Not Enough, Never Enough (Always Too Late)

There are exactly two times a year Herc Hansen lets himself get so drunk he can't even remember what exactly his own name is. And neither of these dates is Christmas.

He never used to do this when he had been a pilot. Maybe he'd felt some sort of fatherly obligation to his son, that no matter how foreign their relationship became he wouldn't add to it by bringing splitting headaches and uncontrolled avalanches of messy emotions into the Drift. Maybe he'd remembered how it felt to wade through the mind of his fuckass brother who couldn't do anything right but make the people who loved him cry.

Mostly he thinks he just didn't want his egotistical jerk of a son, his little boy, to have all his fears justified. To step into Herc's head and conclude, yeah, my fucking old man only saved me 'cause I was ten fucking minutes closer.

But every September fifth starting in 2025, Herc nurses a killer hangover with every ounce of his dignity as a soldier and husband and father and beats himself up for making an impossible choice.

It's January of 2027 now, and sometimes Herc still dreams about circuits and a metallic tang and memories that aren't his. But most of the time he only thinks about the idiots of the PPDC and how they just won't cooperate with him. The Jaeger Program, even in its dying years, even in the first months of its slow and painful dismemberment, employed over 1500 people. That's 1500 technicians, engineers, service people who are about to be out of a job, and the PPDC has decided to maroon them. Again.

He complains to Tendo about all this – about the damn politicians and cowards and ingrate jackasses – at the annual Hong Kong shatterdome "Cancelin' the Apocalypse" party because he's a loud drunk, just like Scott. Except unlike his good-for-nothing brother, he doesn't know if he'd been a loud drunk before or only after they'd mashed their brains together into an ugly pile of a thousand and one different personal issues. After all, he'd only started abusing his liver like this two years ago, when the white-hot lights had torn the ocean asunder and two – only two – life pods had surfaced in the lonely Pacific blue.

Either way it's too late and he doesn't care.

"I've been talking with some of the old places I used to work at," Tendo shouts over the echoing music. Ukrainian hard house or something. "And they're willing to take in about a hundred or so people with engineering skills. Saving the world, even indirectly, looks pretty good on a résumé."

"Thanks, Tendo," Herc slurs, a bit weary after his tirade. "Really 'ppreciate it, since those imbeciles in charge seem to think that once we've saved the entire goddamn world we can do everything by ourselves without any money at all."

"You know, you can take a break sometimes, Marshal" Tendo says, only half-convincingly because it's a well-established fact that Herc Hansen never delegates his work. Never had, never will. "You haven't been looking too great lately."

"We're at a crucial stage in the transitioning. Too many important things going on to take a vacation," he grunts. He's getting too tired for this train of thought, unable to fish out all the right words and all the right feelings to articulate precisely what kinds of stress January 12, 2027 is.

"Hey, Tendo my man, how've you been?" Raleigh's sunny voice cuts Tendo off from whatever he'd been trying to say to Herc to lighten up the mood. Herc looks up, bleary-eyed, from his beer – the sixth glass tonight – to see Mako and Raleigh push through the crowd to their lonely table in the corner.

"Wonderful, not counting my imminent unemployment of course," Tendo greets with a broad grin. "Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori, come back from your fancy interviews to hang out with your old pal?"

"We barely escaped the reporters," Mako says with her soft laugh. "They all want us to talk about the mission. 'How do you feel on the second anniversary, Miss Mori? What was it like to pilot again, Mr. Becket?' I don't know how you were able to handle it for so many years, Marshal."