Inspired by THE FIRST CIRCLE ( THE KNIGHT, DEATH, AND THE DEVIL ) by Cerulean_Spork. In which, many headcanons are drawn and borrowed from Cerulean_Spork, all similarities are deliberately made if just because the sheer awesomeness that is their fic.
XXX
last line drawn in sand and surf
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She meets him first.
You meet her last.
(But when you do, it is like that first circle coming to a close. Turning the one dimensional into the two, eyes to the curve of her lips, line into shape, press of his against your own.)
And you meet him only because he is RAAF and you're RAF, and flyboys like you have the sky in your reach even when you're craving to be grounded by something, someone, that haven't come along your way. Yet, neither him nor you have figured out that part of the equation. You meet him only because your sister and her girlfriend, your best friend, like to meddle in your business, your straight laced business that they tangle into knots. Calling you on your day off at 0800 just to invite you to your favourite pub later that night, because oh hey bro, and you know that nothing goes the way you want it to when she starts a conversation sounding like she wants a favour already.
There's someone Tam and I want you to meet.
And you don't quite know what to expect.
But when you finally arrive, 12 hours after Luna's call, in your favourite bar with Tamsin already pressing a dripping bottle of beer into your hands, you meet him.
You meet Hercules Hansen.
You don't find him quiet or loud, or anything out of the ordinary when you're standing just ten steps away from where the man stands. But in comparison—in retrospect, you really did noticed him quite a bit from the crowd, and there, there really were quite a few of his boys and your boys (and girls) all mingling into one place—and in comparison, he is simply better company than the pilot with the same last name, where in place of his H, there is a stitched S that you aren't inclined to find out on instincts alone.
He is in uniform even though you aren't, and you can spot each other out from the crowd. You don't know how, you've barely met the other man for ten minutes. But there he is, Hercules Hansen, standing out from the rest. It means something, to have you meeting him in the low lights of your favourite pub, but what it really means doesn't come to you until years later.
For now, it is the kind of night that is not at all what you expect.
Well, what you, Stacker Pentecost, mean is that there is a wedding ring on his finger but he is smiling at you in the way that people do when they are already in your bed and asking for more with their heads canting back, throat bared, like you're the only one for them. (You're not, not then, not now, and certainly not ever.)
It's tricky but Luna manages, somehow, to have the two of you sitting right next to each other. Cool beers dripping rings against the table top, Tamsin crowding you in, even closer until your thigh is touching his. You can't tell whether Luna is crowding him on the other side, pushing him close enough so there are only his uniform pants and your jeans between skin, but he hasn't stood up from his seat.
You make polite conversation, he smiles but only just so, Luna grins, and Tamsin begins a game of footsie under the table until everyone's boots are scuffed.
You learn that you're younger than him by five years, but you don't look a day younger with the serious set to your shoulders, and he tells you just that, a slip of an almost dare in the way he looks straight at you and manages not to look away.
(And when you look over at him some day, you are reminded of this very first time you meet the man, how his smile curves over his lips but only just so. A tilt in the corner because he allows you to catch that glimpse, the smile that is brighter in his eyes.)
For another moment, you hold his gaze, you hold that gaze and you try to put into perspective of what he is trying to say without any words or maybe just a different set of words than the ones he is saying now.
What he says, you will remember to this day, because what he says tells you of a woman named Angela Hansen, Ange, he corrects you like you already know her, like she would be personally offended if you didn't call her the way her husband calls her.
And you don't know what that entails for you, to learn the secrets of a woman that you haven't met.
It isn't until later, when you're lying on your bed and he is on the right of you, that what you thought of, in that moment, truly hits you. That Ange is a woman you haven't met, that she is one you will.
.
Tamsin drains her bottle, orders another round for everyone at the table like she's being paid to. Hansen tries to decline, but Tam has always been more persuasive than anyone gives her credit for. For a second, you almost imagined that she would try this trick, that you would show up and she would say, here's a lap full of drunk but surprisingly coherent Aussie we picked up on our way home from work, and you're grateful that she'd left her new friend alone.
Or maybe that she has tried, considering how Hansen and you can probably drink each other under the table.
With the way Luna and Tamsin keep looking at you, you figured that's exactly what they want, and you're not going to satisfy them, if only to prove to them that meddling will do them no good.
S. Hansen comes up to your table, one arm wrapped around the waist of a woman that is pretty and petite, the other slung carelessly over the shoulders of another, fingers clutching around a half-emptied bottle. And for a man that is already on his way to being well and truly drunk, you learn that the S. stands for Scott and this image he presents barely encompasses half of what he is well and truly capable of.
The man has a smile, stretched out wide over his liquor-shined mouth when he looks to his brother, to Tamsin, then Luna, before dropping back over his brother.
And the way he has Hercules scowling as he waves off the salute the younger Hansen is already tossing to the floor on his way out the door, you would think this isn't the first time Hercules has been left without a room to return to.
Your sister and her girlfriend look to you.
.
You don't own a couch.
But you do own a bed that is big enough for two.
.
In the silence, before he falls asleep and you follow, he turns over, and you don't know if he is lying on his back or if he has turned to look at you. What you do know is that he asks you a question, and the fact that you can imagine his smile with those words that come next is something you never intend to learn when you meet him in the half light of your favourite bar.
"What you thinkin' about?"
You think of many things in that moment, most of them him, but the words that leave the tip of your tongue has you smiling in the dark. You don't know how to place it, but you do have a man you've just met lying in the same bed you've only just woke up in this morning. You don't know how to place this swell of what might be appreciation or belief or trust or the many things going through your head.
But it is this that comes out, and this that sticks.
"World domination."
"…Huh."
He turns over again in the dark.
You don't wake up in his arms, and he doesn't wake up with your legs tangled around his. You wake up on the left side of the bed, and him on the right. Seeing him in last night's uniform, and having him sit at your kitchen counter, drinking a fresh cup of coffee from one of your mugs, is a thing that you wished you could capture in a photograph, years in the future when you finally dare to—
What you think about, and what he tells you with resignation in a tragically ironic way, is whether Scott's naked arse will be covered with something, anything really, when he steps through the door. And you don't need memory of what Hercules has seen to want the mere thought of that image out of your head.
.
He goes home to Sydney, Australia.
And you remain stationed across an ocean and then some. It is two years later, when H. becomes Hercules and Hercules becomes Herc in a series of emails and the rare phone calls the two of you exchange, that you, Stacker Pentecost, go to see the Hansens at their home.
Even though this is a deliberate plan you make all on your own, you still find yourself surprised that the next time you're on leave, you're touching down in Sydney and meeting a woman that introduces herself as Angela Hansen for the first time.
She makes sure you catch that it's Ange.
She is tiny in comparison to you, and the way she smiles at you is the same way her husband, your friend, smiled at you that very first time. It is also then that you realize that the Hansens are not at all what you expect when she is motioning to Sydney's landmark, wedding ring gleaming bright in the sun.
(And you love that too, but you only come to realize that when you are years down the road and you've spent more of your leave with them than you do with Luna and Tamsin who just smile like they did when they both turn to look at you in that moment you agree to take Herc home.)
In that moment though, you're met with a red-face toddler that is doing his best to scream and bite at both his mother and you all at the same time. You can't quite tell which he is succeeding at, just that the boy has yet to take a pound of your flesh with his baby teeth.
And you call that a victory all on your part.
Or at least you dare to until Chuck Hansen tries again.
.
He's never been the kind of man that initiates contact but when he sees you again in person, he is pulling you into an embrace.
"Stacks."
"Herc."
He touches a fingertip to where Chuck has sunk his teeth into your arm, and smiles before he tells you that it's probably better to get some disinfectant on that. You agree if only because you can imagine what else Chuck has taken a bite out of in a span of a day. Herc leads you into the bathroom where the counter is a clutter of things, and you try not to notice the way Herc's shirt hikes up, if just by a sliver, when he is rummaging for the first aid kit on the top shelf.
"Sorry 'bout that," what you don't notice is that the mirror catches everything. Herc swipes the wiping alcohol across your skin, it is cool and it dissipates quickly, he continues. "Chuck's at that stage where the world needs to be explored through taste alone."
He shrugs when he sticks a bright blue bandage with tiny brown dogs over the bite and you look to him like he's lost his mind. Herc only holds up the box of doggy band-aids and tells you that the sprog likes dogs, a lot he adds.
There is a smile and a soft chuckle that follows, somewhere, one that catches in your throat when you see the bright red imprints up and down Herc's arms. Instead, you raise an eyebrow.
The way Herc brandishes his arms, shows off the bruises and the bite marks like the proud father that he is, has you slowly smiling too.
You follow his lead, touch a finger to one that looks the newest.
.
It isn't until Angela walks by, almost distracted at the mess Chuck's made of himself with his food, that you step away from Herc, feeling guilty because you're standing in the tiny bathroom with your fingers on her husband's arm.
And you don't understand the meaning behind the way they looked to each other, but you see that they do.
After all, the mirror catches everything.
.
They take you to the beach, and it's habitual to spend your leave with them now.
Driving for miles with their music coming from the CD player of their car, and the songs coming from between their lips, you sit there in the front seat while Herc drives and Ange sits in the back with Chuck dozing against her side. The windows are rolled down low, and there is the sun in your eyes, bright even with the sunglasses you've got perched on your nose.
They are so well prepared with their umbrella, and their towels, and a picnic basket for when Chuck gets hungry, and then one for when everyone else is hungry, that you can't help but wonder if they'd done this for anyone else before. Or if this is just the kind of hospitality all Australians show their foreign friends.
Or if this, Herc dragging you off to the water, and this, Ange following you into the waves, and this, you lying stretched out on a towel with Chuck lying sprawled in the crook of your arm when his parents are kicking up sand and foam by the edge of the Pacific, are all just the three of you left to your own devices.
You decide not to ask.
Only in that moment though, because you decide otherwise, later that night, when you are sitting between them on the couch that pulls out into a bed. The one you've been sleeping on for your past two visits, this marking the start of your third.
Chuck's upstairs, asleep in his bed, and you come to wonder why thinking of the tiny child who has taken a bite out of you on the day you've first touch downed in Sydney has you so concerned. But you also come to learn that you wonder about their little boy so you don't have to think about the man on your right and the woman on your left and the way they are pressed so close.
You ask, that night, but they don't answer with words.
.
Ange touches a hand to your arm, and you should pull away. Take a step back, smile something offhandedly polite, and fundamentally not you in the way that they know you. And they know you is what goes unsaid.
"Stacks," she starts, like she is worried that you would run when you've crossed an ocean and then some, to meet her, not once or twice, but three times now. "Those emails, phone calls, the leaves you spend with us instead of Luna and Tam, we've been—"
"I have Chuck's baby pictures." You blurt out because this is the moment that follows the one where you ask, and they tell you with a brush of her mouth against yours, his fingers splaying across your thigh. One that has you making a haste escape into their kitchen.
Ange smiles, but she isn't just that, it isn't just that she is Ange since that first time you met Herc but that Herc has sent you pictures of his newborn baby and his wife in her hospital gown still. So, instead of doing just that, pulling away like you've been burnt by fire you can't see, you let her touch one hand to your skin, and then a second.
It is the third one that has you settling in your place.
You don't turn around, not fully, just enough so you can catch the sight of Herc's ginger hair just over your shoulder, where he is smiling brightly at you with his eyes, not that his mouth isn't tilted into one.
"Glad to see you've caught up with the program, mate."
And when Hercules kisses you, your mouth follows in the curve of his.
.
They own a couch.
They also own a bed big enough for three.
.
You feel like you're driving on the wrong side of the road when you look at him and her, lying on either side of you. And there should be alarms, or at the very least a how-to manual, if only so you don't fuck up royally.
But lying here, you see him in the low light, in the sunlight that is filtering through their blinds. It is in the morning that follows that you don't understand, in all the years that you've known this man, how you've never tried to have him like you do now.
You turn over, so you're lying on your back, and it is in the shadows still left in the Hansens' bedroom that you realize that you are never going to be bright when it comes to him, to her, to them both. Not when Herc has his nose pressed into your neck, and every breath comes shuddering across your skin, or when Angela has one leg draped over your own. Or that the two of them have their hands laced across your chest, the metal of their wedding rings warm against your skin.
And there's something like propriety that crossed your mind, once, last night, when you weren't stumbling your way to fit between them for the first time.
(When they aren't whispering something ridiculous into your ears from either side, Aussie accent dropping low and thick for your sake because you learn that you like the way his stubble scratches against your chest as he makes his way down. You learn that you like that a lot.)
"…What you thinkin' about?"
Ange murmurs, sleep thick in her voice when she feels you shift, like she can also feel the gears turning in your head. You make to answer, but it's Herc that lifts his head from the pillow to reply.
"World domination still, Stacks?"
And you wonder, in the blend of low light and the still dark of the room, when you've drawn that last line that connects you to them and them right back to you.
"Maybe later," you tell them with a slight yawn, "I'm good right now."
Your yawn is contagious as they follow, shifting to burrow deeper into their sheets and your sides. But their hands don't move from where they rest over your heart, and this isn't anything you expect. The Hansens are just that, they are not at all what you expect. You know, and you love that too.
"Good," they say.
And it really is.
XXX Kuro