a music to attenuate the skin at the heart's surface
...
Herc wakes suddenly at 2:06 am. He considers the silent humid dark for a long moment, holds his breath on the offchance there's something a shade too faint to hear, and still: nothing. Clearly, he's been awakened by a disturbance in the Force, and there's nothing to be done but that he has to get up and figure it out.
He rolls out of his bunk with a groan, sore from the time in-harness and the adrenaline crash of relief when the kaiju K-Watch named Onibaba cut north and east again toward Tokyo and Coyote Tango's area of coverage, instead of westward for Hong Kong and Lucky Seven's stomping grounds. Herc rotates his stiff right shoulder a couple times and stretches before heading out of his bedroom (or whatever he's supposed to call it) into even more oppressive heat of the common room of the Hansen quarters to sort out whatever it is woke him.
Absolutely nothing is out of the ordinary. Chuck's asleep in his own room, sprawled out with the stuffed dog he resolutely refuses to acknowledge he still sleeps with every night. Scott's sacked out in the bathtub with a wastebasket tucked under his arm and a damp washrag thrown over his face, because he still gets migraines after every drop. No lights are on, nothing's on fire, nothing's wrong (or any more wrong than it already is) in Herc's private corner of the world, so he shuffles back to bed, checks that his alarm is still set to go off at six and is just about drifted back off again when his phone vibrates against his desk with an incoming message from Stacker: HERC!
Scrolling back shows him it was the first message from Stacker that must've woke him, a more polite Herc, you up? following several hours after a series of messages promising he'd come through the engagement against Onibaba all clear and that he'd let Herc know when he and Tim-Tams got back into Hong Kong.
am now, Herc sends back. what do you want?
I need help.
Herc drops his head back into the uncomfortable pillow. ?
I think I stole a kid.
He squints at the message, blinks several times, and tries to refocus what must be a hell of a lot of sleep muzziness out of his eyes, but it doesn't make it resolve into some sort of sentence that makes any kind of sense. Being Tamsin's oh-two has pushed staid and stalwart Stacker into pulling no few questionably pranks in the last year and change but this is a little much, even for Stacker Pentecost's occasionally questionable sense of judgment. Herc's just trying to figure out how to respond when the next message comes in: She's crying now and I don't know what to do, I need ideas Herc!
The exclamation points are what does it, and Herc pulls on a t-shirt over his sweatpants and stuffs his feet into his unlaced boots to cross the shatterdome to Stacker's quarters.
The metal door swings open a moment after Herc's knock, and there's Stacker, frantic look on his face above where a young girl, Chuck's age at absolute oldest, is clinging to his shoulders and making the most dreadful, miserable noise Herc's heard since he had to tell Chuck his mum died.
"What do I do, Herc?"
This is how Herc Hansen meets Mako Mori for the first time.
...
Herc Hansen meets Mako Mori many times. There's the day he meets Mako the aspiring engineer, the day he meets Mako the polyglot, the day he meets Mako the budding martial artist (which is the same day Chuck meets Mako the surprisingly competent martial artist, given she's just begun lessons, and Herc and Stacker have to pull them spitting and swearing off each other because Herc's still trying to teach Chuck that it's possible to be honest and to have manners at the same time and Chuck chooses not to believe him), the day he meets Mako the dog lover. He meets Mako: Academy cadet, Mako: rising star, Mako: his son's future copilot, Mako: disappointed teenaged girl. Herc meets Mako the project manager, Mako the gamechanger, Mako the girl-with-the-answers, Mako the would-be ranger who doesn't give up.
"You really think you can keep that girl of yours out of a Jaeger?" he asks Stacker.
"I can damn well try," Stacker says back. "I just want her safe, as far and away out of danger as I can manage."
Herc tips his (weak, watery, altogether disappointing) beer in salute. "Then maybe you should have thought twice about letting her at a robot named Danger, hmm?"
Stacker groans, and crosses his own bottle with Herc's. "Walked into that one, didn't I." He sighs. "'Least I didn't have to give her the lecture on boys 'n girls 'n breakin' hearts."
No. Herc supposes he didn't. Chuck will only hate him forever for that one. Lucky for them then the world's ending soon enough that forever isn't going to be that much longer a time anyhow. He can swallow Chuck's disappointment, and Mako's too, but what he doesn't need to say because Stacker knows it just as damn well is that the safest place anymore is on the front lines and that girl won't be kept off them even if the whole planet lines up in her way.
He raises his bottle to Stacker's again and says, "To the apocalypse and our children's forgiveness, whichever one comes first."
"Glory glory hallulujah and amen to that."
...
Then there's the day Herc meets Mako Mori, Jaeger pilot, and he can't even properly shake her hand. Chuck's bitter gratitude sits heavy in the back of Herc's head as he thanks her and her copilot for them both, and he thinks maybe to apologize for not standing down and out of her way when he should've (like that honestly could have changed anything—it might've, thinks Chuck—), but then in walks Stacker and the count goes on—
This is how Herc Hansen meets Mako Mori for the last time: he's the fixed point left standing behind when the saints go marching out, and he thinks he understands her and Stacker just a little bit better, being the one left behind at the end. Forgiveness it is then, he wants to say to Stacker, but there's just never enough time to say the things that need saying, or enough time to ask, What do I do? How do I do this, Stacker?
But then of course Mako resurfaces and it's the first time they meet all over again, because the Mako Herc met at twelve (at fourteen, at seventeen, eighteen and twenty-one) never stops being Mako the survivor, and if Herc hasn't constantly mistaken resilience for identity since he left Herc the soldier-pilot-husband-father behind to be atomized in Sydney and started being only Herc the ranger-fer-chrissakes—
(He has an old dog now but as for the man himself, he's not too far gone he can't learn a few new tricks.)
...
Herc wakes suddenly at 10:40 pm. He considers the tablet in his lap with the daily news still pulled up, the glow from the lamp over his left shoulder and the beat of the rain on the windows, then starts for the barest moment when the cellphone in his pocket buzzes again with an incoming message. He rises from the chair that's far less comfortable than it seemed to be when he sat down to rest his eyes for a moment while he waited, and tabs up through the messages Mako sent hours ago about the progress of her layovers searching for the newest ones. Landed safely in Sydney! We're looking forward to seeing you soon!
Herc palms his keys and ties his boots at the door. All is well (as well as it can be) in Herc's private corner of the world.
...
notes: Thank you for reading!