Work Text:
It is the night after the Ceremony when it happens. This will be her excuse later – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was tired – but now, in the dark, with her short hair sticking to the sweat of her face, Raleigh holds her to him in a grip that almost breaks her bones.
It takes some time for the dream to fade. Around her still is the roar of splintering glass. She is six again, standing in the wreck of a city which had always seemed so big to her: so big, so solid, so entirely indestructible.
Rubble spills down from above and she curls up, shaking.
“Hey,” Raleigh whispers. It’s rough against the back of her neck. “Hey. Mako. Hey. Come back.”
Slowly, she becomes aware of herself. Her chest. Her ribs. Her thundering heart. Her arms, which Raleigh have pinned against her body like she is dangerous. Her bare legs, the blue of her toes in the night. She opens her mouth: gulps in a lungful of air, forgetting where she is, thinking for a second that she will taste metal and sawdust and death.
Raleigh doesn’t let go of her, even when she begins to thrash. “Hey, there. Hey. Hey.”
“I’m – ”
“You’re back. Just sit for a moment.”
She wets her lips. She sees that they have ended up on the carpet of her room. Heat crawls up her neck; she is glad it is this dark. They are not lovers, and she has never been shy – but she is ashamed of herself.
Raleigh holds onto her a moment longer.
She shifts against him. “You’re crushing me,” she says.
--
It isn’t easy to explain. She has been in his mind and he has been in hers: after that, the human definition of love begins to feel somewhat flimsy. In a crowded room, he always knows where she is. When he sleeps, she can read his dreams in his face. They don’t touch anymore – not unless absolutely necessary – physical touch feels more and more like a sham, like placing a candle next to the sun.
One morning he looks at her from across a hotel room. “Your hair’s getting long now, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“You’ve stopped cutting it?”
“Yes.”
She has never been pretty. She has never been soft, as some women are soft. Her eyes are dark and large and always confronting. Television crews are puzzled with her; they can never seem to make her smile.
“One year now, huh?” Raleigh says, and sips at his coffee. “Maybe we should do something special.”
“Huh,” she says. “We have that gala tonight.”
“More bright lights. You think you can stomach it? We don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
“I’m not made of porcelain,” she says, and her voice has an edge.
They are celebrities now, but they won’t always be. Already the world has begun to forget. What the threat of the Kaiju had once done for international diplomacy is falling apart – already the old conflicts, the old familiar transcontinental bickering: my God, your God, my land, your oil supply.
It’s understandable, the world wanting to move on. If she had the option she would forget it all as well.
“Are you sitting there feeling sorry for yourself again?” Raleigh says.
“Yes,” she says. “This coffee does not even deserve to be given the name. It tastes like dirt.”
“You forgot to put sugar in it. Here, have mine.”
She does not deserve Raleigh. And one look into his face tells her that he does not believe he deserves her, either.
They are, probably, both of them right.
--
“Listen,” Newton says over lunch. He drops his voice, but he does it so conspicuously she wants to hit him. You always know something is up if you can’t hear Newton babbling nonsense in the background. “Listen, Mako, you won’t believe this.”
She takes a bite of her sandwich. “Try me.”
“No, I’m serious. This is incredible, okay? Okay. Look, Mako, don’t roll your eyes like that. Just hear me out.” Newton takes a dramatic breath, as if he’s about to recite a poem. “You know how they said all the equipment, the old machinery, was destroyed after the breach was closed a year ago? The President on television, yada yada?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Newton says. “It’s not. It isn’t. Or, well, they got a lot of it, the government can be surprisingly efficient when they want to be, especially when you don’t want them to be, you know how it is, like that last – ”
“Stop,” she says. She puts her sandwich down. “I don’t want to hear this.”
Newton actually looks hurt. “Hey, Mako, what – ”
“I’m not interested.”
“Sure you’re interested. You have to be.”
“I’m not. I’m tired of this conversation. Every conversation I have now seems to always be about what happened when they closed the breach, what happened during the War. I’m tired of it.”
“No, look, this is different,” Newton says. He makes a clumsy grab at her wrist; he only succeeds because she lets him. “I know what it’s like, okay? Well, no, not exactly what it’s like, I didn’t battle any Kaiju in a giant robot suit, I get that. But I know what it’s like to lose a drift. I connected once, remember? I know.”
“You don’t. It’s different. You were in a drift with a Kaiju.”
“Not always. The last time, Gottlieb was there with me. We went in together.”
She stops what she is doing. She stares at him.
“I know what it’s like, alright?” Newton insists. “You feel – empty. Not entirely empty. You’re still functional, and you have all your own thoughts, and memories, and all that. But there’s a part of you that wants. And you can’t get rid of it.”
“You’re not going to offer me what I think you’re going to offer me,” she says. “I don’t want it.”
Newton’s grip goes white-knuckled. “But think about it, Mako! A second chance! To be whole again. To fill in that space that you can’t fill yourself. Don’t you want Raleigh – ”
“No.”
“That’s not the truth.”
“I’m leaving.”
“I can get you the equipment,” Newton says.
She peels his fingers off her wrist. She is still stronger than him; all that sleekness and muscle gone to waste, now that all the Kaiju in the world are dead.
--
She, of course, already knows this. She is at the bathroom door with them draped over her arm.
They have no sense of modesty with each other. They have both seen each other naked countless times. The steam makes the red of Raleigh’s scars leap out like blood against his skin.
He reaches towards her for a towel, then twists away and winces.
“Shoulder?” she asks.
But of course it is.
“How was Newton? Haven’t seen him in a while. How’s he finding Berlin?”
“He loves it. It was all he talked about during lunch.”
Midway through him towelling his hair, she can see him watching her. His blue eyes rest carefully on her face. It is perhaps the first lie she has told him in a long time and he can sense it, though it is new enough that he is unsure.
“Oh,” Raleigh says at last. “That’s great.”
--
Sometimes she is training and they will be hovering in the wings, watching her. Sometimes she will sense them in her periphery – she will be walking down a corridor, eating dinner, leaving her room.
In a way it does not make sense. She can’t remember ever speaking to Aleksis, and Sasha was brisk, cold, her eyes as brilliant and as blue as chipped ice. They did not encourage friendship. They did not seem to need it. That was a quality in all Jaeger crews; the sense of completeness, of requiring nothing else beyond each other.
Now, sometimes, she imagines how they died. She dreams about water. The slow, violent suffocation.
“I’m glad they died,” she says to Raleigh once.
He darts a quick look at her, alarmed. “What?”
She means: I am glad they died together, in each other’s minds. I am glad they had each other at the end. I am glad they didn’t live to have to endure this – to be separated, to never know the drift again.
“Mako,” Raleigh says. He lays a hand on her arm.
She shakes him off. “If you had the chance,” she says, “would you go back?”
“Go back to what?”
“To the drift. If I could get us back. Would you do it?”
For a moment, Raleigh looks lost. “But – there’s no need for it any more.”
“You don’t miss it?”
“I miss it, but – ”
“It was what we were brought up to do. It was what I was brought up to do. All we ever thought about back then was winning the War, but we never thought about what we would do if we did win the War, do you see? I never – I can’t go back to it, but I can’t go forward either. I’m stuck.”
“We can go forward. We are going forward.”
She laughs. “What, more interviews? More late-night television shows? Raleigh, we can’t keep doing this. We won’t be heroes forever.”
“But that isn’t what bothers you.”
“No. No, you’re right. What bothers me is that – that I don’t have you any more.”
“You have me,” Raleigh says. “I’m still here.”
It perplexes her, the way he doesn’t understand. Her entire mind hums with the lack of him. She combs her fingers through her hair: it is past her shoulders now, not in any particular style, wild and shapeless.
The next morning, she makes a phone call to Berlin.
--
“I don’t mean to pry,” she says politely, her voice a cultured coldness down the phone, “but I was under the impression you yourself are drifting with Newton. On a regular basis.”
“It isn’t the same.”
“How not? As far as I can tell – ”
Gottlieb cuts in with a nervy, accented flutter. “It’s dangerous, Mako. I don’t just mean the technology – which is outdated, third-rate, it isn’t what you’re used to working with. The best machinery, that was all destroyed. But that’s not what I mean. I mean it’s dangerous to get back into the habit.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You do. You want to be whole again, with Raleigh. You want to be in sync with someone again.”
“I don’t see how that is in any way a habit – ”
“It is if you can’t get by without it. If you can’t adapt.” Gottlieb’s voice crescendos just a little, as if he’s leaning in closer to the mouthpiece; as if that would somehow help him get his point across. “The world, Mako, it’s changed. We can’t drift in the open any more. Those of us who’ve been in the drift, we’re – expected to forget it all. We’re expected to move on and function as everybody else does.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” she points out. “For the last year or so, that’s all I’ve been doing. Forgetting.”
“But you haven’t forgotten. That’s why you asked Newt to do this for you.”
“I never asked. He offered.”
“You accepted his offer. It’s the same.”
“I just have to try it one more time,” she says. She twists the phone cord around her finger. “Just once. After that, I know I can manage to bear it. Just one more time.”
Gottlieb sighs – a sharp, sad rush of static, like he feels sorry for her.
“Once you’ve had it, Mako, you’ll always want it.”
“No,” she lies. “You’re wrong. I won’t.”
--
It’s just that, while the apocalypse was raging, she understood her place in the world. There were monsters, and the monsters had to be killed. Everything was clear-cut. Everything was so simple. All through her childhood hate had given her a purpose. It had put the steel in her spine, the hard glint in her eye; it had made her into who she was: Mako Mori, the avenger, Marshal Pentecost’s protégé. It had moulded her out of the clay she’d used to be. It had created her. The first moment she’d drifted with Raleigh Becket, she’d known that they were compatible because they had that same iron core to them – they were both of them seeking to get even for what they’d lost.
But now, there is nothing of that old world left. The War is over. The monsters are gone.
And suddenly, altogether unexpectedly, Mako Mori finds that she no longer knows who she is.
--
His hand darts out. He is still as fast as he once was, as fast as she is herself.
“What are you doing?” he says.
She twists away from him. She’d prepared an excuse but now she can’t remember it. Her heart is bucking at the base of her throat, twisting a knot into her windpipe, and she can’t get a single word out of her mouth.
She tries to get off the bed but he tugs her back.
“Mako, what is this?”
“It’s a headset.”
“To do what? What were you going to do with it?”
“I was just – ” She breaks off, abruptly tired. She tugs the matching one off of her own head. “Never mind, Raleigh. Go back to sleep. We can talk about it later.”
“No, I want to talk about it now. What were you going to do?”
“I was going to try and drift with you.”
“While I was sleeping?”
She can’t look into his face. She pulls the headset from him, begins to roll up the lines and wires. Her hands are shaking. “It was wrong. I did not ask for your permission. I’m sorry. But – Raleigh, you don’t understand. I don’t know how you can just get on with things, go through every day like it’s all nothing, like we never – well, I can’t. I can’t forget it. ”
“Mako, the War is over, I don’t know why you keep – ”
“Exactly. The War is over. We won’t ever be able to drift again, unless we try.”
Raleigh has the careful look again, like she is a jigsaw he is trying to puzzle out. “Drifting means that much to you, does it? Why?”
“You know why,” she snaps. “You know that after you’ve drifted, you can’t – you feel incomplete.”
“But you’re not incomplete. I’m here, right here.”
“No, it’s not the same,” she insists. Her voice sounds raw in her throat, like she’s swallowed salt. “We’ve lost that connection, don’t you see? And it feels to me like I’ve lost a part of myself in the process. It feels like – like there’s something cold inside me that won’t ever be warm. Not until we drift again.”
“We can’t drift forever, Mako,” Raleigh points out, quietly.
“I know. I know that. But I just want to try it one last time. Then I’ll be ready.”
“You’ll be just as ready as you are now. If you open that door, you won’t be able to close it.”
Her eyes flash at him. “Are you saying I’m not strong enough to close it?”
“No, I’m not saying that. God, I’ve been in your mind, I know how strong you are.”
“Then what – ”
“I’m saying that we need to work out a different way forward. You said you were stuck – if you go back into drifting, you’ll just keep on getting caught up by the past, and you know it. You won’t be able to get out of it. And then five years from now we’ll still be drifting, and it’ll be even harder for us to stop.” He shakes his head: his shadow blurs a bit in the dark. “We need to find something else, Mako.”
“There isn’t anything else. Nothing else comes close.”
“Some things come close.”
She can just make out the blue of his eyes. His gaze is steady, pinning her down. She’s seen that look before – across a sparring mat that first time, when they weren’t quite friends, when they were still grappling for the cracks in each other’s armour.
It hurts her and she looks away. “Don’t do that, Raleigh.”
“You asked how I deal with it. How I get on with things. Well, it’s because I don’t feel like I ever lost you, Mako. Not in the way that I lost my brother.”
“Raleigh. Don’t.”
“We’re both of us still here, aren’t we? It’s not over. We don’t have to be over. It won’t be the same, I know, and we won’t ever understand each other as clearly as we did then, but it’s better than nothing.”
“I’m not in love with you,” she says. “Not in that way.”
He nods. “That’s not what I’m asking for.”
She watches him. She’s still holding both headsets in her hands, the wires tracking haphazardly across the carpet. She remembers how it used to feel against her skin: Tendo’s fingers soothing everything into place, the soft, blue hum, the peaceful silence of another mind inside her own.
“If you trust me,” Raleigh says, “and God knows I trust you, then we’ll find a way around it. I promise.”
“I trust you,” she manages to say. “But I don’t see how – ”
“We’ll find a way. We’ll manage it together. You’ll see.”
She doesn’t see. But then Raleigh smiles at her, that white, familiar slash of teeth in the dark; and something warm and reluctant goes through her entire body.
They’ve followed each other blindly before, gone side-by-side forward into the abyss.
She supposes she can do it again.
“Alright,” she says.
--
She goes out for a moment onto the hotel balcony. The wind bites its way down her neck and into her clothes. The sky is still white, bled of all available colour: it is still too early in the day to know which way the weather will turn.
She can hear Raleigh’s breathing from the room behind her, the slow, soft rumble of genuine sleep.
On the balcony she reviews her life up until now. Her family, whose faces she can barely remember any more – father and mother and sisters all a blur. Stacker Pentecost, his dark eyes gentle and firm. Aleksis and Sasha Kaidanovsky, whom never spoke, and the Wei brothers, whom never seemed to stop speaking. Chuck, with his habit of throwing punches first and asking questions later. All in the ground now, or in the Pacific Ocean; lost to her, buried deep inside her past.
Time to let them go, she supposes. Time to move on.
She goes back in. She sits down at the small dressing table. There is a pair of scissors in the drawer; she takes it out and, slowly, lovingly, without any real sense of loss, she begins to cut her hair.