Written for the kinkmeme prompt: Herc has drifted with more people than anyone else, which must be extraordinary when you consider that most pilots seem to stick to one partner. What must it be like to have shared the memories of so many people, in some cases probably even people he didn't even like all that much? I imagine it must be exhausting and to a certain extent also traumatizing. Does he get nightmares? Moments of confusion when he suddenly remembers things that didn't actually happen to him? What happened to his previous co-pilots and did he also lose one of them while being connected to them, like Raleigh did with Yancy?
TLDR: any look at what years of co-piloting with different people did to him.
Bonus if permanently working together with Chuck is actually really good for Herc's sanity, despite all the tension between them.
XXX
left hemisphere; right hemisphere
XXX
The first time, they call it drift compatibility.
The second time, they call it lucky.
Third time, fourth time, they begin to see a pattern, but only with him. Fifth time, sixth time, seventh time, they call it universal compatibility and wants to know what makes him tick. If they don't need him so bad, he won't be surprised if he wakes up one day, strapped on his back to a metal table being cut wide open. He doesn't know how apt that analogy comes to be, years down the road, when he's drifted with more people than anyone else in the corps, has had his head cut wide open for enough men and women to work their way through.
Hercules Hansen doesn't have a word for what they call universal compatibility. Only that when his co-pilot strikes, he blocks, and when they fall, he follows.
They ask how.
He stands there, at parade rest, looking at the men who should be his superiors but are treating him like equals. It is not only then that Herc learns, but that it takes a long time for a military man like himself to get used to, that there are no ranks, not that there isn't any but that it matters very little in the PPDC.
They wait for his answer.
.
"It's a conversation."
He tells them, eventually.
.
In retrospect, there may have been a better way to put it. The way an exchange goes between co-pilot to co-pilot, left hemisphere to right hemisphere. But he has never been a man of words.
He hasn't been a man of many things since the monsters start emerging from the breach.
.
The drop is a countdown, a mental preparation.
What he doesn't know to tell them is that compatibility is many things.
That it is curling his arms tighter around Angela when she presses her freezing feet to his shins, him half asleep and still hissing from the cold, her laughing something low before laying a kiss to the line of his jaw. That it is the two of them making room between their bodies for when Charlie crawls into their bed in the middle of the night.
That it is him throwing a football in the yard to have Scott catching it.
That it is him opening up for the taking, and fully expecting the same in return.
.
[…Initiating…]
.
Before Chuck, there is Scott. And before Scott, well, there is many more.
Back then, Scott is still Scotty, and he can still call Chuck Charlie. It goes to show that universal compatibility is not a familial trait, how Scott refuses to drift with anyone else but his brother or how Chuck can only drift with his father, that a drift with anyone else seems to gut the two of them inside out.
(Maybe, they've seen what it does to him.
Maybe, they know they aren't half as strong as Hercules.
Or maybe, they are just smarter men than the old fool he's become.
What he knows though, and what they don't teach the class, is that the drift is not whole. It is made of fragments and snatches of memories and desires and dreams and nightmares all in one, moving in and out of themselves in the back of that shared headspace. It's an expanse of the sea, the depth of an ocean. It is not linear, and it is not as easy as it seems to pick a single memory out of a co-pilot's mind.)
Herc doesn't pilot a Jaeger with all of his co-pilots, and he's glad for it.
.
They aren't nightmares.
Because they don't scare him.
But when he wakes up with his back drenched in cold sweat, fists clenched into his sheets, and foreign fear gripping at his heart, he figures he's got to give them a name. They are nightmares, ones that aren't his own, not entirely, at the very least. Because when you've drifted with as many men and women as he has, your mind is not your own.
Maybe that should scare him, but so should staring into the eyes of the grotesque monsters making land from the bottom of the Pacific, and yet, here he is, throwing a mean right hook into the bastard's face.
.
"What was that."
That isn't a question in and out of itself. Herc rubs a hand down his face and sits up on his bunk, looking if just for a second to see that they haven't woke Chuck up on the top bunk. Scott isn't easily fazed, but that is certainly unease when he makes to put down his glass of PPDC's piss-poor excuse of what could've been scotch.
"Forget about it, Scott. That isn't your—" Herc bites his tongue, it doesn't go unnoticed but many things don't when they share such close quarters and that doesn't even include half of what makes them co-pilots to Lucky Seven, "that isn't either of our business."
Scott drains his glass, and Herc tries not to wince when Scott looks at him again.
"That wasn't."
Herc shakes his head.
Scott falls silent, and he never does that.
.
Herc hates it. But he comes to hate a great deal of things by the end of the war.
.
Scott should be comfort.
But he is a surprise.
He is an answer to that decade old question.
"What'd you do this time?"
At best, he will get a cheeky grin when the kid extends his scrapped knees out to his older brother, a quip of some kind that Herc could laugh at, if only he knew the inside joke that only Scott seems to know. And at worst, well, Herc would know the answer, know what he did, this time around.
Because there is always a next time when it comes to Scott Hansen.
.
When it happens, it happens.
He doesn't pick it out of the drift quite as quickly as he should have.
But he's fit his head into his little brother for too many drops, caught his throw on the other end of the yard in their childhood home too many times. It isn't faded or distant, neither is it at the forefront of their headspace. What is, however, is the Kaiju intending to tear them in two.
Their drift rips into halves.
.
His right hook is still a mean one when he catches his fist all wrong on Scott's face.
.
Chuck doesn't ask that decade old question Herc can finally answer.
Figured out the inside joke to it all and doesn't have the heart to laugh, just sits there with bruises around his eyes, bandages around his right hand, his tray untouched, and Scott still in the infirmary.
Chuck slumps into the seat across from him at Lucky's table in the mess hall. His eyes are red-rimmed, and Herc remembers that a younger Chuck has always been a bit of a cry baby. Herc also remembers that Chuck isn't so much older now.
"You didn't have to come."
"Sydney isn't so faraway," Chuck shrugs, picks a piece of meat from his dad's plate and carefully chews. The boy has never been careful, he shouldn't be now, and Herc hates that it has come to this, too.
"Sydney isn't so close to the Academy either."
"The Marshal had room on his chopper."
Herc just smiles faintly into a spoonful of mashed potato.
.
He isn't smiling when he learns who his next co-pilot is, but Chuck is. And that counts for something.
(It counts for everything, it has to.)
.
"Ready, old man?"
They don't agree on a lot of things, but they can both agree that Striker's a beauty.
"Have some respect."
.
The drift is not the same every single time but the drop is.
Herc has learned not to take comfort in any of it.
.
Half a decade of drifting with his son earns them ten kills to their name.
Half a decade later, he still wakes up remembering someone else's memories as his own. But it is few and far in between. Chuck doesn't complain when he sits up in his bunk and sees his father stripping his sweat drenched sheets for fresh ones in the morning, just lays back down to rub the sleep from his eyes and waits. He doesn't point out that dad nearly shouts himself hoarse in the middle of the night. He doesn't tell him that he can catch the shadowy edges of some of it when it gets really bad. Most of all, Chuck doesn't tell his father that he just focuses on the ghosting between them so Herc can cling to that instead of following after someone else's drift memories from half a decade back.
There is tension, there will always be tension.
But no one drifts with their co-pilot for half a decade and still calls his head his own.
No one drifts as long as Hercules Hansen and came out sane.
.
Chuck doesn't ask, he simply steels himself into the right side of Striker Eureka and lets the fragments and snatches of the drift wash him by.
What he doesn't need dad to tell him is that compatibility is many things.
That for him, it is his mother smelling like that perfume she likes when she presses a kiss to the crown of his head. That it is his father swinging him on to his shoulders underneath the bright Australian sun. That it is climbing into his parent's bed in the middle of the night and knowing that a space will simply open up between them for him.
.
The drift is knowing where to hit so it hurts the most.
The drift is also trusting your co-pilot enough to have them not do exactly that.
XXX Kuro