I Meant Every Word
Finding out the truth about Fred was almost as big a blow as losing him was. When they got back to the shatterdome, the whole base was celebrating. The streets outside were full of people crying and laughing and rejoicing the destruction of the breach.
It took a while to wade through the masses of people that wanted to congratulate them, who wanted to thank them, who wanted to apologize for ever thinking poorly of them before, and it took all his willpower for Tadashi to keep a straight face and pretend like he wasn’t about to burst into more tears with every passing second. The trip to the drivesuit room alone took half an hour. Eventually though, they did make it back to the command center. The few people left in LOCCENT waited patiently for the Hamadas to join them. It was only Honey, Wasabi, Gogo, and Marshal Callaghan, but that was alright. At least with them, he wouldn’t have to pretend.
Honey was the first to greet them, rushing forward to pull them into a fierce hug and tell them how proud she was of them. Her voice wavered, and he was positive that she was as close to tears as he was. She’d known Fred the longest after all- the two of them had been thick as thieves. But even then, there had been secrets that Fred had never told her.
“He- he left a note,” she said quietly, leading him over to one of the desks and a chair that he could collapse in. She took a seat next to him and swallowed thickly. Hiro sat on his other side, picking listlessly at the fraying cuffs on his hoodie.
Gogo walked up to him with a solemn look on her face, and even her eyes were red rimmed. She must be taking this pretty hard. He knew how much she hated crying. In her hands she held one of Fred’s notebooks- he could tell it was Fred’s because it was covered in cartoon kaiju stickers. People on base liked to bring him sheets of stickers when they saw them in stores. Or they used to anyway. They always said they saw the stickers and thought of him, and could never resist buying them for him. He found it delightful.
Just seeing his notebook in her hands, and looking at the others’ anguished faces made him want to curl up and cry.
There had been a little part of him that was hoping they would tell him that he’d been imagining seeing Fred down there. That it really had just been some oxygen deprived hallucination, and Fred was perfectly fine. But of course that wasn’t what happened. Fred really had somehow showed up in Amaterasu while they were at the bottom of the ocean, and he really was gone.
Gogo flipped open the notebook and handed it to him. On the page, Fred had written the password to his laptop, a folder of files to open, and a note to call his parents if they had any questions.
“We wanted to wait until you got here before we checked his laptop,” she said as Wasabi walked up behind her with the aforementioned device.
It was sweet of them to wait for him, but he almost wished they hadn’t. He wasn’t sure if he could handle whatever was in there right now. With everything that had happened in the last twenty four hours, he wasn’t sure he could take any more. He was a hairsbreadth from breaking. Losing Fred was- it was one of the worst things that had ever happened to him. What if the answers in Fred’s laptop were even worse?
Hiro was the one to take the laptop and input the password. Spending so much time in Tadashi’s head gave him a lot of insight into the way he felt. They may not be hooked up to their jaeger, but for something like this, did that even matter?
When he opened the folder, nobody knew what to expect. Maybe one of those secretly recorded videos that people always left as confessions in the movies? But no, it was nothing like that. There were no videos at all, just files and files of information Fred hadn’t even bothered to label properly. They were all things like Document 1, Document 2, etc. all the way up until Document 342. Hiro clicked one open at random, and found what seemed to be a series of philosophical questions about humanity. Puzzled, he opened another one and was met with a long, detailed description of Mutavore’s cell structure in comparison to… Fred’s?
He squinted at the screen, pulling it closer to read more and try and parse through the kaiju researcher’s notes. He wished Fred wasn’t one of those people that used tablets to write in his own handwriting on screens, but alas, Fred was averse to typing things out if it wasn’t required. He always said that handwriting was special, unique. Like the written version of hearing someone’s voice.
Hiro thought it was just the poetry nerd that occasionally came out in the other. He used to anyway. Recent events were throwing a lot of what he assumed into question.
The file in front of him was not helping. Fred’s note taking style was a dumpster fire. Clearly he didn’t care for making things easy for anyone else to read like the Cornell system. They weren’t even in orderly lines or anything. It was a mess of scribbles and arrows slapped together like he’d puked them over the page.
What information Hiro could understand was positively mind blowing though.
“Honey,” he began hesitantly, catching her eyes over his brother’s shoulder. “Did you… Did you know Fred wasn’t human?” he asked. The words, while spoken carefully, felt like they scraped his throat raw on the way out.
Everyone stared at him as if he had suddenly sprouted another head. Honey blinked at him for a moment before slowly shaking her head. “I- no. What are- no. Freddy was… It can’t be,” she said.
“He was in Amaterasu…” Tadashi said. A small crease appeared between his brows as his brain worked furiously to try and make sense of what was happening. “But there’s no way he could have done that if he was human. We were in the ocean, and he was… He was here not long before.”
“Yeah, but if he’s not- if he wasn’t human, than what was he?” Wasabi asked, stumbling over his words a bit when it came to using past tense for their recently lost friend.
Hiro leaned back from the laptop and steepled his fingers together under his chin. “I think he might have been a kaiju.”
Naturally, they all took this idea like champs and began arguing with him earnestly about it. Not that he could blame them. It was a pretty outlandish theory, but what little evidence they had pointed in its direction. He slapped his hands on the table to get them to quiet down for a minute.
“Look, I know it sounds crazy, but if the notes he left us aren’t some weird prank, then that’s all I can think of! I mean, he’s talking about his cellular structure, and the properties of other kaiju anatomy in comparison to his own- which definitely aren’t human, by the way- and… I mean, come on! It’s not like we have anything else to work with here! Just think about it for a second, okay? We’ve never come across any other non-terrestrial life besides the kaiju. And it’s what he researched… I don’t know. I’m as lost as the rest of you. But he said that it we needed to take a kaiju with us through the breach to trick it, right?”
They mumbled something that sounded more or less like confirmation. “Well, we dropped Raiju’s corpse before we got there. And I don’t really remember a whole lot of what happened after that. Tadashi, did you pick it up again?”
His brother bit his lip, and stared fixedly at his hands as he wrung them in his lap. “…No. I’m pretty sure I didn’t,” he replied quietly.
“Okay,” Hiro breathed out. “Okay. So then wouldn’t it be logical that Fred would either have had to go grab another kaiju body himself, while not hooked up to the jaeger, or… He’d have to be one,” Hiro said, giving them a pleading look.
Honey let out a shuddering breath. “Based on the readings we were getting, something else dragged Amaterasu into the breach. Going off of what Hiro’ suggesting, it would have been Freddy. And if he could somehow change so that he could get into Amaterasu again after entering the breach, he could still manually overload the nuclear reactor without being hooked up.”
The silence as they all digested the information was nearly deafening.
“So what, our resident dork supreme was secretly one of our enemies this whole time? You think he was sent here to spy on us or something?” Gogo asked through clenched teeth.
Everyone’s expressions became strained. None of them wanted to believe that Fred could be capable of betraying them like that, but it wasn’t as if it were impossible. Not anymore.
Tadashi took a deep breath and counted to three before letting it out. “No,” he said sternly. “He wouldn’t have done that. No matter what he was, Fred was a good person. He had a good heart.” The room practically let out a sigh of relief to hear someone refute such a thought so firmly.
“What was he doing here at the shatterdome though?” Wasabi asked tiredly.
“I don’t think he really meant to,” Honey said thoughtfully. “I mean, I don’t think he would have if we’d never met. Back in college, Freddy was a poetry major. He didn’t even really know that Wildlife Studies was a thing you could major in before we became friends. And he seemed perfectly happy with that. He got his minor because he thought it was interesting, and we could take more classes together that way. And I hardly think he would have made his way here if he hadn’t gotten it.” Which was a fair assessment. It’s not like the shatterdome was in the habit of recruiting poets.
“What about his parents? I mean, he has a family, so how does that work?” Hiro asked.
It was that precise moment that they all remembered the last part of Fred’s note. Six pairs of eyes made their way to Fred’s open notebook.
Marshal Callaghan cleared his throat lightly, startling them. “I think it’s time to make a phone call.”
Mr. and Mrs. Whitaker were both heartbroken to learn that Fred was gone, but there was a certain level of resignation when the others asked them to explain how they ended up with a kaiju for a son.
It was a long story, but no one interrupted them, except to ask a question for clarification every once in a while. They explained how their original son actually died after the kaiju attack. They’d kept him on life support for years before giving in, and that was when Fred made his non-terrestrial presence known. They laughed when they recounted it, how insane it sounded that the bird Mr. Whitaker was nursing back to health had transformed into his son, and how the two decided to roll with it.
But they had loved Fred as if he was their flesh and blood, and cherished the time they got with him. They told them how interesting it was to raise an alien who had no idea what anything was, but that Fred had caught on pretty quickly. Despite what the other kaiju were like, Fred had always been very intelligent and compassionate.
They also said that Fred confirmed how unusual he was himself, and how none of his “siblings” were really like him at all. They shared DNA, but Fred was always one of a kind. In more ways than one.
“We want to make it clear- he never wanted any of this. If he ever had a choice with his original- well, I don’t want to call them his family, but you know what I mean- he would never have participated in any of this world taking over business. He just wanted the chance to be free. To make his own decisions. And he cared about all of you very, very much,” Mrs. Whitaker said, reaching out to rest her hand gently on the side of the screen, as if she could only try and convey the sincerity of her words through touch.
Everyone on the other side of the screen smiled ruefully at that. It should have gone without saying that Fred cared about them, and if it had been a day ago, none of them would have doubted it for a second. But that day, with the magnitude of the secret he kept from them, they needed the reminder.
“Thank you,” Tadashi said thickly. “We- we’re sorry we couldn’t save him.” He couldn’t save him. If it wasn’t for him, Fred might still be there. Granted, Tadashi wouldn’t, but he thought it would have been preferable. Not that he’d ever say it out loud. Not that he needed to. He was sure his friends already knew.
“You know, I don’t think he’s gone,” Mr. Whitaker said, throwing an arm casually over the back of his sofa. At their baffled- and somewhat pitying- expressions, he laughed. “No, I’m serious. Call it a parent’s instinct,” he said, nudging his wife in the shoulder when she rolled her eyes at him. But she was smiling too, as if she agreed.
Hiro of course, was the one who couldn’t hold back his skepticism. “Um, isn’t that kind of unlikely?” he asked, wincing when Tadashi and Gogo both reached over to smack him.
The Whitakers took it in stride however, laughing at his bluntness. “Son, you almost succeeded in cutting him in two the first time you met. Didn’t stop him from sticking around years afterwards, did it? No, he’s still out there somewhere- probably putting up a good fight to make it back home,” he said.
It took a second for the man’s words to sink in, but when they did Hiro almost knocked his brother out of his chair with how hard he reached over to grab his shoulder.
“Odokuro? Fred was Odokuro . Oh my god. Oh my GOD . The scar . That was from me ? Oh my god, Tadashi! You wanted to get it on with the kaiju that stuck you in the ICU!” he said, with equal parts horror and glee.
Tadashi felt his face light up, and he smacked Hiro’s arm away. “Don’t say that! Were you raised in a barn? How is it that we were raised by the same people, but you never learned any manners?” he hissed, trying to calm his furious blush as he continued swatting at Hiro.
Even though Tadashi was obviously embarrassed by the way his brother phrased things, it did do wonders to relieve the tension in the room. It took a few more minutes trying to stifle their laughter before anyone could speak up again.
“You really think Freddy’s still out there? Trying to get back to us?” Honey asked.
Mrs. Whitaker gave her an encouraging smile. “He’ll be back,” she said serenely.
“You’ll probably have to keep an eye out on those beaches. Who knows what he’ll turn up as this time,” Mr. Whittaker added with a wink.
And that was that.
It took over a week of fitful slumber and restless days before Tadashi finally said to hell with it, and started driving to the beach every day. He felt kind of dumb walking up and down the coastline, looking for injured animals he thought might be his alien-not-quite-boyfriend in disguise. But what else did he have to do?
With the war over, jaeger pilots were no longer necessary. The program was scrapped, and the shatterdome converted into a research facility- dedicated to understanding more about the kaiju and other extraterrestrial life, of course. Tadashi and Hiro went back to living with their aunt in the city, above her cafe. It was nice, but it was definitely temporary. They were full grown adults now, and truth be told, they were not good at sharing a room anymore. Spending so much time in each other’s heads made it so that they wanted a touch more space in their down time. So he was looking into getting an apartment for himself, but he wasn’t being as diligent as he wished. He was a little preoccupied searching the shore instead.
He knew it was a long shot, and he ought to be doing something else with his time, but he couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let Fred go that easily.
Week after week, he spent each day searching the coast for ay sign of him. Sometimes, on particularly bad nights, he would go searching in the dark as well. but nothing changed. Occasionally he would come across a dead seagull, or fish, or whatever, and have a mini panic attack.
The first time had been the worst. It had been a seagull, and he spent the next half hour after finding it just staring at it, too afraid to do anything else. All he could do was wonder if it was Fred, and if it was, then all his searching had been for nothing after all. He had called Hiro in tears and asked for help. Hiro had generously drove down to the beach with the others, and Honey bagged it up carefully to take it back to the lab and inspect it.
It had been a very quiet ride to the research facility.
The overwhelming relief that washed over them when she concluded that it was a normal seagull was enough to keep Tadashi from the beach for two days. But eventually the urge to keep looking became to strong to ignore, and he returned to his fruitless search.
The others came along too most of the time. Honey had her hands full at the new research facility, being one of the most experienced kaiju researchers around, but she made time to help them as much as she could. Wasabi was also busy trying to work on a new program with Marshal Callaghan to figure out a way to revamp the scrapped jaeger program into something new. Something that could use the skills that were so carefully cultivated in jaegers, in a world where jaegers were no longer needed. Gogo and Hiro were with Tadashi the most often. Gogo had plenty of job offers for someone with her mechanical expertise, but she was taking a break for now. And Hiro was just about as lost as Tadashi was at this point. The two of them were offered positions in Marshal Callaghan’s new program of course, as teachers of sorts. They accepted, but on the stipulation that it wouldn’t be until Tadashi was ready to call it quits on his search for Fred.
That day seemed to grow ever closer as his efforts proved to be in vain. After the third dead seagull Honey inspected, he finally threw in the towel. He just couldn’t take the stress anymore.
And even though he was happy none of the things he brought in for her ended up being Fred, he couldn’t help being disappointed as well. At least if she did find one to be a kaiju, he’d have some closure. As it was, he felt like he was going to spend the rest of his life asking, “what if” until concrete evidence showed up. But he was never going to get that. If Fred had died back when the breach collapsed, it was likely that he was gone in the breach, or the world he came from. There weren’t any huge kaiju corpses littering the ocean floor- other than the three they killed during the attack. Marshal Callaghan had pulled some strings and checked.
So there he was the next day, sulking in Honey’s new lab while she tried to convince him to eat some lunch. But while he no longer had the urge to throw up everything he ate, he just couldn’t bring himself to eat anything at the moment. Part of him wanted to because he knew Fred would have wanted him to stay healthy, but the other pettier part of him said it was wrong to go about his day as if everything was fine.
Still, he didn’t want to worry Honey or any of his other friends any more than he already had, so he took the sandwich she offered him and picked at it listlessly.
She didn’t reprimand him when he gave up after a few bites, merely stroked his back comfortingly while he put his head on her desk and groaned.
Some of her new assistants gave him curious looks, but they had learned by now not to ask about it. All they knew for sure was that they were alive because some shapeshifting kaiju had saved them all, Tadashi was scouring the coast for him, and that the untouched desk next to Ms. Miyazaki’s was for him. Other than that, they had to rely on gossip to fill in the gaps.
Tadashi almost fell asleep like that, he was so drained from… Well, everything.
Before he closed his eyes for more than a few seconds, Hiro came barreling into the lab, making a ruckus when he almost faceplanted after smashing into the door before fully opening it. He stood there gasping for breath while everyone looked on in confusion. Waving off a concerned student, he motioned for Tadashi to get up.
“The Coast Guard just called it in- there’s a kaiju heading for shore,” he wheezed out.
Tadashi and Honey snapped up straight, sharing a look of hesitant hope before booking it out of there with Hiro in tow. Gogo and Wasabi were already waiting for them in the parking lot, and they wasted no time getting out of there.
The drive to the beach took far longer than any of them wanted, but in retrospect it was hardly unwarranted. After all, the general public thought all the kaiju were gone, and they had no idea one like Fred existed. So naturally, they were all fleeing further inland to try and find shelter.
Marshal Callaghan had made a call to make sure that no military branches would try and kill the kaiju. They didn’t quite understand why, but they figured the man that had been in charge of the jaeger program had a plan.
Odokuro’s familiar shape was already sprawled along the shore when they arrived. It was strange to see him like that. His hulking form almost looked vulnerable draped over the sand, despite the fact that even when he wasn’t standing, he towered over the humans. A sizeable expanse of his scales were charred, burned off even in some places, and his eyes were closed. Even with his size, Tadashi wasn’t able to make out whether or not the kaiju was breathing as he approached.
The group pushed right past the perimeter of soldiers, although it wasn’t until after Marshal Callaghan told them to stand down that the soldiers stopped trying to reign them back in.
Tadashi was the first to squeeze through, sprinting to the kaiju as fast as he could. He skidded to a stop just before he would have rammed into him, all too conscious of the state his friend was in. If Fred was still alive, he probably wouldn’t appreciate it if Tadashi ran straight into his face.
He held his hands up hesitantly before resting them gently along the side of his jaw. “Fred?” he whispered. His voice shook, and he found himself suddenly terrified that he’d made the trip for nothing. That their time together was really over, and Fred was gone for good.
“No,” he whispered. And then louder, “No, you don’t get to die yet! Not after everything we’ve been through! You don’t get to tell me you love me, and save my life, and then die without me being able to say it back! That’s not fair, and- and I won’t allow it! Open your fucking eyes and tell me while I’m not about to pass out from oxygen deprivation, damn it!” He punctuated his statement with a rather ungentlemanly pounding of his fist on the other’s scales, although he was sure it did more damage to his hand than Fred.
Honey’s hand landed on his shoulder, and she started to pull him away gently while he scrubbed uselessly at the tears pouring down his face.
He would have missed it if he hadn’t heard the soldier’s shouting further ashore. When he looked up to see what the commotion was he met one of the kaiju’s bright green eyes. He and the others froze as he blinked slowly down at them before crawling to his feet. The shouting grew more frantic, but Tadashi kept his eyes on the figure in front of him, watching as the massive form shuddered and then collapsed back onto the sand as the one he adored.
“Fred!” he cried, throwing himself forward and wrapping the other’s rather battered self tightly in his arms.
All the air from Fred’s lungs left in a whoosh as he raised his arms to reciprocate. “Hey, Smiles,” he chuckled weakly. “Good to see you too- ow! Maybe don’t squeeze so tight on that side, huh?” he said, wincing as he rolled his shoulder. In human form, his burns were even more apparent.
“Sorry! Sorry, I- we should get you to a doctor. You need medical attention,” Tadashi said, frowning as he surveyed the damage.
“Alright, well, no hurry. It’s really not that bad. Most of it’s scarred over,” he replied. With Tadashi’s help he got shakily to his feet and greeted the rest of his friends. Hiro pretended like he hadn’t been worried at all, Gogo rolled her eyes and told him not to pull stupid shit like that again, Wasabi was crying so hard he could barely form sentences, and Honey buried her face into his good shoulder while she cried. All in all, it was a great reunion.
There was some explaining that had to be done to the soldiers, but Marshal Callaghan insisted that he’d take care of it while they got Fred back to civilization.
The ride back to the former shatterdome was filled with happy chatter, and Tadashi couldn’t stop from smiling the whole time. He and Fred were sitting in the back of the van, hands intertwined and shoulders resting against each other, while Fred dozed lightly.
“Hey,” he said softly, startling Tadashi. “I was kind of out of it back there, but what were yelling at me?” he asked. The slight upturn of his lips made it clear that he found it amusing, but Tadashi felt his face heat up nonetheless.
He turned his face away and bit his lip, but Fred could still see how red his ears were. “Oh, nothing,” he mumbled.
Fred raised an eyebrow and nudged him lightly in the side. “Sure sounded like something. I mean, I may not have heard what you said, but you were yelling it. Plus you hit me,” he added slyly.
Tadashi turned back to scowl playfully at him. “Well, you weren’t waking up. I had to get your attention somehow, didn’t I?”
“You always have my attention, Smiles,” he said quietly. “Do you remember what I told you back in Amaterasu?”
Tadashi swallowed thickly. “Of course I do,” he said just as quiet. “Did you mean it?” he asked. He hadn’t really questioned it before when he thought Fred had died, but all the sudden now that he was alive and capable of refuting what he said, Tadashi was starting to have doubts.
Fred squeezed his hand a little tighter and gave him a soft look. “Every word. I love you, Smiles.”
And well, now that he was hearing the words while neither one of them was on their deathbeds, it melted him straight down to his core. He squeezed Fred’s hand back, and blinked back tears as he rested his forehead against the other’s. “I love you too. No matter what happens, I will always love you, Fred.”
The smile he got in return warmed him right down to his toes, and he met Fred halfway when he leaned in to bring their lips together.
The other four made their presence known once more by hooting and hollering some very exasperated, “finally!”s, but they let Fred and Tadashi go back to their own little world shortly. Maybe it was a little embarrassing to have his little brother tease him about his love life, but when Fred was holding his hand and laughing, he found it hard to care.
And maybe things would never be as easy as it would be in movies, where they’d defeat the big bad and live happily ever after, but no matter what happened, they would be together.
And that was more than enough.