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chuck

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Most of the time when Newt works late, Kate doesn't mind at all. She knows he's got loads on his plate and since he's pretty much the most brilliant scientist Darrow has ever seen -- totally no bias -- she expects that his job requires a lot of time. Most evenings she'll just chill out on her own or walk Jeff to the store and get some extra work done there, but when Newt tells her he's going to be late tonight, she decides she's bored and doesn't want to do work or watch TV by herself.

So she texts Chuck. Like, four times. She texts him until he answers, then demands he go out and do something with her. And she texts him about four more times about it until he agrees, which she feels is a serious victory on her part. Chuck is super grumpy about eighty percent of the time and it's part of why she loves him, but it also makes it difficult to get him to do fun stuff with her.

Not that she has any idea what she actually wants to do, which is usually dangerous. Whenever she and Newt want to do something fun, but don't have ideas about what to do, they tend to get into trouble. They've gotten arrested or nearly arrested way too many times already and she doesn't want to add to that tonight, but chances are they're not going to do something that's boring and strictly legal.

She tells him to meet her at the boardwalk, then changes, kisses Jeff on the nose, and heads out with her purse over her shoulder and her phone tucked into her pocket. She doesn't know why she changed, only that she figured a dress and heels wasn't the best plan for whatever they might be doing. Now she's in jeans and a cute pair of sneakers, which basically means she's ready for whatever.

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What Kate has in mind, Chuck doesn't have the first idea. What he does know is that she texted him repeatedly, until it seemed easier to give in and answer than wait to see if she changed her mind or actually said what she was texting about, and that she hasn't exactly given him much of a choice in hanging out. Not that he minds, of course — Kate is one of the few people here he can actually stand, even if he would likely never say so outright in any sort of serious context — but she really can be remarkably persistent. Anyway, it isn't as if he has anything better to be doing. He rarely does, around here, and if there's one thing that can be said for Kate, it's that she keeps things interesting.

Making his way out to the boardwalk where he's agreed to meet her, he calls out her name when he finally spots her, heading in her direction. "Well," he says, "looks like you talked me into it."

"Dude, I am so bored tonight," she says, rolling her eyes expansively, as if that will somehow make it clear just how damn bored she really is. "We need to do something exciting or I'm going to lose my mind and you know Newt will blame you if that happens."

She smiles sweetly at Chuck and reaches to take his arm, batting her eyelashes up at him. "We can do anything you want. I'm serious. I'm game for whatever."

She tends to suggest things like bowling or drinking. Or bowling and drinking, which always turns out to be way more fun than anyone ever expects, but since she'd practically begged Chuck to come out with her tonight, she figures she owes it to him to do something he wants instead. Even if that means something she wouldn't usually do, because that's what friends do for each other, she figures.

"And I'm your go-to person for excitement?" Chuck asks, a bit skeptical, if amused. He hardly finds his own life exciting, especially not when compared to the life he had before this place, and it's hard not to wonder for a moment how many people she might have texted before him. The idea of that isn't something he minds, though. However it happened, he's the one who's here now, apparently being tasked with entertaining his best friend's wife, a thought that, when put in those terms, is funnier than it probably has any right to be. Newt and Kate are probably the most married people he knows, but he doesn't think of Kate just as Newt's wife just as he'd never outright call Newt his best friend, however unavoidably true it might be.

Shaking his head as he looks at her, he just barely manages not to roll his eyes, though it would be, at least, a gesture more fond than exasperated. "Well, I'm not sure how that happened, but you're right. I don't want Newt to take it out on me if you lose your mind. But, hey, as long as it involves drinking, it's exciting enough for me."

"Sometimes," she says brightly, smiling up at Chuck with good cheer. Maybe he's not the most cheerful person in Darrow she knows, but she likes him all the same and he's been there for her through some seriously rough shit, and that makes him important to her beyond the fact that he's Newt's best friend. Not that she's ever heard Chuck use that term, but Newt uses it all the time and she knows Chuck feels the same.

"Okay, so drunken idiotic sport, I'm so down with that," she says. "Do we go pre-game at some dive bar first and then try to let a bowling alley actually give us shoes when we're just the right side of too tipsy? Because that sounds fun. Or we can go find a bowling alley totally sober and get blasted there so they have to kick us out, but we can steal the shoes."

"I think the answer's obviously both," Chuck says after just a moment's thought, biting back a laugh as he does. Bowling may not be a particular talent or interest of his, but Kate makes it sound a lot more fun than it would normally be, and it's still a step up from what he would probably be doing on his own. It seems less about the game itself than the circumstances of it, and that, he's all for. Besides, he can't pretend it wouldn't be entertaining to see just how badly they can do. "Pre-game at a dive bar until we're just the right side of tipsy, then get blasted at the bowling alley and steal the shoes when they kick us out. Should work, right?"

He's fairly sure that is a when, too, rather than an if. With Kate for company, he's probably marginally less likely to start a fight than he would be on his own, or even with Newt, remembering entirely too well how they'd gotten arrested that time because he punched someone on Newt's behalf, or... something like that. Admittedly, the details have become fuzzy. Getting drunk and then kicked out of a bowling alley at least seems like it will be less violent. Considering how much he really does not want to go back to those dentists Newt recommended, he figures he should go with an option less likely to end in another broken tooth.

"Um, that actually sounds perfect," Kate answers and she knows just the dive bar for them to head to. It's only a block away from the bowling alley, which means they'll be able to easily get there, even if they are drunk, and it's the sort of place where they don't have to actually talk to anyone except each other, because most people are literally drowning their sorrows in alcohol.

"C'mon," she says. "We can call Newt later to come pick our sorry asses up and he'll have to do it, because he's sober and the keys to my mom's car are at the condo anyway."

As they walk, she loops her arm through Chuck's, a comfortable, friendly gesture. "So what's new? And don't say nothing, because I feel like I haven't seen you in a gazillion years, so something has to be new, right?"

"How often is there really anything new here?" Chuck asks, brow raising as he glances over her, though he quickly thinks better of the question. "No, wait, don't answer that." Darrow may still be far more uneventful than what he's used to, but there's always some sort of weird shit happening here. At least it's been a couple of months now since everyone was attacked by toys. For all that whatever those things were had been child's play, as far as he's concerned, not remotely threatening in comparison to some of the other things he's fought, that doesn't mean he enjoyed it any. If nothing else, they were annoying as hell, with their weird, squeaky voices and makeshift weapons.

When they aren't under attack, though, he knows that his life tends to be more uneventful than not. He didn't set out looking for that to be the case; it's just hard to know quite what to do with himself sometimes, nothing as satisfactory or as purposeful as what he used to do. "I got my jacket back?" he settles on. "Lent it to someone a while ago. The one I have from home."

Kate gives him a very pointed look at that, just a split second before he tells her not to answer the question and that's really for the best, because crazy murderous toys hatching from plastic eggs is really only the beginning of what can be new in Darrow.

"Who'd you lend it to?" she asks. The jacket sort of seems like one of those super important things from home, the type of thing people don't just lend out to whoever is passing by. Kate knows she wouldn't give her mom's car to just anyone. Even if she knows she'd never be able to own up to it, it's just too much a part of Tara for her to risk something like that.

Then she grins suddenly and looks at Chuck. "Was she hot?"

"She's young," Chuck says first, brow arching like that ought to be the end of it. She's too young, really, though barely. While she is, though, there's no sense in thinking beyond that, especially given the state she'd been in when he found her. She didn't need to give him any details for him to have a pretty damn good idea of what happened before she wound up on Darrow's beach. "Her name's Laura, I found her when she got here. She washed up on the beach dead, wrapped in plastic, only then, you know, not so dead anymore, so..."

Trailing off, he shrugs, visibly uncomfortable in a way that's rare for him. "She wasn't wearing anything, so I gave her the jacket to put on."

"Whoa, whoa, wait a second. Like, 'She's dead. Wrapped in plastic.'? That sort of dead Laura?"

That's a totally unfair question of her to ask, she realizes almost as soon as she does. Chuck is from a completely different time than she is and she really doubts, given everything going on in their world, that his parents would have ever shown him that show like they had with her. But Tara had loved it apparently, had watched it in college with Max, and Kate had only watched the first few episodes before deciding that her life was weird enough without all that extra shit, but she remembers that part.

It's basically the basis for the entire show.

"She probably needed that," she says, wincing a little. "That's really nice of you."

"Yes?" Chuck replies, looking at Kate quizzically. Considering that's pretty much what he's just told her, he doesn't see what the big deal about it is, why it seems so specifically noteworthy, but he also doesn't think it's something that's worth dwelling on. It happened, and at least she didn't have to just stay there, still wrapped in plastic and not wearing anything. It isn't often that he concerns himself with the problems of strangers, but even he couldn't have just left her there like that, maybe especially because he remembers what it was like to wake up on that beach after dying, too. Contrary to what he's pretty sure has often been popular belief, he isn't entirely heartless.

Shrugging, he adds wryly, "Really nice, that's not one I get a lot. It just wouldn't have been right, you know, just to leave her."

"No, it's like... she's from this show, it's really famous and weird as fuck," Kate says. "But maybe don't tell her that. That's the sort of shit that'll fuck someone up."

And she doesn't remember all the details of the show, but she's pretty sure that girl doesn't need anymore fucking up.

When it comes to Chuck being nice, though, Kate only rolls her eyes at him as she leads him into the bar she's been heading for all along. It's pretty much moot, him telling her he doesn't hear that a lot, because she knows he doesn't, and she totally doesn't understand it. Chuck has never been anything but good to her, almost from the first moment they met, and at the time, she'd had some pretty heavy shit going on. She'd practically been buried alive and he had been so sweet.

"Yeah, yeah, you're a real hardass who's rude to everyone," she says, flapping her hand as she pushes open the door to the bar. "Never done a nice thing in your life."

With as long as he's been here, Chuck can't say he's that surprised by what Kate tells him, nor is he about to give it any more thought than necessary. He isn't familiar with whatever this show is, anyway. To him, Laura is just the girl he found on the beach and felt compelled to be nice to. There wouldn't have been anything else for him to do, with what it was easy enough to guess happened to her. That much, though, doesn't seem like his place to get into. He hadn't asked questions; it hadn't seemed right. Neither would offering any of those details now.

"I wouldn't say a word," he says, shaking his head as he follows her into the bar. "And, yeah, that sounds about right." He's never tried to let anything else be the case, never let it bother him that that's what everyone has always thought. "Unless saving the world counts as doing a nice thing, in which case, yeah, I'll take credit for that one."

Kate's eyes roll again, more in amusement this time, because it doesn't matter what Chuck says to her, he's never going to convince her that he's actually an asshole. Maybe he's just a dick to people who deserve it, but Kate knows well enough that plenty of people actually deserve it. The world is made up of total dicks and she doesn't have the patience to put up with them either. Chuck can't be faulted for that.

"Saving the world was pretty nice of you," she agrees as she leads them to a booth and then sinks onto the well worn leather seat. "But you were nice to me, too. Since the moment you met me and since I was already dating Newt, I know it's not just because you thought I was hot. That time I was almost buried alive you were great. You're perfectly capable of being a very nice man, Chuck Hansen, but I promise not to ruin your hard earned rep and tell anyone."

"Oh, it's alright," Chuck says, shrugging. "You can try. I don't think anyone would believe you." There's nothing self-deprecating about it; it is, as far as he can tell, just a simple fact. Certainly it would have been back home, when he knows full well that he wasn't well or remotely liked in the 'Dome beyond his skills in a Jaeger. Even his own father outright told him he wasn't a good person, and what the hell is he supposed to do with that but believe it? He hadn't needed to be nice or good or whatever the hell else to do his job. The same is true now, just without the job.

Not for the first time, he thinks maybe he ought to do something about that, but it's hard to find a purpose when his last purpose had such gravity, such need.

"But, hey, if that's what you want to think, I'll let you think it."

"It's what I know, sweet cheeks," Kate answers with a bright grin just as the waiter comes over and Chuck can argue it more if he wants, but she's already long ago settled on her opinion of him. Maybe he's a bit abrasive, but at the core of who he is, there's kindness. And he totally loves her.

The drink order is easy enough, at least for her, because she's not here to spend a load of money, she's just here to get drunk, and she sits comfortably in the booth until the waiter heads off again.

"I mean, you had to be pretty tough at home, right?" she asks. "Given everything and what you were doing. That's like, a very specialized situation."

Chuck casts her a dubious look at the nickname, but decides not to comment on it. He's pretty sure Newt has called him weirder things, anyway, and there's no chance it would make any difference. Just like Kate will believe of him what she wants to believe of him, he's fairly certain that she'll also damn well call him whatever he wants to. And, well, if he's honest, there are worse things. At least there's nothing to second-guess with Kate, an ease that he has around few people, that he's probably lucky to have with the wife of the person he would only under duress call his best friend. This could easily have been stilted and weird. Instead, it's anything but.

"Yeah, pretty tough is one way of putting it," he says with a laugh. He softens all but imperceptibly after a moment, one shoulder lifting. "And that's all I ever learned how to do, so there you go."

Maybe she's never been where they've been and maybe she's never seen what they've seen, but between Chuck and Newt, she thinks she has a pretty good idea of what their world was like. And beyond that, she knows what it's like to grow up in a situation where you have to put up walls and keep things inside or else risk something. For the both of them, that risk came from their parents. She knows what without even having to ask him.

He learned it because that's what his parents taught him. And she learned it because she had to, because her mother wasn't always her mother and there was no other option when it came to staying sane. It makes her sort of want to kick his dad's ass. Or his mother's. She doesn't actually know which one might be responsible.

"Yeah, same," she says with a shrug. "I mean, in a different way, I know. I wasn't off having to learn how to save the world or whatever, but... yeah. Same. You have to learn how to be tough when your parents are fucking nuts."

"It's all about surviving one way or another, isn't it?" Chuck asks, glancing over at Kate. From him, it's a fairly substantial allowance. That's one of his problems with most of the people here; their problems all seem insignificant compared to what he's used to, and while it isn't a competition about whose life sucked the most, it's hard not to resent people whose biggest concern wasn't on the same scale of monsters coming out of the ocean and trying to destroy the world. He lost his home, his mother, any chance he ever had of having a childhood. He put his life on the line to try to stop entire cities from being destroyed. He blew himself up at the bottom of the goddamn ocean so Raleigh and Mako would have a chance of closing the breach.

Compared to all of that, it's hard to think much of anything else.

He's known Kate long enough, though, that the same doesn't apply to her. Besides, she's married to Newt, who lived through the same apocalypse he did, and if he'd had any doubts, that would be enough to convince him that she gets it. That alone makes all the difference. "You figure out what you have to do to get by."

"Totally agreed," Kate says as their waiter returns with their drinks and once they've been set down in front of them, Kate lifts hers in kind of a salute. Chuck's level of having to get by is a hell of a lot higher than hers and she knows it, but that doesn't mean she doesn't get it in some other ways. Tara had made her life incredibly difficult for a really long time and it's not like she totally blames her mother, she knows it's not like she went out of her way to be hard on them, but Kate had needed to figure out how to get by, too.

Most of her methods had sucked. They'd gotten her into shitty situations with shitty boyfriends and then shitty friends when she thought she was growing up and moving beyond using guys as a way to cope. Lynda had been just as bad, though, and the worst part about it was that she'd been an adult. She should have known better.

"But eventually you have to go back to actually living," she says. "Instead of just getting by. That's the hard part, I think, trying to figure out how to relate to a sea of normal people."

"Isn't it?" Chuck says by way of agreement, glancing around at a bar that seems to be full of the aforementioned normal people. For him, it isn't even going back to it, either, not really. The last time he experienced anything close to normal, he was a child, too young to remember now what it felt like, only that he knows, for a little while, they'd been happy. Now, the very idea of that seems like a fucking joke. Kate probably isn't wrong and he knows it, but he also can't imagine himself ever reaching that point.

He'll always have the weight of being alive because his mother died. He'll always have the years that followed, knowing that his father didn't give a damn about him. He still thinks sometimes that it was a hell of a joke, the two of them being drift compatible.

"Especially when you know they'll never get it. Where you came from. What you went through." It's how and why he's formed what relationships he has in Darrow. All of them left behind something awful, in their own ways.

"Yeah, but I also guess you can't expect it of them and like, it's not a bad thing that they can't understand. It's good when people haven't had messed up shit go on in their lives or, I mean, the messed up shit they've had is the regular kind of messed up shit and not like, giant monsters, death, dissociative identity messed up shit."

For a long time, she was pretty angry. She hated that other people got to have normal lives, that people tried to sympathize with her upbringing without having any idea what it was like, but she doesn't feel like that anymore. It's good that people can't understand. Growing up with Tara had been really difficult and it's not the sort of thing she would wish on others just out of some urge to be less weird.

She is weird. Her life is weird. She's okay with that.

"No, it just makes them lucky," Chuck says, not quite able to mask the hint of resentment in his voice. It isn't their fault, he knows. No one gets to choose the hand they're dealt, the life they're born into, only what they manage to do with it. Still, it is, he thinks, beyond fucking unfair that some people get to live perfectly normal lives, their biggest problems comparatively trivial, while others get to lose a parent as a child and grow up in a world under attack by monsters from another dimension. Before this place, at least, it was the entire world that was at war, or at least a significant portion of it, the people who couldn't hide inland or on the other side of the planet, acting like walls would be enough to stop the kaiju. Here, there's hardly anyone who gets it, and he's not sure he'll ever stop being consumed by it. Of course he'd be a little bitter. "Even with as strange as this place is, it's still... Every time something happens, it goes back to normal eventually. Or something like normal."

"Every time, right?" she asks, laughing a little. "You would think that eventually something would happen and something about Darrow would change, but it's like everyone is just totally content to forget. Which I get, too. I mean, my mom would turn into a teenage girl and do something super fucked up and by the next week we would all be back to acting like nothing was wrong. Which... I don't know, is that a coping mechanism or just life? What are you supposed to do, right? Are you supposed to just change dramatically every time something messed up happens? If that's the case, my family never would have made it through a single week."

They were a disaster, after all, that was just what the Gregsons were. Eventually you had to learn to live with that.

"Both, maybe," Chuck says, shoulders lifting in a shrug. "It was the same for us, you know? Strap into a Jaeger, go kill a fucking monster, get to listen to people you spent weeks or months or years working with die, and then the next day, it would be almost like nothing ever happened. No sense in getting so hung up on it when it's just gonna happen again." The same principle applies with Darrow, he supposes. Strange is ordinary here; if people got fixated on every single thing that happened, let their lives be turned upside down by it, they would just shut the fuck down. For all that a part of him would like to see that, for all that everything here is comparatively small next to what he's used to, it does make more sense this way.

The only exception for him has ever been when Scissure attacked Sydney. It's a hard thing to carry, knowing he's alive because his mother died, suspecting that his father regrets the choice he made between the two of them. Other Rangers dying was to be expected. They all signed on knowing the risks. Civilian casualties are another matter. The destruction of his family wasn't a story so different from anyone else's, but it hurt more than anything that happened once he joined the war himself.

"Yeah, okay, you had it worse," she says, pointing at him over the table with her napkin. It's not that she thinks he's comparing or anything like that, Chuck might think people here have it pretty easy, but he's never made her feel like her life was so much better than his just because people weren't dying. It's nice to have that acknowledged, to have someone agree that yeah, living with someone like Tara was a fucking challenge in a lot of ways no one else will ever understand.

But at least no one ever died. Not like that, anyway.

"I mean, okay, my mom's alters sort of technically died," she says. "There was this whole thing where she had a pretty giant breakdown and one of her alters was killing the others and I know it's not really the same, but it's still just like... T, you know, she was around for my whole life and then she said goodbye to me and it was so fucked."

"It's still something," Chuck says by way of agreement, head ducking in a slight nod. It isn't something he can imagine, at any rate, something difficult to deal with — a loss — in its own right. Maybe there were no monsters or bombs or a choice between her life or her mother's, but it's still its own brand of fucked up. He wouldn't for a second try to argue with that, convinced as he might be that the same wouldn't apply to most of the people here. There are exceptions, sure, but most of them probably wouldn't know how to live through more than a decade of war, how to die at twenty-one in the name of trying to save the goddamn world.

He'd never talk about it, but sometimes he still wishes he hadn't woken up. At least he'd died for a purpose.

"That sounds... Jesus. Intense."

"Yeah, dude, it was fucking bonkers," Kate says, shaking her head. "It's like... I know most people think my mom was just pretending or whatever, but I lived with her alters all my life and they were fully realized people, totally individual from my mom. I had relationships with them they were totally different from the one I had with my mother."

She shrugs and says, "Most people would probably say they didn't die either and I guess they didn't in the sense that they didn't have their own bodies that shut down, but one moment they were there and the next they weren't and that... that felt like death."

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