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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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"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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