Sometimes, something so profoundly exhilarating occurs that it's hard to imagine how you were ever thinking of anything else before it happened. For Ibira, the Shatterdome alarms blaring wildly that day was that moment. She had been through many mission launches before and the way it sends the entire base into an organized frenzy while the nearly deafening sirens bounce off the echoing metal walls. But today would be the first time jaeger pilots were using the serum she had dedicated years of her life to. The first time Hercules and Charles Hansen would be using it on a live mission against a deadly kaiju. Freezing for a split second, Ibira dropped the report she had been reading and broke into an unrestrained sprint. From her training days, she knew she had only minutes, if she was lucky, to reach LOCCENT in time.
Turning the corner as she approached the pilots' bay, Ibira was immediately greeted by a blinding pain as she crashed directly into a large, solid figure and bounced back from the impact. Holding her nose and blinking against the stars in her vision and the tears that automatically sprung to her eyes, Ibira looked up at a very startled Chuck.
"Christ, are you alright, Ibira!" he exclaimed, holding her by the shoulders to steady her. "How fucking fast were you running?"
Still gripping her sore nose, her words came out nasally as she replied, "I didn't know if I'd be able to catch you. I've been talking with Hermann and-"
"Slow down," Chuck interrupted her, gently gripping her chin with one hand and tilting her face back. She instinctively let her hands drop away as he examined her nose. Her eyes fell from his serious stare to the metal chest plate of the ranger suit he was now wearing, which she had flattened her face into. Several technicians were still working at his back, deft hands quickly attaching more parts and connecting various wires.
Sasha and Aleksis Kaidonovsky, the hard-faced pilots of Cherno Alpha, marched past them in breathtaking synchronization. Suddenly mortifyingly aware of how many other people were in the room with them, she stepped back from him and wiped her nose with a painful sniff. There was a small stripe of blood on her fingers as she glanced down at them. She quickly clasped her hands behind her back as Marshall Pentecost and Herc stepped into view, deep in conversation.
"I'm fine," she assured him, standing up straight and clearing her throat. "I'll be running analyses on the live serum data from Striker Eureka the whole time. I -I'll be here..."
Her words trailed off as Chuck's father walked into place beside his son. Chuck blinked at Ibira once before grabbing the gloves that a technician held out to him.
"I do believe it is show time, Miss Valenti," Herc declared, pulling on and adjusting his own gloves with what Ibira could see was pure muscle memory.
"It seems so," she agreed, surprised at the dishonest nonchalance she was able to command into her voice. "I would wish you both luck, but you don't need it."
With a bark of laughter, Hercules clasped her shoulder. The older man gave an affectionate squeeze as he walked past her, once again leaving her and Chuck to stand as alone as they could be in a launch bay full of people.
Staring up into the soft green tones of Chuck's eyes, Ibira opened her mouth but could not think of a single right thing to say over the pounding of her heart in her chest. Somewhere across the room, she heard a voice that her mind vaguely accounted for as Pentecost's calling out to her, but she did not process his words.
Chuck leaned his face down towards her and said in a deep timbre, "Have a medic take a look at your nose before I get back."
Without another glance, he walked towards Striker Eureka's head chamber.
Without remembering doing it, Ibira moved to stand at Marshall Pentecost's side as large doors slammed closed behind the Hansen men. The time that followed, as the last four remaining jaeger teams on Earth approached downtown Hong Kong, would later be a blur to Ibira. She busied herself by double and triple checking readouts on the many command center screens, but she knew there was little she could do at that point besides watch. And as the team of Shatterdome personnel watched the large screens of LOCCENT, their hearts collectively dropped at what Ibira had been dreading most deeply for the past several days. Stifling a horrified gasp with her hand, Hermann Gottlieb's nightmare prediction materialized before them - a Double Event kaiju emergence.
Beside her, she heard Tendo Choi let out what could have been a curse or a prayer.
Hours later, Ibira sat staring blankly out at the night sky that was bleached from the city lights. They had lost two jaegers and five rangers in one day. She was not sure how long she waited in the cold, but she watched as the helicopter carrying Striker Eureka's pilots landed. Although she wished she could, she could not make herself look away as Hercules Hansen was loaded onto a stretcher and quickly rolled away by a swarm of medics. And then her eyes were cemented to Chuck as he followed behind the small crowd, a dark look she had never seen before on his face.
Even later, Ibira stood just out of sight outside the doorway of Hercules Hansen's room in the medical bay. Listening intently for voices, she stepped aside as a pair of doctors left the room, clipboards in hand. When she heard no one else, she cautiously peeked her head into the room. The ginger haired man laid still in bed with his eyes closed and head leaned back against the headboard of the hospital bed. She knew she could still leave before he noticed, and she considered doing just that before clenching her fists and lightly knocking on the door frame.
"Come in," Herc encouraged her warmly, waving her over with his arm that was not held in a blue sling. Seeing the side of his torso wrapped from his shoulder down to his elbow beneath his shirt, Ibira furrowed her eyebrows with deep concern and an acidic flame of guilt flaring in her chest.
"I'll be fine," he said dismissively, offering her a soft smile. At the nearly pitying tone in his gravelly voice, Ibira steeled her expression and sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs at his bedside.
"Are they giving you the good stuff for pain?" she inquired in the serious tone of a Pan Pacific Defense Corps officer.
With a devilish grin, Herc nodded and admitted, "I'm not too proud for some oxys when the situation calls for it."
The shadow of a smile flickered across Ibira's face before her expression darkened again, the gravity of the situation fully sinking into her lungs as she looked again at his broken arm.
Before she could work up the nerve to say anything more, they both turned to look at the sound of severe footsteps entering the room. In a jerking reaction, Ibira stood from her chair as Chuck stood on the other side of the bed across from her, his typically stern and generally sour look returning. They stared at each other for a brief moment before the younger Hansen pilot turned to look down at his father.
"The research twins are holding Pentecost hostage," he reported gruffly, crossing his arms across his broad chest. "He'll be here as soon as he can."
"Fine by me," Hercules sighed deeply. "As it stands, I'm not exactly in the mood for an incident report at the moment."
Ibira began lightly chewing at the inside of her lip at his words, a small furrow forming between her eyebrows again.
"I…I've already written up most of the report," she said, her voice sounding very hollow to her own ears. "From what I could tell from LOCCENT before the EMP blasts, of course. I'll defer to you -both of you, for…the rest. I mean, after comms went down."
Her silent question hung in the fluorescent air of the medical room. They had all beared gut wrenching witness to the final moments of Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon. But shortly after their downfalls, the first ever electromagnetic pulse attack from a kaiju had fried all communication channels between the two remaining jaegers, their pilots and LOCCENT. Now, Ibira only had pieces of what she had gathered from the bustling gossip mill of the Hong Kong Shatterdome and the scattered news coverage she had been able to catch.
Chuck began to speak, but before Ibira could stop herself she blurted out, "I take full responsibility for an error that my serum introduced into your mission."
Scowling at her as if that was the single most irritating thing he had ever heard, Chuck replied, "Nothing about your serum changes the fact that I'm out there piloting with a bloke who was born before the damn internet was invented."
"Sometimes you have less sense than a circus clown," Herc reprimanded his son. "What he means to say is we probably wouldn't be here if it weren't for your serum."
Ibira frowned at this, confusion apparent in her concerned eyes.
"Oh, like it's that hard to imagine your little experiment was actually helpful?" Chuck conceded.
Her mouth stiffened into a hard line and she had to resist rolling her eyes at his idea of a compliment.
In a tone with a certain finality that made it clear that she was not agreeing with either of them, Ibira said "I'm glad you're both back. I'll leave the incident report with Pentecost tomorrow morning."
With a nod at Herc, she excused herself and breezed out of the room, pointedly avoiding Chuck's gaze. He turned slightly toward her as if he were going to follow her, before clenching his jaw and dropping into a chair.
"As stubborn as a fucking mule, that one," Chuck grumbled, mostly to himself.
Herc let out a deep chuckle and said, "You know, your mother was like that."
A heavy silence hung between them. They never discussed Angela Hansen, Chuck's mother and Herc's late wife. That decidedly included not mentioning what had happened during their neural handshake before their mission. They knew well enough by now that they could not control what memories surfaced when they drifted. And for the first time, their minds had both offered up memories of happy, laughing women.
Through his father's eyes, Chuck had looked back on a sunny afternoon in Sydney, Australia. A young Angela, younger than Chuck had ever known her, was laughing. She was so beautiful, and Chuck could feel the love that was blooming between her and the then-young Hercules Hansen. He had forgotten what his mother's laughter had sounded like. Herc had been equally surprised to see the flash of a memory through his son's perspective. Looking down in warm admiration at none other than Ibira Valenti, her eyes were squinted with laughter and her bright, wide smile was dazzling as she beamed up at him. What they both knew was that these were memories -one from decades ago and one from mere days ago -of falling in love.
"Rest up, old man," Chuck said flatly, standing and leaving his father alone in the quiet room.