Preoccupation
It wasn’t a surprise when the next kaiju attack came. It never was with people watching the Breach twenty four hours around the clock and monitoring any changes in activity there.The whole shatterdome was making arrangements, checking the jaegers over, and overall preparing for the worst. Business as usual. The only difference was that the Hamadas weren’t suited up or checking their functionality in Amaterasu Bold.
Before the incident Hiro thought that after over three years of waiting he’d finally have a chance to get back in the field. Not so much now.
It would be a miracle if anyone ever let him touch a jaeger again. Well, except Gogo when she wanted his help repairing things, but that didn’t count. Honestly, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to anyways. He had waited so long for the opportunity, and then he’d gone and fucked everything up.
He’d been so lost in the drift when the incident happened that he didn’t really remember any of what was going on in the real world. He didn’t hear the screams or see those unnervingly still bodies on the ground like Tadashi did whenever he closed his eyes. No, when he closed his eyes it was the same as it had been for the last three-almost four- years.
There was wind howling through the conn-pod, rain pounding against the waves, his brother’s body crumpled in a smoldering heap on the floor. Cold green eyes stared him down while a titanic maw swung closed, cutting off the spewing flames.
And there was the anger. All consuming, ever present.
He used to think it would make him stronger, give him a reason to keep on fighting when there was no one else to take up arms. He used to think his anger would save him.
Now he knew better.
There was no salvation in his rage, only a destruction that would hurt as many people as possible before he came back to himself. If he could he would take every ounce of anger he had and throw it into the ocean as far from him as possible.
But he couldn’t. Even after everything, even after all that his anger had done, he still couldn’t let it go. He wished he had the ability to move on and release his anger the way he was supposed to, but no matter what he did it stuck around. He’d never been good at letting things go- Tadashi had always been so much better at it. Not even the attack from Odokuro that had scarred him forever was enough to hold Tadashi’s anger. And after the incident there was no rage either, just an all-encompassing guilt. He hated to see his brother like that, but at the same time he couldn’t help but feel jealous. He wished his guilt sucked all the anger out of him, but instead it simply made him mad at himself.
If only he had the effortless sort of calm that Honey and Fred exuded. He knew of course that they weren’t actually calm all the time- he’d seen them plenty of times going out of their minds for some reason or another, but generally speaking they weren’t ones to cause a fuss.
There were times though when things slipped through those barriers of serenity. The incident was obviously one of them. Honey occasionally reached points where suddenly everything became too much for her, whether it be her research leading nowhere or running out of pink sticky notes, and she had to sequester herself away from everyone in order to piece herself back together. Fred insisted that it really was necessary and that she wasn’t just trying to hide her pain; she just needed time to be alone and away from stimuli. He had the most experience with her, so they all followed his lead.
As for Fred, there were moments Hiro caught sometimes, where it felt as though the weight of the world was resting on the scientist’s shoulders. He got this look in his eyes like there was a deep, unending sadness hidden just below the surface of his skin, waiting to be released. Not even Honey knew what caused it. Hiro suspected that it had something to do with the long scar that twisted across his torso.
He considered asking about it, but every time he did something always held him back. Maybe it was because Fred didn’t normally keep secrets. Not really. He was an open book when it came to his life- if you asked Fred a question, you’d get a truthful answer. He never really talked about his life before the coma, but that was only because he didn’t really remember it. And boy, was that something to think about. Hiro couldn’t imagine what that must have been like to wake up as a stranger in your own body.
Still, the scar was never explained.
The assumption was that it came from the attack that put him in the coma. It never seemed to fit right with Hiro though. The scar looked too clean, not jagged or rough the way one would expect from getting hit by a tree. No, it looked almost like someone had tried to cut Fred in half but failed. But that was too ridiculous to say out loud.
After all, who would try and do that to Fred?
Really, none of it made any sense. Not the look of it, and not the way that Fred would always rub it like it ached whenever he spent too long looking at Amaterasu.
That was another thing that made no sense to Hiro. Fred knew all about Amaterasu and the attack with Odokuro, but he was still unconscious when the battle went down. And it’s not like he knew them before it happened either, but Honey told him that Fred had always had a strange sort of attachment to the whole ordeal. He would have put it off as some kind of hardcore crushing over Tadashi, but she also told him that Fred had never seen either of the pilots before coming to the shatterdome. He hadn’t even known their names.
Fred was an open book and a mystery all at once. Hiro just wondered if the mystery would be solved once the pages ended.
Tadashi spent the morning huddled in a corner of his bunk. The only times he left the comforting safety of his bed was to rush to the toilet so he could hurl out his insides. He was a mess.
But he was tired of hiding from the world, especially when there was so much to do. So, when noon rolled around, he picked himself up, got dressed, and went to see what he could help with. His hands shook, and his legs felt like jelly, but he soldiered on. He was Tadashi Hamada, and he refused to spend his life cowering in his room.
Yes, he was still upset about what happened. Yes, the guilt from it would probably last until the day he died. Yes, there were probably plenty of people in base who still resented him for it. But running away from his problems wasn’t going to fix them. He didn’t even know if they could ever truly be fixed, but he needed to at least try. If he couldn’t help the world out by suiting up in a jaeger, then there were still other ways for him to help. He was a jaeger tech before Hiro - and by extension Tadashi- decided to become a pilot.
He walked through the hallways, nodding to people as he passed, making his way to LOCCENT. A few people nodded in return when they saw him, but everyone was preoccupied with the breach. Crimson Havoc and Horizon Rayearth had been deployed not long ago and would be reaching their destination soon. The entire shatterdome was waiting with baited breath.
When he reached LOCCENT he found almost all his closest friends there. Wasabi and Marshal Callaghan were keeping a close eye on the jaegers’ progress, Honey was observing the activity at the breach, Gogo was going through last minute system checks with the teams over the comms to keep them occupied, and Hiro was watching everyone else anxiously.
He shot Tadashi a look that was equal parts relief and guilt. “I couldn’t figure out what to do or where to go. I didn’t want to go watch the camera feeds with the rest of the base- I know most of them are over what happened, but I…. It just didn’t feel right,” he said, looking at the floor.
Tadashi clasped his shoulder and gave it a light squeeze, returning the weak smile it prompted from his brother. “I know. That’s why I’m here too.”
Neither of them said anything about how they shouldn’t really be in LOCCENT if they couldn’t actually do anything to help. But then again, no one else in the room said anything about it either.
“Miss Miyazaki, is everything at the breach going as expected?” the Marshal asked, straightening up from where he’d been stooped over Wasabi’s station.
She turned away from the readings in front of her and nodded. “Everything looks like it’s on track. See here-,” she said, pointing at the hologram in front of her, “- the breach is finally expanding enough to let the kaiju through. It will be able to cross within the next ten minutes, I’d say.”
The Marshal hummed in response. “We should get Mr. Whitaker up here then. This is the first Category IV to cross the breach since Odokuro. We’ll need as much input as we can get on how we should deal with it.”
“I’ll do it,” Tadashi volunteered, ignoring the smirks in his direction, as well as the kissy face his little brother was giving him.
“Thank you, Mr. Hamada,” Callaghan replied. His voice didn’t change, but Tadashi could have sworn that his lips twitched upwards for a second. He felt his cheeks grow warm and turned away before any of the others had a chance to tease him about it.
Carefully, Fred peeled back the skin on the claw sample he was working on. He needed a better look at the muscles beneath it. Never mind the fact that he’d already done the same thing to nearly a dozen samples over the past year- this was very important business. Yes, terribly important. Because if he didn’t keep himself busy then he was bound to think about the kaiju about to come out of the breach, and fuck knows he didn’t want to deal with that.
He was so preoccupied with preoccupying himself that he didn’t hear the soft knocking on his office door, or the following footsteps, or the sound of someone calling his name. The only thing that snapped him out of his stupor was a hand on his shoulder that nearly had him jumping through the ceiling.
“Holy shi-!”
“Oh my God! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to- are you okay? I just wanted to, uh- the Marshal asked me to- God, I’m so sorry! I really didn’t mean to scare you,” Tadashi babbled, face heating up in embarrassment.
Fred clutched his chest like an elderly southern belle that had just been told that luncheon had run out of sweet tea. “It’s cool,” he croaked out. He cleared his throat and attempted to regain some composure. “I just wasn’t paying attention. Did you uh, did you need something?”
“Oh! Um, yeah, the Marshal wants you to join us in LOCCENT. Figures you should be there to help analyze the first Category IV since, um.... since before.” he trailed off awkwardly.
Fred’s heart clenched in his chest, mind flicking back to waves splashing against his limbs, heat cooling from his jaws, and a blade flashing in the stormy skies as it swung towards him. He swallowed past the lump in his throat and tried not to focus on the scars that stretched across his friend’s skin. “Okay,” he said, grasping Tadashi’s shoulder in one hand and giving it a squeeze. “Let’s head up then. I was getting sick of looking at alien tissue anyway,” he joked lightly, getting a wan smile in return.
They were quiet on the walk over, speaking only now and then to comment on something as they passed by but not bothering to attempt a conversation. Neither of them said a word about the way their hands brushed against each other until they simultaneously got the courage to simply hold hands like they really wanted to.