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Herc knows that the being who's come back to him isn't exactly Chuck, but he's willing to ignore the less human qualities and focus on the parts that came from his lost son.
The problem is, Max isn't.
He'd brought Max down to the 'welcome home' party, where the PPDC's missing officers were being mobbed by family and friends and colleagues. Chuck had come over to them, obviously relieved to have an excuse to escape the knot of people, clearly expecting Max to run up to him the way Max runs up to everybody. Nobody had expected Max to whine and back away.
Whatever progress Chuck had made between his retrieval and reintegration was lost after that. He shut himself in his room, only speaking to his fellow returnees and, mercifully, Herc, albeit with the same belligerence as ever.
It was Herc who had the idea.
“This is dumb,” said Chuck, looking down at the packet of dog treats in his lap.
“Just try, okay?” Herc replied.
Before, Chuck would have argued. Now, the air in Herc’s room was thick with silence. He never thought he’d miss fighting with his son.
Max, on the other side of Herc's room, glanced towards the pair, and, at Herc’s prompting, Chuck tossed one of the treats behind the dog, who sniffed at it for a moment before quickly snapping it up.
A few more repeats, and he started edging closer to the bunk.
See? Herc wanted to say. It’s gonna be alright, Chuck. Instead he kept his mouth shut, not wanting to shatter the moment or undo the small amount of progress that had been made.
Because progress had been made, and when Max returned to the dog bed on the other side of the room, Chuck didn’t shut back down completely.
Max had come into Chuck's life when he was fourteen, and angry at everything. Herc could do nothing right in his son’s eyes, and he knew on some level that his son was right. When Angela was still alive, she’d done most of the parenting, and Herc had never really had to learn how to do the day-to-day business of school runs and cooking and forming a strong bond with his own kid, and now she was gone and Chuck blamed him and he didn’t have a damn clue how to fix anything. Scott was no help, either, more accustomed to being the fun uncle than a responsible adult.
Max was a birthday present, yet another attempted apology for sub-par parenting.
Even Chuck couldn't be angry with a squirming potato of a bulldog puppy. He'd doted on the creature from the moment they laid eyes on each other and Max had licked his nose. Max was proof that Chuck still had a wellspring of love and hope inside him, something more than bitterness and fury, and he poured all of that affection into the responsibilities of pet ownership.
He wouldn't show any of that affection to Herc, and so Herc channelled his care for his son into Max as well. Their relationship felt broken beyond repair most of the time, but Max adored them both unconditionally and was adored in turn, and most of the time that was almost enough.
They tried again the next day.
This time, Chuck didn't bother complaining or objecting, just settled into throwing treats and letting Max approach and retreat at his own pace.
They managed to get him halfway to Chuck before he refused to try again, comfortable enough with Herc nearby to rest in his rooms but not enough to come too close to Chuck.
The problem was almost certainly the smell, because even a human could tell that the officers who'd returned from the Anteverse smelled faintly of the K-Sci labs, and Max had always hated those. How much worse must the smell be to a sensitive canine nose, and how unsettling must it be when clinging to somebody who used to be familiar?
The irony wasn't lost on Herc, that he had become the bridge between Chuck and Max, when before Max had always been his connection to his son.
After Hong Kong, Max was a godsend.
Angela was long dead in Sydney, Scott was still in prison, and now Chuck lay somewhere in a monster’s guts.
Herc had traded his wife’s life for their son’s, and now he’d failed him too. All he had left of his family was a dog waiting anxiously for an owner who would never come back.
Caring for Max gave him something to live for. Someone to love, to funnel his affection into, to remind him that somebody still needed him.
Eventually, he was able to open up to Stacker about the loss of their children.
The losses had hit everybody - the Kaidenovskys and Weis blamed themselves for not saving their fellow pilots, Tendo had lost friends, everybody had lost colleagues. Doctor Gottlieb’s sister joined the science division, the third Beckett reenlisted in J-Tech, and Stacker’s son was training to avenge his sister, even if there still wasn’t the funding for new Jaegers.
Eventually, Max stopped waiting for Chuck to walk through the doors. Eventually, so did Herc.
And then he got the call.
He came closer every day.
Herc didn't know, couldn't know, if Max was beginning to recognise Chuck or if he was simply learning that Chuck was safe to be around and would dispense treats, but several sessions in he'd already waddled most of the way to Chuck's seat on the bed. Whilst Chuck couldn't play with him like he used to, just being around Max again was doing wonders for him.
"There you go, boy," Chuck said as he tossed another treat. Max snapped it up happily.
Then he scrambled his way onto the bed, bunting his big head against Chuck's arm.
Chuck stilled, and Herc held his breath, as Max set his paws on Chuck's shoulders and licked his face.