in too, like he’d just avoided him once he’d got back because that was just like Chuck, the spoiled arse he was, just the way Herc had made him. But he wasn’t there. He knew he wasn’t there.

Except then he was.

---

The percocet he’d persuaded the doc still lingering on in the med bay to give him wasn’t working by four months after the breach was closed and he knew he was already taking too much of it. He needed a scan or something, the doc said. They’d have to get him out to Hong Kong on a transport and into a hospital to find out exactly what was fucking him up. Hell, though, he did not have the time for that.

As Raleigh and Mako went out all suited and booted into the conn pod of their first fully-functional refurbished jaeger, Herc was about ready to hit something or burst into frustrated tears from the wearing bloody pain, starting to wonder if maybe a trip out of the shatterdome to get his head looked at wasn’t a bad idea after all. And then, as Tendo monitored the neural handshake and their Frankenstein’s monster of a jaeger came up online with its new pilots inside for the very first time, suddenly the headache was gone. Every last trace of it just evaporated away in an instant and for the first time in months, in months, he was so blissfully, comprehensively pain-free that he could’ve cried with it. But there in the corner of his vision was someone he knew couldn’t be there, because he wasn’t there, because he was dead in tiny little fish food pieces at the bottom of the fucking Pacific. Chuck was there in the drivesuit he’d left in, leaning against a wall, his arms crossed over his chest. Chuck was right there in mission control and he was watching him like the whole thing was bloody hilarious.

“Took you long enough to notice me, old man,” Chuck said, and no one but Herc so much as blinked in his direction because he wasn’t there. And so he did the only thing he could reasonably do: he turned, he left the room and he walked away.

Tendo called after him but he didn’t look back, just yelled something vague about them carrying on without him and that was that because hell, it wasn’t like the team didn’t know what they were doing without him. He strode away and he didn’t look back, broke into a jog, fucking ran full-tilt down the corridor away from mission control till his heart was pounding in his chest like that would stop him feeling like everything in the world had just tilted a couple of degrees off its axis and he was the only one who’d noticed. He didn’t stop till he was back in his quarters and he slammed the door hard behind him, took two, three deep breaths and stepped up to the sink.

“I must be losing my damn mind,” he said, and he splashed cold water on his face because it seemed like the thing to do.

“I think that happened a while back,” Chuck replied, right there with him somehow, and bloody hell it sounded just like him.

Herc glanced up and eyed Chuck in the mirror as he leaned heavily against the sink and Chuck just stretched out on his bunk in his jeans and his jacket and his boots, drivesuit gone now like it didn’t take several techies and at least ten minutes to get the whole thing on right or off again but that was the least little issue about it. He’d never told him to get his damn boots off the bed in his life - parenting failure #50 out of about six thousand if he cared to list them all - and he supposed it didn’t make sense to tell him now he was dead so he just turned and frowned as his stomach lurched sickly. The really big issue was he wasn’t there.

“You’re a bloody hallucination,” he said, as Chuck was tucking his arms up under his head. His t-shirt rode up and Herc sighed, rubbing his damp face dry on a rough old hand towel that was probably Chuck’s but they’d stopped differentiating that sort of domestic crap years ago. Military life did that to you, maybe especially when you shared a surname.

“Of course I am,” Chuck said, crossing his legs at the ankles as he apparently made his insubstantial self comfortable. “I’m dead, aren’t I?”

“Far as I know you are, yeah.”

“But it worked, right? Breach is closed?”

“Yeah,” Herc said, and he tossed the towel into the sink as he took a long, deep breath then crossed the room. “You only died saving the whole bloody world, didn’t you.”

Chuck shifted his legs, just pulled up his knees to make space where his boots had just been and Herc sat down, pushing back till the whole line of his spine was up against the wall and Chuck joined him then, pushing up, pulling his knees in, resting his forearms on them with his hands dangling in air.

“You proud of me, old man?” Chuck asked, as if the question made sense, almost as if it were something Chuck would ask except he’d never have asked four months earlier when he was still alive.

Herc rested his head back against the wall and he closed his eyes. He was hearing things and he was seeing things and somehow his months-long headache had vanished without a trace and suddenly it didn’t seem so hard to say, “Course I am. You’re up yourself and I should’ve knocked that out of you years ago but you’re still my kid.” He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands then looked sideways at Chuck, vision slightly blurred from it. “I’d be proud of you if you’d stuffed it up and got half of China eaten by a whole damn flock of kaiju.”

Chuck half-smiled. “Sentimental arse.”

“Been called worse.”

“Uncle Scott always called you worse.”

Herc raised his brows. “You called me worse.”

Chuck made a sort of amused sound in the back of his throat as his mouth twitched into a wider smile, the sort Herc hadn’t seen on him in years. “Yeah, I’ve got a history of being a bit of a bastard.”

“But on the bright side, sounds like death’s cheered you up.”

Chuck reached over and slapped him across the arm; Herc retaliated but, of course, of bloody course, his hand went straight through him just like the air. He wasn’t there so of course it did and Chuck smirked at him like a total arse as Herc wondered how the bloody hell he’d managed to forget the fact he was losing his fucking mind.

“You’re just a hallucination,” Herc said, and Chuck’s smirk died down as he reached over to squeeze Herc’s shoulder. He could feel it when he did it, as much as he was sure it wasn’t real and he was just sitting there talking to himself like he was a few cards short of a full deck.

“Yeah, I probably am,” Chuck agreed, though Herc could feel the warmth of his hand through his t-shirt-clad shoulder. “You saying you want me to shoot off and leave you alone?”

And yeah, so he was losing his mind or he’d already lost it, a few cans short of a six-pack, mad as a fucking hatter, but that wasn’t what worried him. The problem was he didn’t care all that much if he was going round the twist because he’d lost everything or he’d thought he had and now Chuck was back there with him, in mind if not in body.

“Don’t go,” he said. He hated how it sounded, how bloody awkward the sentiment made him feel, but he meant it.

Chuck nodded stiffly in return. “I won’t,” he said.

And he didn’t.

---

Chuck was there in the morning, barefoot in the middle of the room doing tai chi when the alarm went off and Herc woke.

He watched him for a couple of minutes, aware of the sound of his breath and the rustle of his clothes and the quiet pat of his feet on the floor as he moved like he was actually there and not a figment of Herc’s imagination, as he willed away a completely incongruous morning erection. Of course, it stubbornly hung on until all Herc could really do was turn away toward the wall, as quietly as he could, to take care of things before it turned into a problem.

There was an unspoken rule between the two of them, and there’d always needed to be since they’d started working together because sharing quarters everywhere they went really did make it necessary, that they’d each just pretend not to notice or pretend not to know when the other one was desperate enough to beat off in bed. Sometimes it was just unavoidable because hell, it wasn’t like they stopped being blokes just because they were in the Pan Pacific Defense Corps and biology and all that kind of crap meant the odd spontaneous stiffy just happened every now and then. Besides, neither of them had had a significant other in years and stoic, silent celibacy had never seemed like either of them’s personal style.

So, he went ahead and he shoved one hand down under the waist of his sweatpants as he lay there facing the concrete wall. His fingers went around his cock and he squeezed for a second like that was going to help wish away his erection but unsurprisingly he just felt a detached sort of throb of pleasure as he got harder still and so he started to stroke, his hand tight around himself, the head of his cock rubbing torturously against the fabric of his sweats. He shifted around to push them down over his hips and took himself back in hand, trying not to listen to Chuck still flowing all around the room like some kind of bloody zen master, trying to summon up a pretty girl in his head, his first girlfriend, his dead wife at least before she’d died, Brian the Air Force lieutenant he’d screwed around with years ago, fuck, he’d’ve even settled for the memory of the one bloke he still really wished he hadn’t fallen into bed with all those years ago rather than having Chuck doing tai chi in his head while he got himself off. Of course, his head had hurt so damn much that he hadn’t been able to touch himself like that for weeks, at least not with much success.

Then whatever noise there’d been behind him stopped. He paused and he listened; he couldn’t even hear his breath.

“Chuck?” he said, not moving, not turning.

“I know what you’re doing over there, y’know,” Chuck said, amused.

“Well of course you bloody know!” Herc replied, though after that he couldn’t’ve done any more if he’d wanted to. He flopped onto his back and shifted his hips to pull his sweats back up then rubbed at his eyes before he finally glanced over at him. “I thought the rule was we don’t talk about it.”

“That seemed to matter more when I wasn’t dead,” Chuck said, standing there in tree pose with his hands pressed together in front of his chest like yoga had ever been his thing while he’d been living. “Go on and finish, it’s nothing I’ve not seen before.”

“I’m not doing it with you watching me,” Herc said, like somehow this wasn’t the oddest damn conversation he’d had in awhile.

“So I’ll turn around.” Chuck did just that; he turned and went back into his yoga pose on the other leg, facing the other way. “Better?”

“You realise how bloody weird this is, right?”

Chuck glanced back over his shoulder and nearly fell over on his arse, which Herc thought served him right. “You’re the one getting prudish about wanking in front of someone who only exists in your head,” he pointed out. But somehow that didn’t seem terribly comforting and besides, he’d gone as flaccid as he’d ever been in his life. But at least that was the end of that.

The whole day was just like so many had been before it, taking a run with Max on a lead, a shower, breakfast then up to mission control, except every step of the way Chuck was there when he’d been conspicuously absent before. He could hear his boots on the gangway behind him as they ran, saw him sitting around on the floor in the hangar, leaning against railings as he whistled off-key on purpose. He was there in mission control doing clumsy cartwheels in front of the window and Herc’s headache had gone the way of the dodo but sadly that didn’t mean he had any better concentration with Chuck playing the distracting pillock. He had a feeling it was very much on purpose.

It wasn’t till dinner in the mess hall later on that he actually spoke again, though, sitting in the empty seat across the empty table from Herc, looking semi-longingly at a piece of well-cooked fresh-caught fish on his tray.

“I miss eating,” he said. “And I miss drinking. You remember that time I had my first beer? I was what, thirteen? But it’s not like you ever could say no, right, even when you should’ve done. You were a crap father, Hercules Hansen. And who the hell even has a name like Hercules anyway? Uncle Scott must’ve had one hell of an inferiority complex after you.”

Herc didn’t look up. He was concentrating hard on his fish, or trying to, though his grip on his fork was getting tighter by the second and not in a useful way.

“You’ve been ignoring me all day, old man,” Chuck went on. “You haven’t said a word since this morning. You still embarrassed about that? It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve caught you--”

“I just think it’s safer I don’t talk to myself if I don’t want to end up in the bloody looney bin,” Herc cut in, quiet, his head down, one hand in front of his mouth. “What would I say if someone asked? Oh, I’m not talking to myself, no, I’m just talking to Chuck. But it’s all okay ‘cause I know he’s dead really.”

Chuck gave a sort of amused snort like maybe he agreed but after that, he didn’t shut up all night. Frankly, as much as it grated on his nerves, Herc wasn’t sure he wanted him to.

---

He woke with his alarm the next day, from half-formed dreams he couldn’t recall and to an erection he strongly suspected wouldn’t be willed away this time. He sighed, substantially less than impressed with the damn situation, and brought one forearm up to rest over his eyes. The last thing he needed was a repeat performance of the day before, the way Chuck was acting about it.

“Just get on with it so we can get out of this bloody room sometime today, would you?” Chuck said from across the room and Herc looked over; he was sitting cross-legged on his bunk, the one that had been empty for nearly five months by then, since the day he’d got himself blown up at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, leaning against the wall. “Look, if it makes it any easier, I’ll join in.”

Herc just groaned and turned away. “That does not make it easier,” he replied, then pressed his face into his pillow like that might drown out Chuck’s obnoxiousness as he shoved his hand down the front of his sweats.

“So you’re saying it makes it harder?” Chuck said, and Herc could almost hear the bloody amusement in his voice. To say Chuck was a hallucination concocted by Herc’s own idiot brain, he did a fair job of acting just like the real thing always had.

“Creepy-arse double entendres aren’t going to get this done any easier, y’know,” Herc said, his fingers tightening around the length of his cock because fuck, he wasn’t going to be defeated by a voice in his head. But Chuck had gone silent and he should’ve known better than to turn and look but apparently he didn’t right then because he did it anyway. And Chuck had got both of his hands down the front of his own sweats with a huge, shit-eating grin on his face and Herc groaned again as he dropped back down onto his back. “For fuck’s sake, Chuck,” he said, screwing his eyes shut, but he was still hard in his hand and really all he could do was start stroking again. Chuck just laughed at him from across the room till Herc come all over and made a complete mess of himself. Herc couldn’t figure out if it’d turned him on or if he’d got himself off in spite of it and honestly, frankly, it wasn’t a distinction he really wanted to explore.

The day went on from there. Chuck ran three feet behind him, talked at him from outside the empty communal showers, started miming a tightrope walk as Herc was getting a status report on the other jaegers still under reconstruction. He put his feet up on the table at lunch and started telling stories about the time he was still training in the academy and the higher-ups were having trouble finding him a partner ‘cause all he did was keep beating up everyone who might’ve potentially been drift-compatible. Herc already knew all about that, of course - he hadn’t been there at the time but he’d had reports about it while he was still out piloting Lucky Seven with his brother Scott. Of course, Scott was dead now and they hadn’t spoken in years before that anyway. And their parents were dead and his wife was dead and now Chuck was dead, too, so maybe it wasn’t a total surprise that he was seeing things.

It was the same thing the next day and the day after that, the same pattern, waking up turned on for no discernible reason, Chuck mocking him from the bunk across the room as they both got themselves off. It was weird in so many ways on so many levels he didn’t even want to think about it but after four days, five, Chuck chattering at him incessantly while he tried to work, bitching about how he missed beer and missed his jaeger and how generally pissed he was that Raleigh Becket had saved the world and lived, then a whole bloody week, Herc was starting to wonder if maybe the headaches hadn’t been simpler than this. Especially when he woke up on day eight and Chuck had got his sweats pushed down to his knees and his shirt hitched up into his armpits and was touching himself like a bloody porno as he watched Herc watch him do it.

“What the bloody hell are you doing?” he asked, too tired for this but too turned on himself to sound venomous about it, or even vaguely upset.

“You might want to ask yourself instead of me,” Chuck said, lounging there as he squeezed his balls with his free hand. “I’m all in your head, remember? This is all you, marshal. You tell me what you think I’m doing.”

Herc took a laboured breath and sighed it out hard as he pushed his sheets back and sat himself up on the edge of the bed, bare feet on the cold metal floor plates. “I think you’re doing a good job of making me feel like the biggest pervert on the planet,” he said, pushing down at the crotch of his sweats with the heel of one hand. “I think I’ve got a problem.”

Chuck shrugged. “Just one?” he said, then, “Does it matter? I’m dead, remember. Who gives a fuck if you’re masturbating with a mirage? You’re the only one who knows about it.”

“Yeah, that’s not helpful,” Herc said, but he was already pushing his sweats down over his hips and by that point he’d already lost the argument completely. Of course, he was arguing with himself so the point was damn near moot anyway, but it didn’t feel like he was arguing with himself when Chuck was half-naked five metres away and they were both touching themselves up like this was a scene from some clichéd military pornography. Chuck came first, over his fist and his belly with a bloody obscene groan and Herc was perversely glad that at least the dodgy phantasm wasn’t going to mess up the sheets. He was pretty close after that himself, biting back a shout as he watched Chuck catch his non-existent breath. It was completely fucked up. If he hadn’t been losing it before then, well, by God he was now.

All he wanted to do was get away from this for a minute, just for a bloody minute, but Chuck was leaning against the wall chattering away about some fucking thing while he showered alone in the communal showers - perk of being a marshal was at least he got the shower room to himself for fifteen minutes every morning, as long as he got in there on time. But he couldn’t look at him, as much as he couldn’t stop himself hearing him, couldn’t look at him at all for the rest of the day, ignored him in his peripheral vision as he walked through the jaeger bay and inspected the newest reconstructions. They were coming along quickly, another might be good to start testing in a couple of days, but he wasn’t thinking about jaegers or the PPDC or what the hell the UN wanted a team of jaegers for. There were other things on his mind.

Chuck finally shut the fuck up about 2am and Herc got some sleep, albeit briefly. And, like clockwork, just like bloody clockwork, his alarm went off and he woke up with an erection he could’ve knocked in nails with if he’d felt inclined to masochistic DIY. He groaned into his pillow but then there was a hand on his shoulder pushing him onto his back and of course it was Chuck because who the hell else would it be? He tried to shove him back but naturally he wasn’t there so his hands went straight through him and Chuck just looked at him as if to say c’mon, what did you think was going to happen? before he swept the sheets off him with a grand magician-with-a-tablecloth bloody gesture and then sat himself down on the edge of the bed.

“What are you doing, Chuck?” Herc asked, though the answer was at least moderately obvious since his hands were going for the waist of Herc’s sweats.

“You keep asking me that like I have a bloody clue,” Chuck said, shaking his head as his fingers curled down under the elastic at Herc’s waist, the backs of his hands warm against his skin somehow though they weren’t even there. “What do you want me to say?” He pulled down; Herc stayed right where he was for a second, stubborn about it, till Chuck gave him a look like he was less than impressed and not fooled at all and he gave up, conceded defeat and lifted his hips instead. After all, if this was all in his head then it wasn’t like he could pretend he didn’t want it or at least want to see where it went. “You want me to say you’re a dirty old man getting his rocks off with some bloke who’s twenty years younger than him? You want me to say I think you’re a sick fuck who wants to get it on with his kid? I don’t care.” His hand closed around Herc’s cock, squeezed almost too hard or not quite hard enough and he wasn’t totally sure which it was. “What do you think?”

He didn’t reply and it was all over remarkably quickly, okay so maybe not remarkably quickly ‘cause he’d had more than a ten second fuse since school but it was pretty damn quick nonetheless. Chuck got up on his knees over Herc’s thighs and yanked down his own sweats while Herc tried not to watch but found he couldn’t look away, shuffled in close and caught his cock in his hand along with Herc’s. All Herc could do was laugh kinda raggedly, exasperated as Chuck stroked them both together, not sure if he should love it or hate it or want it or be totally repulsed by it but it wasn’t like he could shove him away anyway even if he’d wanted to and he wasn’t sure he did. In the end they came all over each other with tense jerks of their hips and Herc’s hands gripping tight at the sheets.

“You always were a bloody awful father,” Chuck said, but he said it with a smile, said it damn near fondly and Herc could’ve laughed or could’ve cried but did neither in the end. “But that’s fine, dad. I was a bloody awful son.”

He was going to hell, he thought, as Chuck patted his belly and got up off the bed. But at least the Hong Kong shatterdome made a pretty good handbasket.

---

Before the first time he’d got into a jaeger, ten years ago by then, no one had told him what it’d be like. That fact wasn’t totally shocking ‘cause well, there hadn’t been all that many people around the world who’d set foot into a jaeger before Herc Hansen did it, but the ideas of neural interfacing and the drift and the bloody rabbit or RABIT or whatever they’d been calling it or however they’d been spelling it in the official reports back then were only put to him in the abstract. He’d sat in the briefing room in the Jaeger Academy over in Alaska with his younger brother Scott and a gaggle of scientists had told them they’d be connected, they’d see and be inside each other’s heads, and he’d thought he’d understood. He’d talked it over with Scott after the briefing and they’d both thought they’d be fine. They’d thought they could handle it ‘cause they’d trained and they’d trained and they wanted it, they really did. They were going to save the world or at least just pay the bastard kaiju back for what they’d done to Sydney.

Then they’d gone into pons training and everything had gone straight to hell because nothing they’d been told had prepared them in any way for what it really meant to drift with someone. Scott had thrown up after the first time, on his knees in his drive suit, and Herc hadn’t been able to get up off the floor for nearly ten minutes. They hadn’t even been able to look at each other for three whole days then they were back in there again, back in the fucking drift trying to tie things together and make the mess in their heads make sense because neither one of them had the sense God gave them and they collectively just did not know how to quit.

Five years later, after Scott, he’d known what to expect when he’d been assigned with Chuck. He’d sat him down behind closed doors the day they’d got their orders and had the oddest damn conversation he’d ever had in his life with him right then, told him everything that no one else would or could tell him about what it’d be like to pilot a jaeger, not just physically but mentally, and what it would do to him and what it would do to them. He hadn’t tried to put him off the whole idea, not really, because he knew if he’d failed in every other way as a father then he’d at least given him a sense of pride and duty and honour and he was proud of the fact he’d decided to join the PPDC, proud of how he’d blazed through the damn academy like he’d been born to it though considering his Air Force dad and his Air Force granddad, maybe he had been. What he’d told him was they’d see things and they’d know things without needing to or even wanting to, totally against their will and out of their control, and everything would change. The best thing they could do, he’d said, was agree to ignore it and do what they had to do.

“Just focus on the job,” Herc had told him, then they went out into the conn pod in their matching Aussie drive suits and when they drifted for the first time maybe that was the single worst act of parenting Herc had ever displayed before or ever did after. He’d chosen the job over his son that day. He chose saving the world over salvaging whatever was left of their broken relationship because he’d known exactly what would happen; they’d brought Striker Eureka online together and the tech team up in mission control all said the test went well afterwards, but by then they’d already seen inside each other and Herc had known they’d never be the same. Just like he’d never been the same with Scott.

Of course, when Scott had been forced out of the PPDC and then died in a kaiju attack far from a shatterdome let alone a jaeger, Herc hadn’t started seeing things. But two weeks since his first appearance, three weeks and then four, Chuck was still there.

Herc woke the morning of the next renovated jaeger’s launch with Chuck half-sprawled over him like the bunk had ever been made for one bloke their size, let alone two. The problem was it wasn’t like he could push him off ‘cause he’d long since learned his hands just went straight through him, a bloody awful paradox where Chuck could touch him but Herc couldn’t so much as blow his hair out of place in retaliation. But it wasn’t like Chuck was asleep; he was just lying there with one thigh jammed between Herc’s legs, watching him with a smirk.

“I’m not in the mood, Chuck,” he said, and despite the fact he was hard as a damn anvil against Chuck’s thigh he thought he meant it. He tried to mean it, at least, but he’d been trying to mean it every day for weeks, pretending he wasn’t watching as Chuck jacked off across the room or affecting unconvincing nonchalance when Chuck’s hands were on him. Right then, though, he was too tired and too fucking disgusted with himself to let it happen; he struggled his way to his feet, harder than it should’ve been ‘cause he couldn’t lay a hand on Chuck in any way, and grabbed his shower bag on his way to the door. He’d been dreaming about Scott, didn’t remember the specifics but the fact it was Scott was enough to make him half sick. The Kaiju War had really fucked up his family.

He turned on the shower and ducked under the spray, hung his head as he leaned against the tiled wall and closed his eyes. He didn’t need this right now, either the bloody erection he’d had to hide all the way to the shower room or the crap in his head from back in 2015 after he’d deployed in Lucky Seven with Scott, after their first time out in combat. He shook his head at himself as he ran one hand down over his belly and lower, wrapped his fingers around his cock under the shower spray and stroked. But, of course, he wasn’t alone. These days he was never alone.

When a pair of hot hands found his hips under the spray he didn’t have to turn because he knew it was Chuck. When someone stepped up against him, a broad chest against his back, cock pressed up hard against the crack of his arse, the only one it could’ve been was Chuck. Anyone else and he’d’ve punched them out cold in a heartbeat and he’d never have thought twice about it.

“I said I’m not in the mood,” he said, but it sounded just as half-hearted as it felt, more than half-hollow as Chuck’s wet hands moved over his hips, down over his abdomen and followed down to the front of his thighs. “For fuck’s sake, I didn’t start dreaming you up for this crap. You’re not a damn sexual fantasy.”

Chuck chuckled, his mouth pressed up to the back of Herc’s shoulder. “Yeah, you’ve got Uncle Scott in your head for that,” he said, and Herc clenched his jaw hard. There were things they’d never talked about and that had always been one of them, what Chuck had seen him do in the drift, what he’d seen him do with Scott. Two inexperienced jaeger pilots fucked up from the drift, reeling, the connection deeper and more complicated and more bloody fraught than anything they’d ever had with anyone else before that and they’d tried not to do it, they’d tried to laugh it off like it just wasn’t a big deal but then they’d tumbled onto the floor in the combat room one day and Scott had pinned him down then Herc rolled on top and then Scott did, and the next thing they’d known they’d been dry humping like idiot bloody teenagers instead of full-grown blokes in their thirties. That was just the way it was for jaeger pilots: they kept their distance, ignored the link, acted like it wasn’t there outside the conn pod, or it spilled over into something closer and messier and, their case, completely fucked up. Sometimes he wondered if the couples ever had it easier.

“Yeah, you might’ve noticed I’m not hallucinating your uncle Scott,” Herc said, his voice two shades lower and darker than normal, quieter with it ‘cause who knew who might hear.

“D’you wonder why it’s me and not him?” Chuck said, and his hands moved down, fingers pushing in between Herc’s thighs.

“No, I don’t.”

One of Chuck’s hands cupped his balls and squeezed, made him take a sharp breath full of steam. He could feel the rise and fall of Chuck’s chest against his back. Fuck, it felt real. It didn’t even feel like Scott, not really.

“So why am I here?”

Herc dropped his forehead down against the tiled wall, harder than he’d intended and he cursed under his breath, made Chuck snicker against his shoulder.

“I’m not ready for you to go,” Herc said, and Chuck’s free hand went down between the two of them; he squeezed his arse and then pressed his fingers in between his cheeks, slick with something more substantial with water though he hadn’t moved away. He paused a moment, like he was giving him a chance to run or at least the semblance of it, then two of those fingers pushed into him, slowly. All he could think to do was shift his feet wider apart like that wasn’t the stupidest thing he could’ve done under the circumstances.

“Thought I said I’m not leaving,” Chuck said. Fingers pulled back. Herc took an unsteady breath and Chuck shifted, pressed the blunt head of his cock up between his cheeks. Herc didn’t move, wasn’t sure how to or if he could or should and so Chuck started to push inside him, wrapped his arms around his waist and held him there as he did it.

“Don’t,” Herc said, his eyes screwed closed, but he was leaning forward against the wall, he was pushing back against him.

“‘Cause I’m not Scott?” Chuck asked, as he bottomed out inside him, in as far as he could go. “‘Cause I’m your son? I’m dead. I’m not even real. What the fuck do you care?”

It was a compelling argument and by the time one of Chuck’s hands went around his cock, Herc couldn’t’ve said any more if he’d wanted to. Chuck moved, hips flexing; Chuck’s hand moved over the length of him; Herc fucking sobbed against the wall and he pushed back and he took it. He could hear the faint slap of wet skin on skin as they moved together, could hear the catch in Chuck’s breath and the way he almost growled against his shoulder blade. It shouldn’t have been happening and he knew it. He shouldn’t have let it happen, but every muscle in his body was winding up tighter, his own breath coming faster, harsher, teeth bared, fingers curling against the tiles. He pushed against him, harder, faster, Chuck’s hand at his cock moving with it till Herc’s hips were jerking and fuck, that was it, he came in a fucking spasm with a groan he could only half bite back that echoed dully as Chuck bucked inside him twice, three times, then finished too.

“We shouldn’t’ve done that,” Herc said, voice tight and low as Chuck pulled back, pulled out, stepped away.

He glanced back over his shoulder and Chuck crossed his arms over his chest, skin flushed, his expression dark.

“We should’ve done that years ago,” Chuck said, and then he walked away.

---

The next jaeger launched without a hitch, Raleigh and Mako bringing it up online in the conn pod ‘cause it wasn’t like they had new recruits streaming in from the Jaeger Academy to fill the new pilots’ spots because hell, the Academy had been closed for years. They’d got a few new hopefuls training daily in the combat room, a few that’d finished their individual training but needed partnering up, and none of them were really ready for the real thing. The best and only pilots with any experience at all that he’d got were Raleigh and Mako and he guessed since they’d saved the world once already he could’ve done a hell of a lot worse.

He watched from mission control, in charge but Tendo called the shots because that just made better sense and not just because Herc was on edge again. His head was pounding twenty minutes in and he popped a couple of ibuprofen while a couple of the tech guys gave him a brief look that said they’d not seen him do that in weeks by then and they really hoped it wasn’t going to turn out to be a regular thing. Herc hoped so too because he hadn’t seen Chuck in over an hour and the headache was making him bloody nervous about that. He didn’t want him gone, and not just ‘cause he didn’t want the headaches back again.

They were in there the best part of the morning, running drills, testing, Raleigh making crap jokes that made Mako sometimes laugh and sometimes groan and it was good to see she hadn’t lost her sense of humour when she’d lost what she’d had left to pass as a father. If anything she’d gained something she’d been missing before - or at least something she’d buried somewhere safe and quiet and kept for later, just in case - when she’d started drifting with Raleigh more regularly and yeah, okay, there were times when Herc would find her in the mess hall on her own, eyes damp, not reading whatever it was she was pretending to read, but she seemed more happy than not.

He had lunch with the two of them, went over there and set his tray down next to Raleigh and then they both looked up as he sat down; it was the first time he’d actually eaten in company for a while if you didn’t count Chuck - and you couldn’t count Chuck - and although it wasn’t like they minded him joining them it must’ve been totally unexpected judging from the look on both their faces. They didn’t do a great job of hiding it, not that Raleigh did a great job of hiding much of anything at all. He was sort of like Chuck that way, the way you always knew when he was pleased or smug or frustrated or pissed off ‘cause it was right there on his face. Not that Chuck was there right at that moment to compare him to and he didn’t know where the hell he was, if he was, if he’d bulled ahead and fucked things up with Chuck the Hallucination even if it was in new and different ways from how he’d fucked up with his dead son, once upon a time.

“You doing okay, marshal?” Raleigh asked as he and Mako went to leave maybe twenty, thirty minutes later, while Mako was disposing of their trays. Herc forced a smile to his face and got at least half the way there, but that seemed to be the reaction Raleigh was looking for so it didn’t matter that he hadn’t managed it the whole way after all. He gave Herc’s shoulder a near-awkward squeeze with a half-smile of his own.

“I’d say it gets better…” he said, trailing off with a shrug and Herc got it. He chuckled wryly and gave Raleigh a nod that he returned before he left, but Herc couldn’t help but think however good Raleigh’s intentions were, he didn’t get it. He wasn’t the one screwing around with a hallucination. Of course, fuck knew where his hallucination actually was right then.

He left the mess hall for an afternoon of video conferences in Stacker’s office - his office now, he supposed - going over funding schedules and progress reports like he was a goddamn finance assistant and not marshal of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. The guy in the pristine, pricey suit on one of the screens in front of him kept on frowning at him and all Herc wanted to do was tell him if he didn’t like the way he dressed he could go fuck himself, it wasn’t a bloody beauty contest, if he wanted someone who’d put on a bloody uniform just for a video conference then they could find themselves a new marshal because he was not Stacker bloody Pentecost. But he gritted his teeth and got on with it, his headache increasing by the minute.

He skipped dinner and went back to his quarters and Chuck wasn’t there, either, at least not until he was. Herc fairly flung himself down onto his bunk, pissed at himself and maybe at half the world in general and sometimes behind closed doors and especially since the day Chuck died it wasn’t hard to see where Chuck had got his attitude from. He’d grown up with rangers for role models, with a reckless brat of an uncle and a father who took out his frustrations on gym equipment till his knuckles sometimes bled just so he could keep his usual laid-back cool in place everywhere else.

“You look like hell,” Chuck said.

The door hadn’t opened but Herc guessed it wouldn’t have since Chuck was just a particularly sarcastic figment of his imagination. He opened his eyes; Chuck was sitting across the room there on his old bunk.

“Thought you’d gone.”

“We’ve been through this before,” Chuck said. “I’m not leaving. And sometimes a headache’s just a headache, marshal.”

“So the headache was about you before?”

Chuck shrugged. “I was screaming at you for months before you saw me that first time,” he said. “I was starting to think I’d never get through that thick head of yours. So I might’ve had something to do with it, yeah.”

Herc just closed his eyes and shook his head. He guessed at least that explained why he’d never felt like Chuck was gone; he’d had him in his head right from the start.

---

He woke before his alarm the next day, not really startled awake but woken up slowly by the hand that had pushed its way up under his shirt, resting warmly against his chest underneath. He’d ended up up on his side somehow, Chuck spooned up behind him like that wasn’t kind of creepy and weird. He sighed.

“What are you doing, Chuck?” he asked, before he could stop himself, like the answer might’ve changed since last time.

Chuck just snickered against the back of his neck and his hand took a detour, made its way down over his belly to the waist of his sweats, then underneath.

“Look, I got bored waiting for you to wake up,” he said, fingertips brushing over the hair at the base of Herc’s cock and making him shiver, which made Chuck snort, amused. “Being dead’s not all it’s cracked up to be, okay? I can’t even read a bloody book.”

“Like you ever read a book by choice,” Herc muttered, and Chuck wrapped his hand around him, squeezed in retaliation.

“It’s not like I had a great academic role model in my formative years, dad,” Chuck said, the pad of his thumb swiping over the head of Herc’s cock, making him grit his teeth.

“You’d rather I’d read you Moby Dick than taught you to fight?” Herc said, and Chuck moved, pushed up, shoved Herc down on his back and straddled his thighs. In the crap low white light from over the sink he wasn’t sure if Chuck looked amused or pissed or a combination of both, but he pulled down Herc’s sweats over his hips and Herc shivered again as the cooler air hit hotter skin. Chuck definitely looked amused then, as he wrapped his hand around him and stroked slowly and Herc watched him do it, awkward, flushed.

“You didn’t teach me to fight,” Chuck said as he shuffled back and Herc pushed himself up on his forearms, setting his jaw. “The PPDC taught me to fight. You were just the ranger assigned to do it.” He leaned down, gaze flickering up for a second before his tongue came out against the tip of Herc’s erection just for a second in a lazy little circle.

He meant to protest. He really did, but then Chuck took him in his mouth and he watched him do it, watched him take him in as far as he could without gagging and it wasn’t like he thought for a second Chuck had never done this before because he’d seen it in the drift the second time they’d done it, seen him in the Academy at seventeen going down on some classmate Herc had only met once or twice back then and then never again. He’d had a feeling after that drift that if he’d met the bloke again he might’ve knocked him out cold for the shit he saw him doing with Chuck when they drifted. Now here he was doing the same damn thing.

Chuck pulled back, suddenly, smiling smugly for whatever reason Herc couldn’t decipher except maybe being in his head Chuck knew exactly what he’d been thinking. Herc watched him stand up, watched him pull off his shirt and toss it away, pull off his sweats and leave himself stark naked in the rubbish light. He’d always looked a lot more like his mum than his dad, Herc thought, and that maybe made it easier when Chuck went back down over his thighs, mattress dipping somehow with the weight that wasn’t even really there. Chuck took him back in his hand and somehow his fingers were slick, stroking stuff thickly over the length of him and Herc’s fingers tightened on two handfuls of sheets.

“For fuck’s sake, Chuck,” he said, exasperated, but that was as far as his complaint went as Chuck shrugged it off, moved and sat back, guided him up against him, pushed down. He went in easy but tight, Chuck’s breath uneven for the first few seconds till he’d come down as far as he could on his knees, got Herc pressed up as far as he could get inside him. He leaned forward then, hands spread on Herc’s chest, looking down at him; Herc’s hands went up to his biceps, wanted to squeeze there and steady them both but yeah, hell, they went straight through and Chuck shook his head at him.

“Hallucination, right?” he said, and Herc groaned and stretched his hands up behind his head instead, caught the metal bars in the headboard of his bunk.

“Some bloody hallucination,” Herc muttered, but then Chuck moved, shifted his hips, shifted around him and he couldn’t’ve managed another word if he’d wanted to.

He’d meant to protest but there they were, Chuck riding him like there was any sense in that at all, and all Herc could do was watch and try like hell to keep still because he knew exactly what would happen if he tried to touch. Chuck was flushed red straight through his cheeks into his chest and Herc had to stop himself from reaching for his cock because fuck, that wouldn’t’ve worked either. All he could do was let it happen so he did, his pulse quickening, fingers going numb he was holding so hard at the headboard. One of Chuck’s hands finally found his own erection and he stroked while Herc watched, damn near shaking his muscles were so fucking tense and getting tenser and tighter till the whole thing was so close to bloody painful that when Chuck went tight or tighter around him and came over his chest that was when he came too. His release really was a bloody release.

He choked back a groan and Chuck laughed and leaned down and pressed his mouth to his jaw, to his chin, the corner of his mouth. He looked down at him, serious for a second, pressed his mouth to Herc’s and fuck, fuck, he couldn’t as much as run his hand over Chuck’s hair, down his spine, over his hips, let alone kiss him back. He couldn’t run his hands over Chuck’s thighs, rub his thumbs over his hipbones the way he wanted to, couldn’t pull him down against him and as much as he hated himself for wanting it, made himself fucking sick, Christ he wanted it.

Chuck pulled away, pulled back, moved slowly till Herc was all the way back out of him and he stepped away. He pulled on his grundies, jeans, boots, saved his shirt for last and Herc watched him from the bed because getting up and jogging and eating and showering and going out into the hangar for inspections seemed a hell of a lot less important than any of it had a half hour earlier, even while he was sleeping. But Chuck came back over, stooped just as far as he needed to so he could scoop Herc’s dog tags off his chest and give a tug that was right on the borderline of being hard enough to break the chain. Herc would’ve liked to’ve seen that, though he had to surmise that if it’d broken then he’d’ve had to’ve broken it himself even if he wouldn’t’ve remembered it that way.

“You always were a lazy arse,” Chuck said, though they both knew that was pretty much the opposite of the actual truth. “Get up, old man. Before someone comes looking for you and finds you like this. What the hell would you tell them?”

So he did. Chuck watched him dress, went with him when he jogged with Max, talked at him over breakfast, pushed him up against the wall in the shower and sucked at his collarbone till under any ordinary circumstances there’d’ve been a bruise left behind. Herc let him. He stopped pretending he’d protest, or even that he wanted to.

After all, he’d never been able to deny Chuck anything before he’d died; maybe now wasn’t the time to start.

---

A week passed, two, four. They had three new teams ready, no disastrous pons training scenarios, no destructive jaeger tests, and the final jaeger was getting closer to ready to be brought online.

It had taken a few days for Herc to realise that he’d reset his alarm for an hour earlier in the morning so he wouldn’t miss a video conference with some bigwig in a crappy time zone and never actually turned it back; Chuck was there every morning when it went off, sometimes practicing half-naked tai chi, sometimes lounging on his own bunk, sometimes in Herc’s, but the result was predictable whichever way it started. Chuck would suck him off or he’d ride him with a smirk on his face or he’d push him down on his hands and knees and do him instead, not like it seemed to make a difference to either of them who did what to whom when really it was always Chuck in control because Herc couldn’t so much as touch him. Still, even then, it was all in his head anyway.

Four weeks like that, talking before Herc went to sleep at night like they’d never really done before Chuck died because now it didn’t seem to matter what they said because really, Herc was just talking to himself. They’d talk before he tried to sleep, at least, and sometimes all he could do was lie there and listen to Chuck breathe and wonder what happened to him when he finally did sleep, if he still existed, if he went to sleep too. Then he’d get up in the morning and they’d do what they did and then he’d go to work, finding it easier, smiling when that was the right response, telling the techs and the mechanics and even Gottlieb and Geiszler that they were doing good work because hell, they were. They deserved the praise.

He stood there in mission control and watched as Raleigh and Mako went out into the sixth and last jaeger. Chuck came closer, walked straight through two techs but by that point Herc was almost used to seeing that, the way he jogged through people while they walked Max and how he’d tried to freak him out by popping straight through doors or walls or desktops till the novelty wore off. He stopped right next to him there by the console up in mission control and Herc took a short sidelong glance before he turned back to the window the looked out into the hangar bay.

“That’s the one we would’ve had,” Herc said, looking out at the jaeger, and if anyone thought it was odd that he was talking to himself then they didn’t let on. After all, he knew how it’d sound because he knew how it looked; the jaeger out there in the bay was the one they’d’ve had if Chuck had lived. It looked a lot like Striker Eureka as was but that was mostly because they’d used so many of her spares on their last and latest reconstruction project. Of course, underneath that she was a hulking old mark 1, heavy and solid but still pretty quick now she’d been outfitted with new parts and new upgrades, or at least newer ones. Underneath it was all that was left of Lucky Seven, Herc’s first jaeger, the one he’d shared with his brother. That meant something to him, that they’d have piloted the odd amalgamation together.

Raleigh and Mako brought her online and with the patchwork of Striker’s old spares all over the exterior it was nearly like that day again, watching Chuck and Stacker before they left for Challenger Deep and the breach. Chuck took a sidestep closer, brought one arm up and rested his forearm against Herc’s back, rubbed at the back of his neck. Herc hadn’t realised how hard he was gripping the edge of the console till he started easing off it.

“She’s ugly as sin, y’know,” Chuck said, and Herc ducked his head to hide his smile. “We’d’ve been bloody good in her, though.”

Herc couldn’t say he disagreed.

They broke for lunch and for once Herc had no lengthy meetings scheduled for the afternoon; he changed and hit the gym, Chuck needling him the whole time about his form as he knocked the hell out of punchbag the way he’d used to train before he’d been made marshal.

“You’re quick for an old fella,” Chuck told him, spinning a staff that wasn’t there around his hands, around his waist, over his head like it was nothing and Herc just gave him a sidelong look that said show-off. That just made Chuck’s smile wider. “You think you could still take me?”

Herc remembered training with Chuck. He threw a few more stiff punches with his taped hands but what he was thinking about was the combat room at the Sydney shatterdome after Chuck had graduated top of his class from the Academy over on Kodiak, how they’d knocked seven bells out of each other all over the floor while no one was watching, getting further and further out of control till Herc had punched him down to the floor, bust open his lip so Chuck had spat blood on the mat.

“I don’t think we’ll ever find out,” Herc said, and Chuck’s smile faded fast.

Then he showered and he grabbed dinner in their quarters, telling Chuck a story about the first time he’d ever flown a plane, back in the day, when he was a lad; Chuck knew it already but not because he’d ever told him. They’d never really talked. After the kaiju attack on Sydney, there’d always been something in the way. But the whole time he knew neither of them was thinking about flying or planes or even Chuck’s great abiding love of showing off.

Herc knew he could never touch him again, couldn’t even hit him, not that he’d ever wanted to. It looked like Chuck resented that fact just as much as he did.

---

The knock on the door woke him sometime after 3am four days later and he pulled himself out of bed, groaned as he headed to the door. He’d been a military man for as long as he could remember so yeah, midnight wake-up calls had been part of the job, but that wasn’t to say he enjoyed them.

“Sir, we’ve got a distress signal,” said the bloke standing out there in the corridor when he finally stopped fumbling with the door and got it open, a short type looking sheepish at least that he’d clearly woken up the boss.

“Didn’t think we had anyone scheduled out there tonight,” Herc said, rubbing his eyes.

“We don’t, sir.” Herc stretched, looking at him. “But it’s a PPDC signal and it’s coming from about 70 miles from the breach. Or where that was, I mean. Not that it’s there now. There’s no indication that it is.”

Herc nodded; he was fairly positive that the breach hadn’t just spontaneously reopened somehow at 3.17am that particular day, on this poor fella’s watch, though he supposed stranger things had happened. “Get a team out there,” he said. “Find out what it is and get back to me when we’ve got a definite answer.”

“Sir.”

The techie on duty disappeared back down the corridor the way he’d come and Herc turned back into his quarters, closed the door and stepped back against it, rested his head back against the cold metal. Chuck was awake, because Chuck was always awake, sitting shirtless on Herc’s bunk with his head against the wall, watching him. Herc rubbed at the back of his neck and watched him right back.

“What do you think it is?” Chuck asked.

Herc shrugged against the door then pushed himself away from it, stepped back over there barefoot and sat himself down next to him on the crap PPDC-issue mattress. He’d been sleeping on crap mattresses just like it more than half his life, he thought. In the scheme of things, this one measured up pretty well.

“No idea,” Herc said, pulling his knees up, and Chuck rested his wrist over the top of one of them, warm and heavy. It was like he could almost feel his pulse but if he’d put his fingers to it they’d’ve slipped straight through thin air ‘cause that was all Chuck really was. “Likely some broken piece of crap washed up with a beacon on it.”

“Yeah,” Chuck agreed, but something didn’t seem right. “You should get back to sleep, who knows when that techie arse’ll come knocking again and you look like hell, old man.”

“Yeah, you always were a charmer,” Herc said, and Chuck vacated the bed so he could stretch back out. And not quite right or not, it took him less than three whole minutes to drift back off.

The next knock came three hours later, the same techie but his face was white as a bloody sheet and Herc frowned at him when he couldn’t get the words out. It was like talking to Gottlieb and Geiszler, just as confusing but with infinitely fewer words, and in the end Herc just threw on his clothes and went with him.

He led the way to the med bay and Herc frowned the whole way, walking too fast for the short-legged techie who was pretty much tripping over his own feet to keep up; Chuck was poking fun at the guy the whole way which might’ve been more effective if anyone but Herc could’ve heard him. And when they got there, opened the door and stepped inside, there was a jaeger escape pod sitting there on the floor with the sleep-deprived doctor standing over it, a mechanic in a grease-stained boiler suit and a med technician wrenching it open.

“Who is it?” he asked.

He hadn’t stepped another centimetre into the room. He wasn’t sure he could. Chuck, however, waltzed over there bold as brass and peered inside with nothing like his dad’s trepidation.

“I always was a handsome bastard,” Chuck said and glanced back at him, the spiel not quite enough to make Herc smile ‘cause they were both in the process of turning white as the proverbial.

“It’s him, isn’t it.”

“It seems so,” said the doctor.

“Is he…?”

The doctor stooped to the side of the pod and peered inside, did what Herc supposed was pressing his fingers to the side of Chuck’s neck. He looked back over at him as he straightened back up; he nodded.

“He’s alive,” he said. “The stasis equipment seems to have worked perfectly, marshal.”

“He’s alive?”

The doctor smiled, nodded patiently. “He most certainly is.”

Chuck, at least the Chuck in his head, looked back down into the pod and then nodded, too.

“I most certainly am,” he said, in a thoroughly bad impression of the doctor since his American accent had always been totally rubbish.

“Will he--”

“--wake up? I should say so.”

“When?” Chuck said.

“When?” Herc said.

“An hour, maybe two.”

“Can I stay?”

“I don’t see why not.”

They left him in the escape pod, lying there in his drive suit and Herc thought about pulling up a chair but in the end he just went down on the floor next to it as everyone but the doc and his assistant left the room, curious but knowing when to keep their distance. He couldn’t count Chuck in that, of course, since whatever it was he’d got in his head was still there, sitting on the end of the pod looking halfway between unimpressed and amused as he stared into it.

When the real Chuck woke 47 minutes later, the Chuck in his head was nowhere to be seen.

---

Herc stayed around for the first twenty minutes while the doctor and his assistant fussed over Chuck and a couple of techies came in to get him out of his drivesuit. The doctor took his vitals, checked reflexes, asked questions to which he got unsurprisingly sarcastic answers while Herc hung back as far as he could and still hear and once the doc had pronounced him fit and surprisingly well considering his recent apparent demise though he should probably spend at least a full 24 hours in the med bay for observation just to be sure, Herc nodded his thanks and he turned and walked out. Chuck had seen him; he knew he’d been there and that was enough. He didn’t need him to hang around. He didn’t need his old man presuming a kind of intimacy they’d never really had because of conversations and everything bloody thing else he’d made up in his own head.

He spent the day in the hangar with Mako and a team of mechanics, making himself useful with a spraycan full of extremely high-tech oil though in the end it was still pretty much just oil and it didn’t need a PhD from MIT to spray it into every hole in a particularly bulky knee-piece. He cleaned off his hands and ate his lunch in the hangar since Raleigh turned up with enough for three, sitting cross-legged on the floor with them like he wasn’t the marshal of the PPDC and his son hadn’t just woken up after nearly eight months presumed dead. They didn’t press him about it. Apparently they knew him well enough not to, though everyone else was eyeing him like they couldn’t understand why he wasn’t there in the med bay with Chuck.

They headed into the mess hall after a much-needed shower for dinner, Raleigh and Mako making nice with the newer teams while Herc was silent over his lacklustre chicken casserole. Then he took a slow walk back to his quarters - their quarters, though he could soon have that sorted and Chuck installed in a room of his own and so that was what he did then, what he did next. He called in a favour with the quartermaster and got a room opened up for Chuck, spent an hour shoving all his gear into boxes and Raleigh helped him get them down the corridor, round two corners and down a flight of stairs into Chuck’s new quarters. Raleigh didn’t ask why and Herc was glad about that after ‘cause he had no bloody clue what he’d’ve had to tell him that would’ve sounded close to convincing.

He went back to his quarters after that, stretched out on his bunk fully clothed and he didn’t mean to fall asleep but that’s exactly what happened, sometime around 11pm. He’d meant to change or at least take off his boots and the next thing he knew the door opened and then slammed and he was bolt fucking upright in bed looking at Chuck standing there in a tracksuit two sizes too big for him and a pair of flimsy med bay slippers.

“I ran into Raleigh in the corridor,” he said, looking fucking incensed. “You moved me out. What, you thought you’d wait until I miraculously came back from the dead to actually get rid of me?”

Herc sighed. “Thought you’d want your own space now your old man can get it for you,” he said, and went back down heavily onto his back. “I’m glad you’re alive, kid, but don’t be such a bloody drama queen. I thought I was doing you a favour.”

“Yeah, don’t do me any more of them,” Chuck said. And he turned around and walked out. Herc was alone again, completely.

There was no hallucination of Chuck there in the morning like there’d been for months by then and Herc couldn’t have anticipated what it’d be like for him to just be gone like that, just gone, now the real Chuck was back in the shatterdome. He dragged himself through the shower, let Chuck take care of Max and spent the day between deployment plans to help out after an earthquake somewhere round Papua New Guinea and the science lab where Gottlieb and Geiszler were trying to discuss potential therapeutic applications of drift technologies. The next day felt the same with minute variations and the day after that followed suit, except a package arrived from some smartarse in the UN with a uniform made just for him. He shoved the box up on top of his locker back in his quarters where he hoped to forget all about it. A month later, he almost had. A month later, they still weren’t talking. A month later, at least the headaches hadn’t come back.

He saw Chuck the day after that, down in the combat room where they were still testing out candidates for the last jaeger and even if he’d been in emergency stasis and presumed dead for the best part of a year, maybe more, Chuck was still the best damn fighter in there. He glanced at Herc and he scowled and he knocked the next guy who stepped out onto the mat unconscious, accidentally on purpose, like he ever did that crap accidentally. Herc walked out of the room. Chuck took on the next comer.

He was back in the combat room the next day, watching again sometime after lunch, talking to Raleigh who kept pausing to heckle and Herc couldn’t say he blamed him when Chuck let himself get riled up that way because of it. Mako gave Raleigh a disapproving glance every time he did it as she tapped away on a tablet on her lap but Herc could tell it was lip-service to the marshal more than genuine disapproval. Maybe most people there respected Chuck in a way because of his record or his talent or his connections but that didn’t mean anyone actually liked him. Herc supposed he only had himself to blame for that, not that Chuck would’ve given a damn.

Chuck looked up at him halfway through his next match and got himself knocked down on his arse for his trouble. Raleigh laughed; Mako elbowed him none-too-subtly in the ribs and Herc just looked right back at Chuck while that was going on, tilting his head, frowning as Chuck picked himself up off the mat and ran one hand over his hair. Then he did it again just like he’d done the day before: he knocked the guy out cold, laid him out on the floor and there wasn’t much Raleigh could say to that except maybe it’d be a cold day in hell before they found anyone who’d actually want to drift with a nutjob like Chuck.

So Herc did the only thing he could: he got up and he walked over and he waved off the next contender. He untied his boots and he toed them off and pulled off his socks, balancing on one leg then the other, and he dropped his jacket on the floor by his discarded footwear. Then he stepped onto the mats and Chuck scowled at him.

“You think you can still take me?” Chuck said, stretching while Herc stretched and then they settled into their stance.

“Why don’t we find out?” Herc said. He supposed they were about to.

It was a bad idea and Herc knew it but he couldn’t just keep letting the obnoxious arse beat people up day in and day out. So when Chuck came in hard and fast he took a swift sidestep and caught him between the shoulder blades with his elbow; when he went for his knees he grabbed an arm and threw him. Chuck landed a kick above his hip and then a blow to his shoulder but Herc was tougher than that and more experienced than anyone Chuck had fought in weeks, maybe ever, and okay so he was younger but Herc knew him, knew every move in his arsenal, every shift of his feet, every stretch of every muscle. And when Chuck came back in harder and angrier it was almost easy to spring up and hammer him down with one huge blow to the jaw that sent him sprawling, the force of it jarring all through Herc’s bones and tendons. It probably hurt him almost as much as it hurt Chuck, just left him standing while Chuck lay there on the ground.

Chuck looked up at him; at least Herc hadn’t split his lip this time but he looked just as pissed as he had the first time. In the end, he didn’t even bother holding out his hand to help him up ‘cause he knew he’d slap it away and this whole escapade had not been the way to welcome him back from the dead. Stacker would never have done it. Then again, the closest thing Stacker had had to a kid was Mako Mori and she’d had a hell of a lot more respect in her than Chuck had ever had. So he left him there, picked up his boots and his jacket and left.

He took his aching arse to the showers after that, cleared everyone out because what use was it being marshal if it didn’t have its perks and besides, it wasn’t like the shatterdome didn’t have other shower rooms. He stepped in under the spray, sighed and bowed his head and wondered how the hell he’d managed to get himself into this bloody mess, or at least how it’d spiralled so far out of control.

But then there were hands at his hips and a forehead pressed down between his shoulder blades. He closed his eyes. He wished he weren’t relieved.

“I thought you’d left,” he said.

Chuck didn’t reply. He just pushed him forward, pushed him up against the wall and followed with him till Herc’s forearms and forehead rested down against the tiles and he paused there, pressed up against him.

“Are you going to drift with him again?” Chuck asked, his lips moving against Herc’s skin.

“Maybe I’m the only one who can,” he said, and fuck, he’d missed this. He was bloody disgusted with himself for it but he’d missed it, how Chuck’s hands moved over him, how his nails raked down over his abdomen and his fingers tightened around his cock. He wasn’t even hard yet and it was the best he’d had in weeks of trying to get himself off with his own hand in a bed where he remembered all the things he’d done with a fucking ghost in his head. He missed it ‘cause the real Chuck was so fucking distant. “He’s an arrogant arse. I can’t go inflicting him on some bloody recruit and that’s if he’d let me in the first place. He probably thinks he could pilot the damn jaeger by himself.”

“Sounds like me, yeah,” Chuck said, murmured against him, the agreement half-jarring. And then he stepped back and he walked away.

He was there when Herc got back to his quarters, sitting there on his bunk with his boots on the sheets, so Herc closed the door behind him and tossed his towel into the sink to deal with later.

“You know that drives me round the bend,” Herc said, gesturing to his boots on the bed, and Chuck shrugged against the wall.

“You know that’s why I do it,” he replied, then paused as he glanced at Herc then away again. “I’m not all that different from him, am I? I didn’t think I’d changed a lot since I didn’t actually die.”

Herc went over, chuckled tiredly as he did so, and sat himself down on the bunk right next to him so close he could feel the heat his body threw off. “You’re exactly like him,” he said. “You just learned how to talk crap through instead of insulting everyone who’s around you. Or, y’know, knocking them out.”

Chuck moved then, pulled himself up and shoved Herc down on his back and came back in to straddle his thighs. Herc let him do it. He’d long since stopped trying to protests.

“So I’m like him, yeah?”

Herc nodded, tucking his hands up out of the way under the pillow behind his head. “Yeah,” he said, “like I said, you’re exactly like him. ‘Cept you’re in my head.”

“So what if I’m not?”

“Not what? Like him?” Herc frowned as Chuck’s hands pushed his shirt up then went down to unbuckle his belt. Chuck smiled wryly, eyes on the buckle a second longer before he looked up, his hands going still.

“Not in your head,” he said, and suddenly he wasn’t smiling anymore.

Something in Herc’s chest went tight, something in his stomach flipped like a fucking pancake and he just looked at him for a moment after that, his hands going up to the bars in the headboard like that might steady him somehow. He took a breath, still unsteady, still watching him, trying to make that sentence make sense, figure out if he was being a bloody smartarse or what the fuck this was, but even Chuck had never been that much of a prick, at least not to him, or, hell, at least not often, at least not when it really counted. So he brought his hands down from under the pillow and he paused, flexing his fingers while Chuck looked at him like one or both of them might flee the damn room at any given second rather than do this. Then Herc put his hands down on Chuck’s thighs and fuck, fuck, he was solid, he was real, it was him.

“For fuck’s sake, Chuck!” Herc said, and he meant to jerk his hands away, he really did, except he didn’t quite manage it. “So what the fuck was all that while you were drifting around in a bloody lifeboat in the bloody Pacific? We were ghost drifting? You were alive all the time and you were just, what, pissing me around?”

“Look, I was as bloody surprised as you were that I was in that pod.” Chuck got up, pulled himself off the bed and stood there looking down at him so Herc stood, too, feeling ludicrous with his belt hanging unbuckled. “I thought I was dead. You thought I was dead. We all thought I was dead, alright? I don’t even have a bloody clue how I ended up in a pod. I thought I got blown up and I was a damn figment of your imagination as much as you did.”

“And so you thought you’d come in here and do what?”

“I thought I’d tell you I remember.”

“And I thought we agreed we’d forget what we saw in the drift.”

Chuck laughed then, sharply, bitterly. “‘Cause that’s worked so well for us so far, right?”

“It’s worked,” Herc said. “I don’t know about well, but it’s worked.”

“Till you thought I was dead and that made it okay for us to fuck.”

“I’m pretty sure that was your idea, you bloody genius.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you really tried to stop me.”

“I didn’t have a lot of choice, did I.”

And Chuck went to hit him and that was when Herc knew he’d pushed the whole damn thing too far. Chuck’s fist hit Herc’s jaw and Herc lashed out in response before he could stop himself and then they were fighting again, again, like bloody idiots because Herc supposed they were when it came down to it but then Jesus, it was something else again ‘cause they looked at each other there in the crappy shatterdome quarters they’d shared, all riled up and pissed off, and the next thing Herc knew he’d got his hands in Chuck’s hair and Chuck’s hands under the back of his shirt and they’d pressed together, mouths together, bodies together, the kiss almost bloody painful they went at it so damn hard. Herc’s head reeled. He could touch him. Jesus Christ, he could touch him.

They stumbled to the bed, tugged at each other, tugged at each other’s clothes but they were on the mattress before anything had come off at all, kneeling there with their hands all fucking over each other just the way they’d not been able to do before. Chuck shoved down Herc’s trousers, taking his underwear with them; Herc caught Chuck’s sweats and tugged them down too and bloody hell he knew he shouldn’t but if this whole fucking insane ordeal didn’t count as extenuating circumstances when all was said and done then he had no damn clue what did. Chuck pulled away, flushed red, breathing hard, and he turned awkwardly, dropped down on his hands and knees and rummaged for the lube they both knew Herc kept down there, there was no point denying they did. He passed it back to him with a hot glance and Herc was fucking shaking while he unscrewed the cap, as he squeezed it out over his fingers, as he smeared the stuff between Chuck’s cheeks and made his breath hitch. Then he slicked himself with it, quickly, thickly, tossed it onto the floor because fuck the fiddly-arse screw cap and damn, he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t, but he lined himself up and he pushed himself in.

He had Chuck’s hips in his hands as he moved, almost everything about what they were doing so familiar yet so fucking different now he could touch him, get his hands on him and not through empty air where he might’ve been if he’d just been real. He did it harder, deeper, skin slapping skin and Chuck’s hands went up to the headboard, finding leverage to push back against him till he pushed himself all the way up onto his knees and bloody hell, he wrapped his arms around Chuck’s waist and held him there as he flexed his hips, pushing into him, felt Chuck’s chest rise with his unsteady breath, let one hand stray down between Chuck’s thighs to wrap around the length of him. Maybe it was so fucked up he should’ve felt ashamed or maybe they both should’ve but Chuck gasped in a breath and his hips bucked and Herc knew neither one of them was going to last, at least not this time, like that meant there’d be other times and his face felt hot and his cock bloody well twitched at the thought of that. Other times. A future. They had a future.

Chuck came with a shout that he didn’t try to muffle then cursed under his breath because it was like he’d forgotten he was real just as much as Herc ever had and forgotten was the fuck discretion was with it. Herc wasn’t long after, a few jerky thrusts of his hips, uneven because he just didn’t have the will in him to keep control as he came and came and came with his arms wrapped tight around Chuck there from behind, his face pressed down against his shoulder. Then Chuck pulled away and went down and pulled Herc with him, on top of him, kissed him, kissed him, bloody well kissed him till they neither of them had breath left and all they could do was look at each other, Herc stretched out on top of him, their dogtags clashing together on Chuck’s chest.

“Don’t you dare let anyone else get into a jaeger with me,” Chuck said as he reached up, took Herc’s stubbled face in his hands.

Herc nodded down at him. “I won’t,” he said. “It’s you and me, kid. Promise.”

In a way, it always had been.

---

They were in the jaeger three days later, suited up they way they always had been though some smartarse had tacked on four stars to each shoulder of Herc’s drivesuit. They went into the drift and brought the jaeger online, the link strong as it’d ever been. And they took her out for a spin.

They ate together in the mess hall afterwards; Raleigh and Mako came over, paused, but Chuck just nodded curtly and so the two of them sat down. Herc couldn’t see the three of them ever being the best of pals but hell, even that much was progress. Who knew, maybe civil conversation might not be impossible after all.

“I’m moving back in,” Chuck said, once they’d left the hall, in the corridor on the way back to Herc’s quarters. Herc just chuckled under his breath and reached up to ruffle Chuck’s hair as obnoxiously as he knew how ‘cause it wasn’t like he’d been living in the new quarters they’d moved him to anyway. He just went back there for clothes and the rest of the time he was there in the room they’d shared before he hadn’t died. No one questioned it. Everyone knew better than to question jaeger pilots ‘cause none of them ever made a great deal of sense.

They stripped each other down behind closed doors; Herc went down on his knees and Chuck laughed at him till he took him in his mouth and then told him all about the time the fella from the Academy had done that for him till Herc pulled back and told him if he didn’t shut his idiot mouth he’d be sleeping in the corridor, possibly naked. And in the morning, when the Jaeger Peacekeeper Program was due to officially go online, all six teams in place and tentative plans to bring in a seventh wreck for work, Chuck made him put on his uniform. Even the damn hat.

“You’re a bloody awful father, marshal,” Chuck told him, smirking, but there was no venom to it at all as Chuck fixed his tie with a practiced eye.

“You’re a crap son, ranger,” Herc replied, with a smile and a crisp salute that Chuck returned before he paused a second.

“I’m proud of you, dad,” he said after that, and Herc nodded, tugging his cuffs straight.

“I’ve always been proud of you,” he said, and he meant it. So Chuck knocked the hat off his head and stepped in close to kiss him, got himself caught on Herc’s uniform buttons and in the end it was such a bloody three ring circus that Herc had to take his jacket off to get them apart, laughing at each other, pushing and pulling till Herc’s tie was out of place again and he’d messed up Chuck’s artistically messy hair.

It wasn’t perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn’t anyone’s idea of ideal, not even theirs, maybe especially not theirs; they still fought, they still argued pretty bitterly and pretty regularly and threw their weight around till no one wanted to come near them but there it was, it was what they had. It was all they had - a spoiled bulldog, the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, and each other. It was all Herc wanted. He might’ve lost a lot but he was a lot more happy than not.

They left the room together, side by side, and went to face the cameras as they introduced the world to their new jaeger program.

They left the room together, side by side. They made a crap father and a fucking dreadful son, but they made good partners.