Her Bulldog Boy

by mimimarsbars

She is eight when Trespasser attacks San Francisco in 2013. She is ten when Karloff destroys her home in Vancouver. She is eleven when she arrives on the steps of the Hong Kong Shatterdome and asks for Hercules Hansen. She is thirteen the first time Chuck Hansen kisses her. She is fifteen the first time she realizes she's in love. (Chuck/OC - Rated M for later chapters)

1. Chapter 1 - Age 8

Her parents run around the room in a flurry, pulling out drawers and stuffing things carelessly into suitcases as they continue on a rampage throughout the apartment. Outside, the ground shakes with the weight of two giants. As Karloff destroys the vicinity of their Vancouver apartment, the Emmett family struggled to gather their belongings and run to safety, if such a thing was possible.

"Charles, we're out of time!" Her mother yells as the sound of the jets gets nearer and nearer. Evidently, that's the last thing she says, as in the second after the last syllable leaves her mouth the side of the building her mother is in is ripped into the air, and the terrifying face of Karloff is exposed through the new hole. She is eight, and the cry of absolute despair that erupts from her mouth at the loss of her mother is one the world will never forget. But there is little time to mourn.

"Go!" Her father yells, pushing her out the door and towards then window on the opposite side. He throws a red backpack at her as she stumbles out on to the fire escape and beings climbing down.

"Daddy!" She calls behind her, pausing to glance backwards just as he climbs out on to the rickety metal staircase.

"I'm right behind you!" He yells back desperately, fleeing two flights behind his daughter. But the next giant is not Karloff, it is a being of metal and fire. She screamed as the first Jaeger deployed to fight a kaiju swings, taking off the top half of the building and the portion of the fire escape attached, the same portion with her father on it, into the air. Then she cries for her father as she runs, the too-large red backpack swinging on her shoulders. She hits the ground and keeps running, stumbling and tearing the skin on her hands and arms as she ducks through destroyed alleys and torn down buildings in an attempt to evade the monster rampaging through the city.

When the police scour the city for survivors, they find her curled up in the remains of a bank, hugging the backpack to her chest as she hid beneath the shattered remains of a wooden desk. Later, when she sits in the small make-shift hospital area allocated for the survivors, she digs through the backpack and finds an old cigar box filled with odds and ends: an old Swiss Army Knife, a marathon bib, and a crumbling photo of two men with their arms around each other in what looks like an airplane hanger. She flips the photo over and finds, in scrawling handwriting that isn't her father's, "I OWE YOU - HERC HANSEN."

She has found her lifeline. Herc Hansen, wherever he is, whoever he is, is her last chance.

*Quick A/N: this is an AU-ish in which Chuck grows up in the Hong Kong Shatterdome with his father, Pentecost, and Mako Mori, although in canonverse he and his father live in Sydney until they join the Jaeger program when he is twelve. Otherwise, enjoy!