Work Text:
There was never a need to think about the future, before. Before there was only the fight, simulations and redesigns, mean averages to calculate and days measured in the cold precision between disasters. Through the gauzy film of memory that had bled over in the drift there was ice and snow and water, chain-link fences and metal sparks. Those memories were made up of sweat and blood, soaked in the aimless days spent moving from site to site, following the coastal wall from Baja to Anchorage. Mako had never seen the shores in Pacific Northwest, but she knew how they looked under moonlight from the sweat-filmed windows of passenger trains; how the ocean smelled, how the wind tasted salty on the edges of her mouth. These things become matters of fact, folded into her memories and kept on display like curios and trinkets, borrowed and curated, never forgotten.
Raleigh’s memories had tastes and smells, textures and tremors. They made manifest in tactile sensations that she could feel under her skin, like scraped knees and sore knuckles from bad falls or fist fights. Every memory felt electric like that, an almost guilty firing of synapses and neurons that came from peering into strange rooms and looking at unfamiliar faces. Some memories were harmless, framed around childhood homes or old dogs or Yancey like sad altarpieces; others were tinged in the whispers of late-night fumbling, made up of fingers and lips and teeth.
“You’ve been inside my head,” Raleigh said of it once with only a shrug. “And I’ve been inside of yours. It’s just what it is.”
There was no future yet, so Mako didn’t bring it up. She never said anything and he never asked questions. It was a mutual understanding, one of many compromises made as they waited for monsters to come out of the dark. Her silence was easy; his silence was not.
--
After was a hard thing to nail down. It didn’t come with instructions or a field guide, and there were no neat little boxes to pack things in to deal with later. Everything bled together into days without proper sleep, hours eaten up by everything that came in the aftermath. Debriefs on the orders from the higher-ups, questions to be answered, interviews to trudge through and data to compile. The funerals were finally held a week later, once there was time to breathe and think. When there were no bodies left to bury, it didn’t feel quite so pressing to invite everyone else to mourn the holes left in Mako’s world.
Back in the real world, the one without monsters and giants, there were arrangements to make. People to notify, calls to listen to and condolences to accept. Mako only had Stacker’s old dress blues left, so she folded them carefully and placed them in a tiny wooden box with his name on the front. It was all she had and it still didn’t feel like enough, just a token or a consolation prize. She took a deep breath in the mirror the morning of the service and told herself that she would survive. The old mantra felt somehow hollow in the face of things, but it was her duty to go on. She would honor her father in the only way she could.
There were countless faces in the crowd at the service. People she knew and people she didn’t, all coming up to the dais to tell stories about what kind of man Stacker Pentecost was. What kind of pilot, soldier, leader. No one had any stories about what kind of father he was, or how steadfast he was, or how patient, or how strong his arms had been when they held her for the first time. Only Mako knew, and she kept that between her and her wooden box. That was enough.
And if at some point between the service and the wake, and the sleepless night she would spend in her father’s silent house, she felt Raleigh’s hand close over hers, that would be enough, too.
--
There was one night that they never spoke of, in a long string of things that were never talked about. It was the last time they slept on the Shatterdome, after Stacker died, before everything had to change. Mako had gone to Raleigh’s room instead of her own and slept in his bed, and he held her while she tossed and turned. He never tried to kiss her; she never asked not him to. In the morning, she kissed him instead.
--
They buried the Kaidonovskys next, then the Wei brothers, then Chuck Hansen. By then Mako could no longer find comfort in the silence. There was a hole left in the world around her by the certainty of death, the absence of hope. She tried to fill it with the government contracts that quickly came down the pipeline, agencies looking for her skills and expertise in the transition. The world was now post-war, but there was still research to conduct and data to collect, projects to be derived from the successes and failures of the Jaeger program. There was work to be done. Work she understood; work she could live with.
Everyone disappeared quickly and with little ceremony. Herc was still a marshal with obligations to fulfill, and he went the way of the other ranking officials at the Shatterdome. Newton and Hermann found themselves suddenly famous, like overnight rock stars with book deals and talk show appearances. The rest of the crews were all absorbed into other projects and programs. Then there was Raleigh, always the last man standing. He had no monsters to fight and no walls to chase, no qualifications or distractions. There was nothing left for him to do, and so after the pageantry and the media interest began to fade, he made his quiet exit from Mako’s life.
“I’ll keep in touch,” he said as he held her hands on the flight deck. “I just have to do this for a while. Have to clear my head for a bit.”
“Just so long as you come back.”
“Of course I’ll come back. You won’t be rid of me that easily.”
“Good,” she sort-of smiled. “I would make you sorry if you didn’t.”
Soon she watched him disappear over the ocean on a plane bound for Alaska, for all those beaches she never saw. After that, there was only work and silence. She had her duties, and that had to be enough for now.
--
In the drift there was nothing to talk about. No doors remained closed, no secrets kept hidden under beds or swept under rugs. Sometimes, when Mako dreamt, she saw Raleigh’s life in reverse; others she saw fragments of time in those narrow days before everything changed. His eyes on hers, whether in the rain or in the ring, or across crowded chow halls or empty corridors. Then she would wake up alone and remember that he was on the other side of the planet, and everything about that seemed unfair.
--
Raleigh was a lot of things, but he was never dishonest. He sent her emails and letters and photographs, told her stories about places her visited or people he met. Beaches in California, the desert in New Mexico, green forests of trees and long stretches of black asphalt. Mako collected the postcards for her windowless office, stretched from wall to wall on a string like tiny portholes to wide open spaces. Every weekend she wrote back him about the city and about her work, the new defense systems she was working on to prevent wars like that from ever happening again. He always said he was proud of her and that he would see her soon, and signed his messages with Love, Raleigh. Reading that always made her squirm in her seat.
Then the last message came on a postcard of the Grand Canyon, with coffee-stains around the edges of the saturated full-color photo. I’m coming back to Hong Kong to see you, it read in his familiar chicken-scratch. I think we need to talk.
In all their letters and emails, Mako never told Raleigh that she’d seen him pleasure women in his memories. Women with no names or histories, categorized by levels of intimacy she had no context for. They appeared to her only as flickers of skin and color, light and sound, made out of mouths and eyes and fingertips. She couldn’t help but dwell on what he’d seen in her mind, what it made him feel, if it made him think of her differently. In the end, she said nothing of that, either, and stayed awake that night and wondered if her memories felt as electric as his.
--
When Raleigh got off the plane, it felt as if all the air had left the terminal, sucked away into the vacuum of space far overhead. His hair was a little longer than Mako remembered it being, a three-day’s beard making scratchy definition of his jawline. She fought against the weightless sensation that washed over her and walked across the terminal to meet him. When he took her hands and kissed her forehead, it was not at all what she anticipated, thinking of his lips and teeth in the cab on the way into the city. Still she smiled when he greeted her in Japanese, even if his accent was atrocious from disuse.
“I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you, too,” he smiled back, as if nothing else had really changed.
The ride back to her apartment was silent but for the patter of rain on the windows of the cab. Between them the divide from one seat to the next was cavernous, deep as the ocean. At precisely four-twenty-one he reached across the middle seat to take her hand, holding it tightly. She never let go. By five-ten they were in her tiny apartment atop a winding concrete sprawl of tenement buildings. Mako had no guest room or sofa, but she made no mention of that as she slipped off her shoes and offered him something to drink. Raleigh took the offered beer and excused himself to the bathroom to clean up while she finished hers, sitting on the foot of her bed, listening to the water run in the next room.
At five-thirty, with her fingers and toes warmed by the slow burn of alcohol, Mako opened the bathroom door. Raleigh turned from the sink, toweling off his shaven face. Shirtless, his body was still the tapestry of burn marks and scars that she had remembered it being, a palpable roadmap of memories in thin ridges and flat swells. Her eyes wandered openly, over the sculpting of his shoulders and neck, the dips of his hipbones, the lean musculature of his arms, his long fingers. The corner of his mouth lifted in the beginnings of a smile. Like nothing ever changed.
“Hey,” she said, barely above a murmur.
“Hi.”
They kissed three times: Once in the doorway, again in the bedroom, and once more in the bed where he laid her out, each deeper than the last. One more kiss, a cheating bite of her bottom lip, and he moved out of her reach to settle between her legs. Another on her stomach, her hip, her thigh, hands busily rolling her skirt up to thumb over the warm defining crease in her underwear. He smiled; she sighed. This silence was easy, like breathing was easy. It settled in bone-deep, her eyes closed, her mouth open, swelling up to fill the spaces between them for all the months spent on opposite sides of the ocean.
--
“You said we needed to talk,” she said into his collarbone long after the rain stopped.
The hand skimming down her spine never faltered, even for his soft breath of laughter. “I figured we were past talking, all things considered.”
“Why did you come back?”
“I needed to see you.”
She tipped her chin up to look at him, unsatisfied with his answer. “So why did you leave in the first place?”
He shrugged. “I needed to work my shit out first.”
“You never said why.”
“Why what?”
“That night.”
Eventually he sighed, looking up at the ceiling instead. “You just lost your dad, Mako. You didn’t need me hovering, making it worse.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“I didn’t have to. I know that look. It’s just what it is.”
She wasn’t thrilled with that answer either, but she let that ride for now, settling instead to trace the L-shaped scar over his heart. “You’re not allowed to leave this time.”
At that, he laughed again. “Yes, ma’am.”
There was never time to think of the future, but, as rainclouds quickly rolled over the city, it finally felt like there was room for it now.