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The drift is silence.
If the drift is silence, then RABITS are crescendos. If the drift is silence and RABITS are crescendos than hidden memories are sour notes. If the drift is silence and RABITS are crescendos and hidden memories are sour notes than good memories are harmonies. they are appealing, they are tempting, they call to pilots and beg them to follow the siren’s call.
They are tempting to everyone, Chuck Hansen, even to you.
You did your first drift as a teenager, the day after you ran a razor across your skin for the first time. You’ve been told you lost your innocence the day your mom died, but on the day you step in to your dad’s head you lose your youth. You go from barely a decade and a half of life experience to decades worth of it. You’re young and you’re old and you know nothing and a lot of things all at once.
It feels like you died and were reborn all at once.
It’s will that keeps you standing there when the drift ends, it’s pride that walks your legs back to your room. It’s a combination of those two that give you the strength to walk back to the conn pod with limbs that are suddenly all wrong. You step in again, you find yourself like it was just something you left behind. You fight again and again and again. You lose and you find yourself more times than you can count.
You love foods you hated and you hate foods you loved. You wake up one night screaming for a man whose your brother and your uncle all at once. He’s long long gone and you still haven’t forgiven your father for sending the one remaining family member away. But for the first time you think of him and you feel fury and you know that your scream is the one for him to leave, your fathers is the one for him to stay and they mix together as one garbled note you stifle in your pillow as Max yelps in concern.
You know your father wanted your uncle gone. He wouldn’t even let him say goodbye in private and the entire time you tried to ask for answers and your uncle looked at you helplessly your father was in the background breathing like a bull. Now when you think of that goodbye you know what the back of your brothers vest felt like as you hauled him up and threw him out and how even that wasn’t satisfying enough for you.
You and your father hate yourselves, so its not that difficult to hate him and you can’t fathom that his love for you is genuine. You need each other, you’re stuck together, but it isn’t something you’re happy about. So you focus on your job, on taking everything you feel out with Striker’s hands and blades and cannons. You fight with everything in it and you still come up short.
You don’t even let Pentecost get his words out before you take up his offer.
Of course that means seeing Mako again.
You’re Chuck Hansen, you’re old and you’re young and you’re a hero and now you’re a coward too. You don’t have time for girls you care about. Mako left like Uncle Scott and it felt like you died instead of your mom when she did. She left right after a fight, right after he did when the only thing you wanted in the world was to know it wasn’t just you and your dad. But that’s exactly was it was and you’ve never questioned it. There’s something in you that stops you from digging, but you aren’t sure if its you or your dad.
Max has always expressed what you can’t, always gotten what you can’t.
You are not jealous of their reunion.
You aren’t, you’re Chuck Hansen, you don’t get jealous. You also don’t sulk and you don’t lash out at your childhood hero who also, shockingly, has left. Coming back doesn’t make it better. It doesn’t throw you off your game to the point where the Wei’s actually humiliate you in Basketball. It doesn’t make your fingers twitch as you strap yourself in and deploy, pushed to the sideline by Stacker and his great good.
it doesn’t make you chase a RABIT.
You’ve been good at lying to yourself for a long time, Chuck Hansen. It’s one thing you and your father are good at independent of each other. You chase the RABIT and you’re in a hallway. You can hear a frightened whimper and the sound of flesh hitting flesh. You’re running, ignoring the ache in your knee from an injury you never had. You’re running and your hand is around your brother’s neck as you rip him off of your best friend’s daughter.
He snarls and you look at Mako whose clothes are torn and whose looking at a far away point as her cheek swells. There’s something heavy in your hand and the man who was your brother is a heap on the ground. You rip off your shirt and put it over the girl, you speak low and soft until she looks at you. She lurches forward and buries her face in your chest and sobs in shame she shouldn’t feel. You don’t remember how to hug a child but you try as you look behind her for blood.
You leave Scott locked in her room and bring her to Stacker.
There’s a lurch and you’re Herc lunging at your brother across the rigs and then you’re you again and there’s electricity running through you and Striker’s dead in the water which is fitting because you feel dead too. You claw at the rigs and shove yourself free and when you scream at the Kaiju it’s with every fibre of your being. You wish you could kill it with your bare hands.
You settle for punching the pod.
They take your father away to get looked at as you hit everything you can. You hate him, you hate him more than anything else in the world. Someone grabs your arm and you throw them back and of course it’s Mako who staggers and then diggs her heels in, glaring at you because to her you’re just insane. Now when you look at her you can just see the tiny girl who you pulled your uncle off of.
"I didn’t know!" You shout because tact has never been one of your strong suits, "I didn’t fucking know."
Mako does that thing you hate where she folds in to herself, she closes off and folds herself behind an impenetrable wall as you stare at her helplessly, wondering how you can be such an ass. She presses her lips together and looks at you calmly and it’s truly incredible how a small woman can make you feel like you’re an inch tall.
"Now you do," she says.
she doesn’t walk away she stands there and looks at you, steady and unmoving and she’s a fixed point. She’s a fixed point and you’re a hurricane beating against her facade. She stands there and breathes calmly as you take deep huffs of air. It’s been years since someone was properly angry at you and there’s no doubt in your mind that Mako’s angry. Her anger is unfamiliar, it’s icy and cold but it’s there and you’re twisted because she’s angry and your relieved you can still read any emotion on her face.
you stand there for one more moment and the turn, barely getting out thanks as you walk past.
It’s your turn to do the thing you hate, Chuck Hansen.
It’s your turn to leave.
You have failed your friend, you won’t fail anyone else. You say that to your father as Stacker speaks to his daughter. He understands. He doesn’t apologize, which is good, there’s too much between you to apologize for. You can’t spend your last moments apologizing, not to him. Those apologies are just one more unspoken thing between the pair of them.
You and Mako pull each other aside at the same moment.
The posture she’s worn for Stacker slips, her shoulders curving gently as her head droops. Your hands go to her shoulders and you hate the fact that you’re both zipped in to your drift suits. You don’t hug her, you don’t hug and with your suits in it wouldn’t matter. Instead you hook your fingers under her chin and guide it up as she raises it, pressing your foreheads together. that’s how pilots hug, your face is the only exposed skin.
"I want to kill him," you say and she nods, "he was in your room," she nods again as you realize why she left so quickly, "I’m sorry," you say.
"Me too," she says.
You stand there and breathe her in, you try to memorize everything about her. You never had time for romance and she was the most distraction you would allow yourself until you couldn’t. But if you had time for any of that, you know it would be with her. When you open your eyes they’re wet and you knows hers aren’t just wet because of Stacker’s words. Her fingertips reach out and touch your face and you can’t help the slight pressure of your lips against them.
It’s your turn to leave and you don’t want to go.
You don’t want to go and in a unique twist you don’t. It isn’t up to you. You have to respect your copilot except when they’re unconscious. Well even then, even when you knock them out. Which stacker does. You feel a smack on the back of your head a second before everything goes white hot. You come to ten feet below the surface and drag yourself out of your pod and kick up against the weight of the armor and the heat of the water.
You’re a survivor, Chuck Hansen, but as you struggle on the surface you realize in the midst of all that surviving you never learned how to live.
But then Mako’s next to you, hauling you up and together you kick to a pod that’s floating. You grab the lifeline with one hand and her with the other and you suck in lungfuls of air and when your childhood hero hauls Mako up and then offers a hand to you, you take it and the three of you do your best to maintain contact and not tip the pod over as the planes fly in a victory formation overhead.