Work Text:
They warned you before the first time: It’s the drift. Things might get awkward. And you said I know, I’ve been there before, I’m a professional. Like there was a distinction. Like you hadn’t seen things you wanted to forget. The problem was, drifting made you feel like you both couldn’t and didn’t have to talk about those things.
Images you saw that went by too fast. Lucky Seven, and the end. You’re a goddamn professional, and you don’t ever bring up what you see until it’s too late. Things went the same way with Chuck. You can try to run from him, but he will always be there, an impression of the ride.
An impression of something he saw, because he was trying not to think about it. Times before that there had been those awkward moments where one of you felt the other cumming, a flash of lust, attraction that wasn’t your own. Sometimes it mixed you up good, glancing at another pilot and having an erection that you thought you were too straight to have.
Chuck knew that you knew and you knew that he knew and you cycled back into not talking about it, not having a conversation until a white hot second of a memory floated by and you remembered the thought process of looking through porn videos for a man who looked like yourself, which would have been narcissistic had it been something you’d done.
You knew that Chuck knew that you were trying to push it away. He thrust it at you, the memory, the video he settled on masturbating to of some hunky muscle boy getting held down by the hair and throatfucked.
You scared?
Scared of what?
That your son’s a fag.
No.
You’re pulling away from me.
The neural handshake faltered. Everything alright Hansens? You’re a goddamn professional, and a good pilot, and you pulled yourself and Chuck back out of the deep waters of memory. You told yourself you’d talk about it later, loud enough for Chuck to hear.
But you never did talk about it. The problem was hierarchical: in the drift you were equals, but in the flesh you were the authority figure. And it’s hard to keep up that same respect when you’ve seen every ugly thought in your individual heads so deeply that it integrated into your own self-loathing.
An incident from your teenage years. The first time you saw your father cry. The shame you felt that day, realizing he wasn’t a god. That he was mortal, and weak, and had an internal life as deep and troubled as yours. When you’re in the drift you get that way about yourself, not knowing who's echoing who.
If you’re so worried you fucked up, why didn’t you try harder?
I did what I thought was best at the time.
Sure.
You only get my memories through a filter of who I am now. How I remember experiencing them, not how they were.
I know. I’m in your head.
The problem was reciprocal: you were both intimately unaware of the angst the other felt at being unable to be a father and a son. He wanted you to fix it; you didn’t want to accept his solution. It felt counterintuitive to take someone else’s commands, even if it ended with them on the floor.
However. It’s a father’s job to fix things, even when they’re beat down and terrified and at their limit. And you’d disappointed him more than enough times to count, even continuing into the conditions of the drift itself, like the time his fantasies ghosted back into your head and you heard him thinking fuck him fucking bastard can’t even jack off anymore without—
You stopped there. You were in his head; you knew how that sentence ended.
He knew you were considering it; each time you piloted the ghost drift lasted for longer. At first it’d been a few minutes. Some physical sensations, tripping over your own feet at the confusion between your body, his body, and the way the sea had split at a swing of your arm. The problem wasn’t recovering from feeling the body of the Jaeger—the proprioceptive system knew fifty meters from two. It was the overlap between you and Chuck, close enough it fooled a confused body map into holding its own hand.
Now you spent three days overlapped. You ate together, showered together, slept together. He was sick of you. You tried to leave. It lasted half an hour, and then he fell down the stairs because your feet had been on solid ground and he’d mistaken it for his own foot on the step and you’d felt the pain, too, limping to where he was.
Pilots should stay together, the doctor reminded you. You’re lucky it’s only a bruise.
A bruised shin, a little flare of pain in his shoulder where he’d caught himself. The shame that had made you try to leave. How were you supposed to piss when you knew he was in the other room listening and getting hard? You’d shared the image: him on his knees, head bowed, piss running down his neck. Putting him in his place—that’s your idea not mine don’t you ever pin that on me—and then you had to get away from him before something happened that you’d regret.
It happened; you regretted it.
Chuck knew that riling you up wouldn’t work. You could take any number of barbs without comment. Part of being a professional Jaeger pilot was allowing things to roll off your back; no one could censor their mind the way they censored their words. He didn’t need to remind you how he felt when you already knew, but he did anyways, snide comments and prickly monologues. Part of the ritual was the reminding. Play-acting at a relationship where you didn’t already know too much.
Knowing too much made you vulnerable. Chuck could flay every part of your mind relating to fatherhood and find the guiltiest bits, the ones easiest to play with. He knew that you knew that he thought you’d saved the wrong person, and that sometimes you thought he was right, that being a single parent was beyond your ability. How you weren’t ever sure about kids, that he had been a surprise.
You’re fucking stuck with me.
Funny, I feel the same way.
Parental guilt: the counterpart of parental tenderness. He had the nerve, the guts, to tell you that there was an easy way to get his love. You knew he was lying, and you know what he was asking was meant to punish you. So you said yes. It fit the self-loathing and fixed the need to, in his eyes, be a man who did the hard things. Restore some hierarchy.
The hard thing was going along with what he asked for. In your bathroom, on a night when most everyone was on leave, still paranoid at every small sound. You were saving humanity, flaws aside, but some flaws felt too all-encompassing to overlook. Chuck shifted on the tile floor.
Get on with it.
Who’s in charge here, you or me?
One small advantage was that you didn’t have to discuss the details. He’d thought enough about every step you had an idea of when to push and when to yield. Even if yielding diminished your respect in his eyes; he wanted you to get carried away so every ounce of hurt felt more justified.
You put your hand in his hair, pulled his chin up to look you in the eye. This is for your own good, you thought across the link, unbuttoning your fly. His annoyance at you felt joyous, somehow, like what he’d wanted all along was an authoritarian bastard and not someone who was incompetently trying.
You’re not much of an authoritarian yet.
Shut up, boy.
It felt good to tell him to shut up. You didn’t want to think too deeply about that. Instead, you did what he’d dreamed of; pissed on his face and watched it drip down his chin. He squeezed his eyes shut and sputtered a little, but you forced him still until you finished.
His eyes opened. Your cock hung in front of his face; he looked between it and you.
Suck me off. Faggot.
Way to sell it.
I’m not a homophobic man. Feels wrong.
You’ve got your goddamn son on his knees and you’re still worried about that?
That got you angry. This was all to please him, satisfy that burning need for human touch and a father he could loathe, and he couldn’t commit to his part: the twenty something on his knees, open eyed, looking to make his daddy proud.
Don’t make me call you that.
You’re gonna do what I damn well ask; I’m in your head. I know what you want. You were a military man even before this; you know command and obedience. He wanted a hardass, you could be a hardass, but that also required some goddamn respect. Listen to me good. When I tell you something, you say ‘yes sir’ and you do it. Got that, faggot?
Yes. Sir.
It started to hit you, the arousal feedback, the way Chuck’s mind was bouncing between a thousand different fantasies. Fixated on your cock, still in front of him.
Suck me off.
He didn’t say sir but it was implied enough with a thought; you didn’t want to stop him from fitting as much of your cock in his mouth as possible. You’re a good cocksucker, you hurled at him, with every hateful thing the term implied. Was this really what he’d always wanted from you?
Before you could even really get hard, he came.
Disappointed, sir?
Read my mind.
Even after the encounter, the thing you didn’t talk about, he kept it up. Pestering. Sometimes he’d say sir at the end of sentences, force the memory of you calling him a faggot back up, ask for it in all but name. He wanted you to be the bad guy. You’re a man who’s always tried to do right by his kid, or so you justified it, said anything was worth saving the world. And your drift compatibility was through the roof.
At the same time he hated it too, his own disgust overwhelming the ghost drift, grappling with the realization that you’d dragged one another across a boundary most normal people would find impenetrable. Chuck wanted to blame you, and that’s where you drew the line: you’d both damned one another. This was a mutual place of shame.
I think we fucked up.
You think?
Hold it over my head, why dontcha?
I’m not mad—
--then be mad, for goddamn once.
Disappointed. Boy, I’m disappointed.
It was a testament to the hooks in each others flesh that you didn’t falter the connection. A testament to the fact that you’d never be able to have another person so intimate and deep all it took was a thought the right direction and you’d get hard. Like being a teenager again, melting under the skin when Chuck said yes sir to the brass. You’re a professional; you keep it together even when all you can think about is fucking your son in the shower until the grout scrapes his forearms raw. That one time you had called him those names again, still hard to form in your mouth, terms of abuse that made him shiver. And the orgasm had almost been worth it.
Chuck grabbed on to the memory and pulled it to the front of your mind. Next time, say it like you mean it, old man. And then he was gone.