Aftermath: A Pacific Rim: The Black Story

Chapter 1: A Father's Grieving

That first night, after the battle with the Category-6, when Ford Travis saw his children again for the first time in five long years, he had so much that he had wanted to say to them...but he didn't know where to begin.

Instead, he simply held them in his arms and cried. Taylor and Hayley were not the same children whom he and Brina had been forced to leave behind in Shadow Basin. Taylor was a young man now: Ford had hardly recognized the dirty, drivesuit-clad pilot who had stepped out of the Gunraven's troop bay at first.

It was only when he got closer that he then saw his son in the contours of his face. Hayley was five years older too, but she looked as though she had aged thirty. Her movements were burdened somehow, like she carried a weight he couldn't see, and when he looked into her eyes he saw what he had seen many times before in so many of his fellow pilots, the ones who had lost everything and everyone they loved in the Blackout. Ford saw that same pain again in both of his children, and it had broken his heart.

"We shouldn't have left you," he had sobbed, over and over again, "I'm sorry. Hayley, Taylor, I am so, so sorry."

"It's alright, dad," Taylor had assured him, unable to keep himself from crying as well, "It's alright...we never blamed you."

"It doesn't matter anymore," Hayley had then said, "We're together again. None of it matters anymore."

But their reunion was incomplete.

...

It was the next day, Taylor and Hayley told Ford about Brina: How she had been taken by the Sisters of the Kaiju, how the two had found her after a battle and then freed her from their control, and how she had died just three days before, protecting her children, and the boy, and the young woman they'd brought with them...from the cult.

"She was so worried that we weren't going to make it," Hayley recounted, tears streaming down her face, "We couldn't let her die like that! We...we put her in the rig, and Loa and I made sure that she was at peace. She died thinking that we all made it to Sydney."

It had taken Ford all of his strength not to break down with Hayley as he held her close, and she put her arms around him in kind, shuddering and weeping.

"That was a brave thing you did," he said to her, his voice nearly breaking as he held back tears of his own, "I'm so sorry you had to do it, but it was brave. We'll get you help."

he promised his daughter. His fourteen year old daughter who had spent the last third of her life in the closest thing to Hell on Earth that there could be, feeling her mother's death as if it had been her own. Beside them, Ford saw Taylor shamefully look away.

"You won't have to suffer through this alone. Either of you," vowed Ford.

...

It was only when he returned to his quarters that evening to sleep that he allowed himself to collapse into his bunk and finally weep.

They had promised that they would see their children again together.

"I had tried to hold onto that promise, I really did, Brina." he dreaded, "I swear to you I tried, but as the weeks had turned into months, and the months became years..."

There had been times when Ford had found himself hoping that his wife was dead. The only other possibility he could think of...the Sisters...was a far worse fate. He hated himself now for ever feeling that way. Now, he would have given anything to see Brina again, even for a moment.

After he had stopped crying, laying silent in the darkness for nearly a minute, a yellow light illuminated the space on the floor by the head of the bed. Root's spherical avatar materialized above his black box.