Who are you? (scene)

Herc Hansen confronts his son. 
==Links==
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==Novelization==
(Chapter 17)
After the scrap outside Pentecost’s office, Herc allowed himself precisely fifteen minutes to get his temper under control and decide what he was going to say. Then he went looking for Chuck in Striker Eureka’s maintenance area. He found his son working with a three-foot wrench on a single bolt whose head was bigger than Herc’s fist. Though compared to the size of most of the machined parts of Striker Eureka, it was a sliver.
“He’s grounding Mako,” Herc said over the sound of whatever turn-of-the-century guitar hero was playing on the radio. It all sounded the same to him.
“Well, that’s half of the right decision,” Chuck said. He wiped his hands and added, “But I want him off the mission even more than the bird.”
Something about the moment—Chuck’s flip attitude set against the immensity of the task before them, or his knee-jerk impulse to destroy an ally because he thought he might be a rival when the Pan-Pacific Defense Corp needed every warm body Hannibal Chau’s market share could finance... Whatever it was, it tipped Herc over an edge that he’d been moving toward for a long time.
He reached down and turned the radio down. Not off, but down.
“Hey, I was listening to that,” Chuck said.
“Who are you?” Herc asked his son.
Chuck looked confused and belligerent at the same time, like it irritated him not to know the answer to a question, but it irritated him even more that his father would ask him a question he couldn’t answer.
“What?”
Herc smashed the radio into the floor. A few small pieces of it bounced away, but it was a shop-floor model, designed to take a beating. He hadn’t wrecked it, but it made an impression on Chuck. Got his full attention for the first time in Herc’s recent memory.
“Who are you?” he demanded, stepping up into his son’s face.
“I’m the only chance we’ve got to deliver that bomb, is who I am—” Chuck started.
“Not the point,” Herc said.
“—but I’m stuck with two prison guards, the basketball triplets, Tokyo pop, and a washout.”
“Not the point!” Herc said, louder.
Chuck got louder, too. “Pentecost may be a good man, but he hasn’t seen combat in, what? Ten years, maybe? More? The only chance we’ve got at a future is delivering that bomb, and I am the one doing it—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about!”
“That’s who I am!”
“I know,” Herc said, dialing it back just a notch. “I know you’re a great Ranger, and I’m proud of that. But dammit, kid... why are you not a better person? Why didn’t I make you a better person?”
“A better person?” Chuck echoed, as if he couldn’t believe this mattered to Herc. “Don’t blame yourself. It’s not like you really brought me up anyway. After Mom died, I spent more time with these machines than I ever did with you.” He tapped the wrench fondly against the chassis of Striker Eureka.
Herc remembered the mushroom cloud rising over Sydney. The second one. The first had been out at the islands, an hour before, and had slowed the kaiju down. The authorities had given the entire population of downtown Sydney one hour to clear out.
One hour for five million people to get to safety
Then the second nuke came down. The kaiju died. So had Angela. He had not known whether it was the kaiju or the bomb that had killed her. Pentecost had taken him aside and told him it was the kaiju, that she had been killed in the collapse of the building where she worked. Herc had never made up his mind if he could believe that or not. All he knew was that he’d only had an hour. He’d gotten from the base, where he was an active-duty pilot with the Air Force, across the bay into Sydney while everyone else was getting the hell out. Cell networks were down. There was no way to find anyone. He had to guess, and he could only get one of them. He chose Chuck, and Chuck had never forgiven him for it.
Chuck’s school had survived the kaiju but been reduced to ashes and slag by the second nuke. Herc could see the mushroom cloud in his mind, rising over downtown Sydney as he got the hell out of there in an old Bell Kiowa that had probably seen its first service in Vietnam. Was Angela already dead by then? He would never know.
But Herc Hansen had sacrificed everything for this boy, and Chuck would always hate him for it. Sometimes Herc wanted to sit him down and say, Hey, listen, would you really rather I had let you die so I could save your mother? Is that what you want?
Because I pray to any and all gods that have ever existed that you never have to make that choice.
Not that Chuck would listen. Because Chuck didn’t listen to anyone.
“Let’s face it,” said Chuck. “The only reason we even speak today is because we’re Drift-compatible. Because we’re good at smashing things together. In fact, we don’t even need to speak.”
He picked up the battered radio and dialed it back to its original volume.
“Catch you in the Drift, Dad,” he said, and turned it up a little higher.
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