xi.
The first time Noel ever sees Hope is when he moves in with Lightning to the last open shatterdome, years after his graduation from the Jaeger academy.
He's talking with Serah - and no matter how many times the woman whined, he would stand his ground and deem himself (with no small amount of embarrassment) too old to keep calling her aunt - at the Command Center when the silver haired engineer enters the room, arms full with a variety of blueprints. He barely nods as some people greet him before moving to a small cubicle, spreading the papers all over the table and then giving them his utmost attention.
When he asks Serah who the man is, all she does is look between them in silence for a moment before telling him he was their new head engineer, tasked with the upgrading of the Jaegers they had left.
Looking back at the other, Noel had made a small noise of appreciation at the back of his throat. Good. They needed all the personnel they could gather if they wanted the Jaeger program to stand tall once more.
Hope doesn't see him staring that day.

xii.
The first time Hope ever sees Noel is when he is in front of an old mark II Jaeger, overseeing the first trial with its new core, and the young brunet runs past him to meet a pink haired woman ahead.
When he identifies the woman as being the very important Marshall Farron, he thinks the kid must be either crazy or very brave to talk so freely with their figure of authority but when she turns - surprised, of course - and smiles at brunet, he connects the dots.
This must be the boy she took in after Onibaba's attack at New Bodhum, her last mission as a Jaeger pilot. He had known he was young but even now, he didn't look much older than early twenties.
Noel, he believed his name was.
He seemed well and happy, considering his traumatic past. Huh.
He wished he could say the same about himself.
Noel doesn't see him staring that day.

xiii.
They actually meet each other during a briefing.
Running late, Noel is the last one to arrive and he quietly sneaks into the conference room, standing by the door as not to attract attention to himself. Sighing in relief when he takes notice that the Marshall is just starting her speech, he pats his chest and tries to control his breathing - it was a long run! - before he startles, hearing someone shamelessly but still quietly snicker to his right.
Looking over, he sees the new head engineer eying him with amusement, a hand covering what's sure to be a small, teasing grin.
Apologizing for interrupting is the only thing that runs through his head so that's what he does, a hand reaching to rub the back of his head in embarrassment.
He is surprised when another hand is extended under his nose.
Looking up as he took it, Noel sees the other man give him a wider smile and presenting himself quietly.
Hope, he said his name was. Fitting, considering his position in the program.
He had barely gotten his name out and dropped Hope's hand when Lightning's voice boomed across the room, making him jerk back against the wall and shrink under her familiar glare. He felt ten and with his hand in the cookie tin all over again.
Plus, the whole room was holding back snickers. It was humiliating.
Flushing to the tips of his ears, he gave the tiniest nods: he knew he was in the wrong and he was sorry. Holding Lightning's reproaching glare until she looked away, Noel sagged with relief before stealing a quick glance at Hope, sure that he would be embarrassed as well and wouldn't even spare him another glance until the briefing was over.
To his surprise, the man was obviously holding back laughter. He did look back at him when he felt his stare burning a hole on his back but he even had the guts to give him a small shrug, face passive as ever.
Noel narrowed his eyes, lips stretching into an amused grin. So that was how it was gonna be…
His curiosity had officially been picked.

xiv.
Noel was... everywhere.
When he had first arrived at the shatterdome, the occasions in which Hope would lay eyes on the brunet were few. Now, ever since their little exchange during Marshall Farron's latest briefing... The man would pop up everywhere he went.
Noel would always see him, no matter how much he tried to hide. It wasn't that he didn't like him; he just preferred to focus on his work instead of making friends in the workplace.
He would always run up to him and strike a conversation, too.
Noel was chatty. He was loud. He moved too much: he could practically smell the golden retriever deep within him.
He was... admittedly a breath of fresh air.

xv.
Hope was... an enigma.
Although he had been in the shatterdome for a while, he didn't seem to regularly interact with anyone – besides him and that was practically forced on him - and when he did, it was quick and professional.
There was little human warmth in his actions, yet he cared enough to help their project.
It made him insanely curious. That decided it.
He began a little personal quest: get to know the man beneath the cold exterior.
At first, he tried to ask around about the man's past - the past is what molded people into who they were, after all or so Noel believed - but all he got were head shakes and murmurs about how they knew nothing of Hope, leaving him no other option that to run right up to the one person he knew would know something: Lightning.
The pink haired woman refused to tell him anything.
Noel was stunned into silence for a moment, watching as his mentor stared up at him as if waiting for further questions. When asked why she wouldn't answer him, Lightning simply told him it was not her place to tell - that if he was so interested in the other man, that he should strike up a conversation and get to know him himself, not through others when opinions might be biased and were weak comparisons to the real deal.
Surrendering to her logic after he turned it over in his head for a while, Noel ended up nodding and was about to apologize for taking her time when he froze, hand instinctively rising to his own nose as Lightning's began to bleed.
As always, it took a moment for it to stop. He felt broken inside, as he always did when his adoptive mother suffered an episode.
Mark I Jaeger were weapons of mass destruction and… not much else. There wasn't a lot beside reinforced steel to protect its pilots. The possibility that the inside of a Mark I Jaeger might be as risky as a fight against a Kaiju wasn't even considered. Yet, radiation poisoning was a thing... And Lightning was a victim.
She had told him, when he asked her why she had retired from piloting, that if she ever set foot inside a Jaeger again, the toll would be so great she wouldn't survive.
He hadn't bothered her again about the subject.
Despite his strong feelings towards the Jaeger program, he'd rather keep his mother.

xvi.
Paranoid.
That would be the best word to define him at the moment.
Looking over his shoulder for what felt like the nth time, Hope tasted victory at last as he caught a glimpse of brown hair around the corner.
Noel was tailing him. He knew it.
Question was… Why?

xvii.
Determined.
The adjective fit him to a T in that instant, as he quickly ducked around a corner.
He was keen on following Lightning's advice: to get to know Hope by going to the man himself for information.
How do you do it when your target is either too busy with his work (and you would feel bad for interrupting) or is surrounded by others, though?
Noel was then forced to admit to himself that most of the complications he was facing towards approaching the other man were born from his own inability to come up with a single topic of conversation. What would he say, when he finally approached him?
What could he say?
As he felt a tap to his shoulder and came to face with a raised eyebrow and narrowed eyes, Noel was spared the agony of having to think further about an opening line.
He worked better under pressure, anyway.

xviii.
Noel had taken to bringing him food at seemingly random moments of the day.
He had used his busy schedule and need to forgo some meals to meet deadlines as an excuse to do so but after so many occurrences, it had become a routine. Their routine.
He was transparent, though.
The moment the veiled questions started coming, Hope knew. Noel was a man on a mission and his goal? To gather information on him.
Too bad for the brunet that he wasn't about to start prattling freely about his life, especially when what he was comfortable sharing was already known to the other man.
Hope Estheim. Head Engineer. Very busy man.
It wasn't enough for the other, apparently.
As Noel did a, admittedly, laughable effort to pry material from him, Hope regarded him with a careful eye as he took his time to savor the food. Why did he want to know? What was the point? He believed that he was an interesting enough person, even without the knowledge of his past: why the need to pry further into his life?
Did Noel really think he was that interesting…?
Or did he already know and wanted to seize the whole story directly from him?

xix.
Hope was a tough nut to crack.
He had tried to be vague, he had tried to be subtle but every time, and before he realized it, the subject had been turned around and he was the one answering the very questions he wanted to know about Hope.
Noel started to wonder if he really should be delving into such deep waters, if the other was so insistent in evading him.
What could need so much secrecy?

xx.
Noel had reached a breaking point and finally decided on a direct approach.
He had started easily enough. Hometown, age, pets…
Hope closed his eyes.
It made him think of other days – better days. Days filled with laughter and warm smiles and homemade butter cookies cooling in the highest shelf so he couldn't reach them before then.
There wasn't a day when he didn't think of his life – or what it used to be.
Hope Estheim: a normal boy from a normal family.
Things used to be so simple, he thought with a pang. Even with the Kaiju threatening their very existence, he had had a happy life. Uneventful.
Then he had gotten into his head that he wanted to be a Jaeger pilot and his naivety caused everything to change.
Much like the final twist of the knife at just the right time, Noel chose that moment to ask about his family.
At first, there was silence.
Then, everything came rushing back all at once as the white noise he had tried so hard to bury away filled his ears.

pain screams hope listen to me

His left arm jerks, his fist clenches. Scars like tattoos and a daily reminder of what he couldn't achieve, rising and rising until they were suffocating him, squeezing at his throat tighter and tighter and tighter-

kaiju metal hissing blood nora stOP HOPE

Hope realizes he is sobbing and that his feet had taken him to his dorm when he sees the frozen smile of his mother, beaming up at him through broken glass by his bed.
He doesn't sleep that night.

xxi.
Lightning was comforting in her silence as he laid beside her in her dorm, a child seeking sanctuary in his mother's presence.
Hope had just gotten up and left.
No words, no glances – no indication that even acknowledged his presence: just heavy breathing and tense muscles, a cornered animal fleeing in unadulterated terror.
Noel had just stared after him, speechless. Maybe he should have followed, maybe not.
All he knew was that he had crossed a line.

xxii.
The impromptu snacks.
The little chats.
Noel had stopped reaching out to him altogether. Did he welcome the change or did he loathe it?
When his days had been filled with wide smiles and incessant chatter, now they were mostly silent, filled with equations and rationality. For years, he had lived this way.
Now, it was suffocating in its simplicity.
Relieving Knifehead's strike was agonizing. Crippling. Cleansing.
Hope was far from having accepted his mother's death. He doubted he ever would: in his heart laid a wound too deep to fully heal and in his soul, a hole in the shape of his mother that could never be filled.
What Noel's question did was rip off the band-aid. The wound wasn't healed but needed the oxygen in order to scar.
In the end, it didn't matter.
Noel was gone.
It took him three times of absently looking over his shoulder in search for the other to realize that he misses him.

xxiii.
Fourteen days, one hour and twenty minutes.
It was how long it took Noel to figure out what to say.

xxiv.
Taped to his desk one morning, there was a note.

'Hangar, 2100
Dinner for two'

Two simple sentences.
A smile that lasted for hours.

xxv.
He had a speech prepared.
Lightning could recite it in her sleep, Serah had it engrained in her memory – all because Noel had made sure to run it by the two of them several times before he deemed it acceptable to be presented to Hope, in hopes of not offending the other yet again.
It wasn't as if he wasn't sure of what he needed to say – he was – but he didn't dare say it in a way that pushed Hope further away.
It was easy, with the other Rangers. With Hope…?
Inexplicably harder.
(Noel vaguely speculated that it had something to do with the other's angry glare. It rivaled Lightning's and that was saying something.)
In the end, when the other man met him at precisely nine o'clock, all that had left his lips was a muddled mess and more fidgeting that he was comfortable with in front of another person that was not his mother or aunt.
He just couldn't help it.
The moment Hope had walked in front of him – all quiet intensity and calm authority – everything that he had painstakingly prepared had vanished. Lost, forever.
Noel watched in silence after that, expecting the other to turn and leave.
Hope smiled instead.

xxvi.
As he sipped some of the sweet wine Noel had managed to smuggle into the hangar – his look had all but begged him not to ask –, Hope contemplated the brunet
In all honesty, he had expected an excuse.
Not an apology.
Noel had given him time to cool down – unwillingly, Noel had sheepishly admitted -, even when he did not know what had set him off in the first place.
He had apologized, even not knowing what he had done wrong.
Despite his lack of knowledge about anything, Noel had been more considerate to him than all of those that indeed knew him had been since he had arrived at their shatterdome.
So he told him.
Noel had earned that much.

xxvii.
As the door to Hope's dorm closed behind him, Noel finally allowed his mind to drift as his feet mechanically carried him to his own.
A pilot.
Estheim. The name rung in his ears.
Suddenly, it was all much clearer - Hope's walls.
Noel still remembered the day. Anyone still connected to the Jaeger program did, as it had been the straw that broke the chocobo's back – the defining moment that had the whole program shut down.
Noel didn't duel on that, though.
Jaegers had been his salvation. For Hope, they were his doom.
Just how hard must it be, to face his damnation every day?
To be in their presence all day long?

xxviii.
The alarm came at dawn.
The target was the small town of Oerba, to where a category III Kaiju was quickly headed.
Vanille and Fang, two veteran pilots, were to be deployed. Hope was almost embarrassed when the two showed up to suit up and greeted him: the two women had graduated around the time that he and his mother had and, as far as memory went, the four of them had gotten along quite well. Yet, he had failed to approach them in all of the time that he had been in the shatterdome.
They were unorthodox but efficient and their compatibility was better than most he had seen, maybe aside from his and his mother's. Their Jaeger, a mark III named Ragnarok, was just starting to show her age but continued to sum up victories to their side. It was a terrific machine: he had made sure of it.
Waving at Vanille as she bounced past him on her way to the cockpit, Hope thought fondly that, once they returned, they should get together sometime. Catch up a little.
For so long, he had been building up walls around his heart.
Maybe it was time to start letting others in again.

xxix.
Oerba remained unharmed. The Kaiju had been defeated.
Ragnarok lay with it at the bottom of the ocean, marking the place of her bittersweet victory.
Noel doesn't see Hope for weeks after that.

xxx.
Time was running out. The apocalypse was approaching.
Hope didn't need to listen to the worried whispers and murmurs of the other workers commenting on Dr. Zaidelle and Dr. Farron's frantic and constant trips to Marshall Farron's quarters to know it.
All he would have had to do was read the reports.
The Kaiju were evolving.
Ragnarok had been taken down but not by pure and sheer violence. The Kaiju aimed specifically for the Jaeger's weaker spots.
It knew exactly what it was doing.
The human race needs to take a stance, Marshall Farron told them later that day at an emergency meeting. All of their resources, both material and human, gathered for a final strike.
It was time.