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There's a knock on the door at 0200. It doesn't take much; the past five years, he hasn't been much for sleeping.
No matter what he tries to tell himself otherwise, the pulse beneath his skin jumps, remembers another time when he rolled out of bed at the same time. Remembers the consequences. (don't get cocky, he'd said, and what did he go and do? always listen to your brother, his mother had said once, and what did he go and do then?)
When he heaves the door open, Mako is standing in her nightshirt, a blanket pulled around her shoulders, shaking with sobs.
"Hey," he murmurs, stepping aside to let her in. "What's the matter, are you all right?"
One look at her tells him everything he needs to know: her weight is placed unevenly, the stance wider than she normally keeps, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Moving. Constantly. There's another choked sob, and she presses her arm against her mouth, her teeth scraping against the skin.
"Come here," he says, and takes her into his arms. Her nose bumps along the ridge of his collarbone, and she sighs. A low, contented noise that leaves a huff of warm breath along his throat.
You'd think with all the extra time they had between now and when he was first going through the Academy, they'd find better ways to prepare pilots for this.
"It's just the Drift," he says, but she doesn't say anything. Just digs her fingernails deep into his back, like she's trying to claw herself a place against his body. Never to be pulled apart. He had times like this. Before. When they would just collapse together on one of the bunks, and pull the blankets over their heads like when they were boys, pushing against each other as much as possible. Doesn't matter what the reason behind it is, doesn't matter the mood or the tension either of them carry, just that they share space. Just that space doesn't matter.
"I'm sorry," she says, "but every time I lie there, I see him. I can hear his screaming, and I can feel the rip along here." She runs her fingers over his shirt, along the side of his body where Gipsy Danger left him scarred.
"I know," he says. "It's a lot to take at first. But you'll get used to it. The best pilots always do. And trust me, you're one of the best."
No matter what he says, though, she just stays with her head buried against the crook of his shoulder, tucking her face away from him. "I shouldn't have…" she begins, and he shakes his head.
"I was in your head. You were in mine. Once you get in there, and once you leave, things get…messy."
His hands find the small of her back and he leads her backward in an awkward show of a dance, stumbling back towards the bunk before falling on the stiff cot. Her eyes widen and he smiles. The laugh dies in his throat when the images bleed through, all tinted blue and colored by feeling. He can hear the hoarseness of her breathing, the soft moans she makes when she's close, can hear how she loves being on top, the way she rolls her hips -
He shifts the hem of his pants, clearing his throat, and this time, it's her turn to laugh. Echoing him. Parts of a whole - isn't that what drifting is all about? When she glances up at him, though, all he notices is the way her eyes have grown dark, the way her lashes flutter when she blinks.
"I promise," he says… and she nods.
"I know you would never…"
And this - it's been a long time since this too. The half-sentences, the abbreviation, the lack of necessity about speaking. So when he moves to sit on the cot, and pulls her down on top of him, she doesn't comment. Just tucks her legs around his, and presses her face back against his shoulder.
The singing comes a little after. It's jarring, and his voice was never that well tuned to begin with; the syllables stick in his mouth and come out uneven and garbled. "hayo-mo yuki-taya, kono zaisho koete…"
Her fingers curl along his hip, and he can feel her mouthing along with him.
"mukou ni mieru wa, oya no uchi…"
She looks up at him from beneath her lashes, and he hears the question on her tongue.
"Yes," he says. "Of course."
She blinks again, and he can see her jaw tighten, can see the play of muscles in her neck. "And…?"
He nods. "I promise that I won't…"
"I know," she says. And with no further preamble, she shifts out of his embrace, further down towards the edge of the bed and pulls off her shirt. Her dogtags are bright in the low light, dipping against the curve of her breast, and he cranes his head, trying not to look. It's more than just touching; it's about sharing a body as much as a mind.
He peels his own off, and strips out of his pants as she does the same. Just the two of them in barely anything. Well, he probably never had to deal with those concerns when he was doing this with Yancy.
She giggles then, but crawls forward towards him, the dogtags knocking quietly against her body with the movement. She pauses for a moment, her eyes darting around his body, considering where to place herself. Her arms, on either side of him; her legs, between his; her hands, against the warmth of his back or against his face, or buried in his hair.
She exhales and her chin stutters along his skin.
"Maybe I should have showered again before going to bed," he says and she laughs.
"In the morning," she says, and his fingers trace circles against her bare hip.
"This is just what it's like after you drift," he says.
Pushing herself up onto her hands, she makes that face at him again. The wrinkle of criticism he's come to regard with affection.
"I'm pretty sure the Marshal will not think that."
"Go to bed," he says.
(In the morning, when he wakes, she's disappeared, leaving his shoes in a neat row by the door.)
-
The second time - they're buoyed back into the hallway by a crowd of drunk colleagues (work hard, play hard, am i right, my man, tendo had slurred, clapping him on the shoulder) after their first real victory and everything is just as he remembers. God, her giddiness rolls off of her in waves, no matter how small and understated her smile, and he just remembers everything.
When you're in a drift, there aren't any secrets. Can't be. Not in a situation like that where you're padding around each other's heads. And there were tiny details he picked out - all the instances where she watched him watching her, or the dreams that filtered through a little grainy and out of focus but with definite sound and content not suited for children, and other fragments too - loss and grief and the feel of cold sheets of rain by the sea.
She hovers around her doorway for a moment, but he already knows she isn't going to take the step. He pushes his door open, and she takes a cautious step down from her own door, peering both directions down the hallway.
"You're going to lose your window," he says, beginning to push the door a fraction of an inch closed.
She bursts across the gap in a sprint, ducking under his arm and into his room.
"Keep doing this, and you'll make it a habit," he says, shutting the door. When he turns around, she's already pulled her jacket off, leaving only the thin tank and making quick work of her boots. "People are already talking."
She shifts into a slouch and pulls hard at the laces. "Let them talk," she nearly growls, and he wonders if he hasn't slipped into her as well. Little by little. He watches her for a moment - the boots, the socks, then the pants and finally, the tank - and when she slides underneath the thin sheet to lie there in his bed, he has to concentrate hard to put the wall up between them. To keep himself from being so transparent.
She smiles, but it edges on smirk.
The words hide on the edge of her mind, and he follows suit. They fit together the way they have the past few nights, her legs sliding between his, her head resting against his chest. She can hear his heart - he remembers that from the drift.
"Don't let it go to your head," she says. "It's about the drift."
His thumb brushes against that spot along her ribcage and she shudders. "Of course," he says. "Wouldn't dare to think otherwise."
She kicks his thigh with the heel of her foot.
-
The alarms are screaming at him, and her breathing is getting thinner. He can feel it - it rattles his ribcage just the same, the burning ache that tells him that she isn't going to last in here much longer. Neither of them are. where would you rather die?, the marshal asked him once, and he picked the only answer he found.
He looks at her and comes up with a different one. He looks at her and thinks the question was unfair. Chips stacked against them. Well, as stupid as he may be - though he's no Australian Jaeger pilot level of stupid - he doesn't like to take needless risks.
all i have to do is fall. anyone can fall.
In his head, his mother's voice echoes. Stories of gods and angels. Stories of men who fly too close to the sun. Falling is easy. Falling is Yancy kicking him off the lower branch of the apple tree in their yard; falling is the first time he kisses Julia after a game and having her boyfriend knock him in the teeth. He knows how to fall; he's good with falling.
He touches his hand to the helmet of the suit and wishes he could feel the softness of her skin, instead, and for a moment, before the escape pod goes up and out of reach, he touches his hand to her ankle, feels the jut of bone against the cup of his palm.
Goodbye, he thinks. It was an honor to fight with you.
She isn't awake, but he knows she hears him. Somewhere. Their drift is, well - he trusts that she hears him.
-
On the escape pod, she can't stop touching him. Her hands on his cold face, pressing his head against her shoulder, struggling to listen for his breathing.
And when he wheezes back to life, he mirrors her. Presses his forehead against hers. In her breathing, she can hear his own; in her head, she can hear his voice; and it's like none of the other times they've drifted, there are tears choking up in her eyes and she's so happy, she's so glad to see him alive, to see him here before her, and his hands are warming the longer they stay like this.
The choppers start to roar from overhead, thundering towards them like wild animals, and he takes her hands, presses one of hers between his two. And she thinks she doesn't ever want to be severed from him, never wants to be separated. Wants to crawl into his body and make a home, and when she meets his gaze, she knows that's the same thought he's thinking the same way she knows Jaeger anatomy -
it isn't a riddle, it isn't a puzzle, but facts. Cold. Unchangeable.
-
The base is given about four months. Four months to clear out of the space, to return the territory to the control of China. The parts to be salvaged or sold to museums or to gift shops, where they can be viewed and appreciated for the pieces of history they are. Where they can be celebrated as some kind of heroic strike force.
What he thinks about - what Mako thinks about - are the funeral arrangements. The little pieces of her that must be given away, no matter how long she spent restoring them or repairing them. The way the group must splinter - technicians returning to homelands, soldiers returning to home armies. The threat has evaporated, and with it, so must they.
No one appreciates a waste of taxpayer resources.
She spends every night of those months in his bed, curled up around him. Sometimes crying, sometimes dry-eyed. And he feels it - the echoes of her sorrow and her grief mixing with his until everything feels like a cloud that hangs over the both of them. Except for the moments when he holds her against him, or when she falls asleep lying half on top of him - when they are heavy enough to anchor each other to something real, to something stronger than this.
They are both orphans - he realizes this in the midst of their third shared drift-dream of the month. Their losses standing in a line like pawns on a chessboard, and the two of them. Armed with their swords, armed with their hanbō, until the moment when the ground shifts and they fall through. Through to Alaska, through to Tokyo - the ash drifts and tastes like snow, the snow lands on the tongue thick as dust.
When she jerks awake first, he follows soon after, and there is nothing to say. Nothing to do but to grip harder, to remember that they are both here, that this is another thing to master doing together. Another thing to master coordinating.
He brushes his lips across her bare shoulder, the Japanese tumbling out at awkward cadence, unaware of what he's saying and knowing that he's saying it, and she repeats something - some off-shoot of a story Yancy used to tell - until even their aching feels the same. She closes her eyes and presses her forehead to his - a little harder than usual - and her lips part, just so, so she can match his ragged breathing with her own.
Her forehead rolls just a fraction to the right and he moves with her. Always moves with her. And when she pulls away to look up at him, her eyes large and dark, it doesn't take him a second to figure out what to do. To be honest, he's not even sure he thinks about it all.
Her mouth is soft underneath his, and her ragged breathing grows demanding as he deepens the kiss, as his hands wind into her hair, as she pulls them both down to the bed. He settles his legs between hers, rocking his hips gently against hers.
He starts to say something and she leans up to take his lips between her own. To wind her hand in his hair and tug lightly. Until he's groaning against her mouth and pressing open-mouthed kisses along her jaw.
Her fingers play at the crook of his neck and shoulder and he can hear her thoughts as her hand slips underneath his shirt to press against the flat plane of his back.
It goes on like that for a while. His mouth, and hers; shifting along the bed; soft noises in the quiet space of his bunk. Then she lifts her head, and cranes her neck to peer at the door. He tries to read her. Can't. (The tricks they learn, the tricks they've taught each other.)
"Mako?"
She moves to sit up on the edge of the mattress. "I'm…" she starts, and he nods, taking her hand.
"It's okay," he says, and his voice cracks with her sadness.
She turns and tucks her head against his shoulder. "You are… to me, you …"
His hands brace under her chin, gently raising it to look at him. Leans forward, his forehead coming to rest against hers.
She sighs his name.
-
The problem with being so connected is that things start being taken for granted. He spends so much time with her, and so much of it passes between them in looks, in touches, nonverbally. The problem comes with the things they need to talk about, but haven't. The clock is winding down on the HK Shatterdome; most of the personnel have left for other jobs, for other countries, and there are only about three dozen people left.
He knows she's gotten job offers. She's one of the foremost experts in Jaeger technology, in mechanics, and besides that, she's a hell of a fighter. And Marshal Pentecost's protege. Daughter. Whatever you want to call it. They'd be crazy not to take her.
And as much as he knows her, they've both gotten better at shuttering. All he knows is the indecision and apprehension that sits on her skin like beads of sweat; all he knows is that she has offers and he hasn't gotten very many. He doesn't know where either of them will land, or if they'll land together, but he knows that she deserves more than to have someone like him hold her back. He's a washed up flyboy, and he can go back to the wall he came from as easy as that. But her? There's nothing but possibility for someone like her.
One night, he reaches out, touches her elbow. She turns in her sleep and mumbles his name.
Anchoring is one thing; sinking, quite another.
-
He finds out from Herc. The old man means well, if he has (on occasion) a big mouth. Not all the details, of course, but enough to know that one of them is some big technology company in Tokyo, more than willing to pay her what her brilliance demands and put her up as long as she works for them. The other offers, he's only heard rumors. Mostly from the lab grunts, but if he knows her (and he knows her), she hasn't said a word to anyone.
That night, when she stumbles into his bunk at 0300 after a long night of preparing notes and clearing up the stacks of data and research, he tells her she should take it. Her spine stiffens then, and she turns, the buttons on the front of her shirt unbuttoned, but still very much dressed.
"Who did you hear that from?" she asks, her eyes bright with anger. He hasn't seen her like this since … well, since training.
"I'm just telling you that I think -- "
"-- oh, how did he even find out -- "
"-- you should take it, it's exactly what you want to be doing and it's -- "
"-- it's my decision and you need to let me -- "
"-- back in Japan and I don't want you to miss taking a good thing just because of -- "
"--make my own choices. You aren't -- what -- because of what?"
He stills, and she goes silent. The walls are up, and he can sense the anger rolling off of her in waves. Her posture rigid, her clothes shaking with the slight tremor of her body.
"I think…" she says, buttoning her shirt again.
He shakes his head, rubbing at an imaginary knot in his neck. "Mako, look. I was only trying to -- "
"I know," she says. "But it isn't your business."
She picks up her boots, opens the door, and breezes out.
It's the first night they spend apart in months.
-
He returns to Alaska; she flies to London first, then plans to return to Hong Kong, then Japan.
It isn't work that drives them. Or him anyway. The governments of the world are clamoring for her to work for them - Department of State, Shadow Cabinetry, Prime Ministerial Cabinet positions - but she's stayed completely silent on the subject.
(He doesn't even know what takes him back to Alaska except the thought that's where he's always run, like a dog licking its wounds. After his parents, after Yancy, and now, after Mako. After Stacker.
The country's glad to have him back at any rate, whatever poor excuse for a hero he might be. He isn't a charismatic Australian, he isn't anybody. He's a boy who fell into a pit of flame and found that he had enough left in him to shoot back up.
He needs some kind of reason, so he finds one - they get him for the dedication of the destruction of the anti-Kaiju wall. And isn't that funny, he always ends up tearing down the things he builds.)
The day Herc sees them both to the airport, Mako has her three bags of luggage between them, a carry-on resting on top. One of them's just her data and research notes and whatever she's saved of the Marshal's office. She doesn't look at him. Peers down at her notebook with desperate focus, her hands gripping it tightly. He flashes back to a tablet, to a hard rain and a dark blue umbrella and the choppy noise of helicopter rotors.
Herc squints at him first, then her. Max trots up to her and she kneels, tears in her eyes, to say goodbye. "I'm not going to let it go, you know," he says. "Stacker wouldn't have wanted it."
"What the Marshal wanted doesn't matter now that we've killed the breach."
"I'm going to fight for it, same as he would," Herc says.
"It's pointless, Marshal."
"Hardly anything happens just once, Raleigh. You ought to know that."
Raleigh shrugs, and Mako strides ahead towards the hangar doors.
-
The wall comes down, and he walks the site for hours after the cameras and reporters have left. Shoves as many pieces of the rubble will fit in his pockets. (For what? Who even knows anymore?)
Even walks out to the shoreline one morning - one cold as shit morning, and damn, he'd forgotten this about Alaska, how much he hated the fucking ice and cold - and hurls one of the pieces as far out to sea as he can manage.
It lands with a quiet noise. One he barely catches. (He remembers a poem, split lines of Japanese, and banana trees.)
"There you go, Yance," he whispers, and his voice sounds ragged to his own ears. "Something I built for you."
And then another piece. For the Marshal.
And then another. For the Wei triplets. For the Russians. Until his pockets grow lighter and lighter and there are no pieces of the wall left. Save one.
And when the snow starts tufting down from the east, he thinks of the funerals across the ocean. Wishes the snow grows heavier until the drifts come up to his knees, his hips. Until the entire landscape is swathed in white, crying for brothers and fathers in the sea.
-
The newspapers find him there. Flashbulbs flying in his face, questions being asked a mile a minute. What do you think about the decision to award you the medal of honor? What about Miss Mori? Have you heard the rumors about Stacker Pentecost's illness? Do you think his decision to keep it secret was illegal? Immoral? What do you think about the trafficking of kaiju parts? He shakes them off. Alaska wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as he needed, anyway.
He heads to the Southern Californian coast. The beaches have been pushed back, eroded by kaiju blue, or decimated, but there's teams of Chinese development and waste teams, here to clean it up and develop it into new resorts and strip malls. He grabs a Hazmat suit and joins in. Days become weeks. Instead of building a wall, he's digging. Hoping to find something solid beneath the waste that's settled on top. Hoping to find land.
His supervisor's an old Chinese man. Smokes cigars like nothing, spits in the water he just spent hours cleaning. Makes him think of Hong Kong. They all recognize his face though. Ask questions about Mako.
daai lou a, the overseer grouses, are you paying fucking attention?
He scrapes a line of hardened sea foam and kaiju blue off of the top of the water, flings it towards the bin. Some of it lands on the guy's jacket sleeve with a loud wet noise.
"Oops," he says. Guess things aren't that different between then and now anyway.
-
The barracks here are barely anything more than tarp-covered huts, but they all make do. Nearly a milk crate of space per man, and all of them stinking like kaiju shit, sweat, and piss. (There's nothing like living with an entire army of men to make you miss the niceties in life. Scented soap and blankets.)
Underneath his pillow, he keeps the stack of photos. In between the images he has, there are scraps of letters from her that he's received over the months. Nothing substantial, but thin sheets of flyleaf that stick together and bleed ink like nothing. It helps him see her, though. The dark blots - where she'd gotten stuck on a thought and let the pen sit too long; the light touches where the dots over i's drag onto other letters, creating nearly illegible words - where her excitement to tell him a story had outweighed all other necessities. As much as she's neat, organized, composed in everyday life, she forgoes all of those here, and he imagines it's a lot to do with writing characters.
He sees it now, when the Chinese men jot notes or write dirty slang on the walls of the toilet. When you write characters, sometimes it's too easy to just let your wrist float along, to finish scribbling the rest of the picture than to care about what it looks like.
He hasn't read Chinese in years, but he imagines even if he did know how to read it, he'd still struggle a little.
hey, his bunkmate grunts, you and the lady ever? There's a contagious guffaw that passes through the barracks.
He blinks, and he sees Mako sitting on the bed beside him, her fists clenched, her mouth wrapped around a scowl.
she'd hit you if she heard that, he rattles back in stilted Cantonese.
The other men clap and roar with laughter that sounds like a howl of wind.
-
He leaves the toxic wasteland of coast for the north. For further inland. Ends up along further inland in Canada.
Herc calls him now and again to check in, to try to find out where he's landed himself. Ever since Chuck died, Raleigh figures part of him needs to make amends to somebody, and he's just as good. All of 'em, orphans or abandoned somehow. Problems with fighting a war in pairs.
He gets a decent apartment this time. Larger than his space in the barracks. Cleaner too. Even got a real kitchen counter and table and everything. He asks Herc about Mako, and the Australian just growls kid, either you go see her, or you buy yourself a goddamn tv, what do i look like to you?
(He does the latter but dreams about the former.)
Her image floats along the news channels near endlessly. Her opinion solicited on everything from technology to politics to the redevelopment of the Pacific coastline. Her official job title is, of course, with the Japanese government, but she never misses an opportunity to make a news appearance. (finally got a chance to be heard, he thinks, and then finds the thought isn't his own, finds the resentment curls low in his chest like a familiar ghost.)
She looks thinner, the circles under her eyes more prominent.
He wonders if she's sleeping enough.
(One night, he wakes up in the middle of the night and shuffles into the kitchen before he's even fully conscious, makes a mug of warm milk and adds a dash of cinnamon and stirs in some sugar.
here, he rasps, sliding the mug down the counter. The liquid sloshes out the sides, spills on everything, before the mug slides the rest of the way off the counter to crash against the floor. mako!, he calls, and then he remembers.)
-
(She flew to London first. Had to see the land that built sensei with its cold, damp hands; had to pay her respects to the city that built a king; had to cry her tears into the river and ride the Eye into the clouds and try to touch heaven.
After that, there was nothing. Job offers to the ceiling, sure, that kept coming every single day, but nothing like it was in Hong Kong.
There are reporters every day but the questions are stilted, insulting. Does the knowledge that Stacker kept his illness secret from the people affect his legacy, in your opinion? Do you believe that he was under the influence of his medication? How are you finding the West? Now that you have left the East, what are your intentions? Do you believe that serving the East now would be better than joining the forefront of scientific advancement here?
Oh, she knows, she knows. They mean well. But it makes the decision even easier. Takes the first research and development job out in Kyoto. She jots notes to Raleigh whenever she can, but feels his absence like a heavy bell around the neck.
Dreams of seeing his face amid a torrent of snow, of kissing him and tasting snowflake.
She doesn't sleep well. Can't stay in deep sleep for too long. Always wakes up at 0200 or 0300, or goes to bed around 0500 or 0600 and dreams of light bursting behind her eyes. Of electric that arcs along jellyfish.
She starts awake most nights, and reaches out, calling for him.)
-
He mails her the piece of the wall he saves for her. It's crumbled a little more now, borne too much of his burden of needing to move, of needing to find new places to settle and hope he'll stick. (But he has his answer. Has always had his answer.)
There's nothing he can think to write, nothing he thinks she doesn't already know. (That's the problem with sharing a mind, you start to know too much and not enough.) Her laughter rings in his head and he spends days doodling a little anime cat on a napkin.
daai tau ding dong, the Cantonese kids call it. An old relic.
if only he had something that could connect me to you in a second, he writes.
(In his head, he sees her lean back, clasping her hands on her knees, her hair falling in front of her face with her laughter.
red string, sweetheart, she intones, and he wants to kiss her so badly, his fingers tense on the pencil. The image of her flickers once, twice, but she comes to rest over him on the mattress, her hair - longer now, nearly to her shoulderblades - brushing across him as she leans down and sucks his bottom lip between her own and pulls gently. now, don't you want to do something better than talk about cartoons?)
In his haste, he falls off the workbench. The men point and laugh. He should be used to this by now.
-
In Japan, she walks into her flat, tosses her keys into a bowl near the door, and shouts, "Raleigh, I got you that longan…"
It takes her a moment. "…you wanted."
It's easy enough to hear the other part of the conversation. To hear the low rumble of his laugh, but there's only the skittering noise of Max's paws against the floor. Herc's in town, and she gets the privilege of dogsitting for a few weeks while he goes to present his case to the Japanese government. She can hear the Marshal in his words, in his inflection - shutting down the jaeger program now is a mistake, his piece begins, and here's why.
She misses the Marshal. Misses other things. The incessant noise of basketballs keeping time against the floor, the hard thumping noise of the music of the Russians. Come of age on a base, and you start to miss the things people distract themselves with.
She switches on her music - a low acoustic rock song she doesn't remember liking, but also remembers loving - and sings along, bopping her head.
and you said you'd never listen to my music, Raleigh says, and she stiffens her neck, exaggerating a shrug. Her thumbs split longan skin, popping the smooth fruit out, and she sucks it into her mouth. Chews carefully around the pit.
"Be nice to the person that bought you longan," she chirps.
His shadow moves to stand behind her, presses his hands to the underside of her breasts. oh, i can be nice, he hums, and she laughs, her cheeks pinching with how wide her grin is.
"Hey," she says, spitting the pit in the sink, "at least you can thank me." She turns, and finds Max standing on the arm of her sofa, whimpering mournfully. "Oh, sorry," she says. "You want longan?"
She figures if Chuck used to feed him base food under the table, then fresh fruit could hardly do anything worse.
-
Yancy leans back in the armchair in his apartment, kicks at the leg of the table. are we going to have to do this birds and bees thing?
Raleigh shakes his head. It's a misplaced memory - something from when he was fifteen and their parents had just died, and they were just trying to find their stride in the new place between being kids and adults.
His ribcage ripples with pain and he closes his eyes, sees himself, sees himself become seeing mako, sees the interior of Gipsy Danger, sparking and angry and a furious shade of red.
(Mako prepares herself to go to bed, and combs her fingers through her hair. "It wasn't your fault," she says.)
He shakes his head, throws an empty beer can across the length of his apartment, and finds the space it travels to be incredible.
Space. Too much of it, too little of it. In his head, outside of his head.
"I got to just suck it up and…"
("I don't want you to come if that's why you're doing it.")
"I miss you. You got my…?"
("I got it. It's on the edge of my desk.")
"I built it."
He moves to the mattress, lies down and stares up at the blank ceiling. Hears himself telling Yancy about the stars, hears himself telling Yancy about wanting to be an astronaut. His shoulders roll with laughter, and he hears himself speak with his brother's voice, "Ah, c'mon, kid, what do you think we are 'cept some better-than-average street rats? Boxcar kids."
He hears himself reply oh what do you know and closes his eyes and sees the sprawl of stars in space like small bits of glitter caught in netting.
-
He goes to Tokyo first. Finds the familiar wreckage, the corroded structure of what used to be a metropolis. Kaiju bones being used to start small colonies of adventuresome people who want to live on the edge of the shore. More bone slums.
Herc comes to meet him. Calls him an asshole and a dumb shit. Fairly standard.
"She's in Korea for a conference. Don't need a drift to read that dumbass look on your face."
Raleigh laughs. A full belly laugh, the kind he hasn't had in ages. "Missed you, too, Marshal."
Herc shrugs, uncomfortable. "Eh, don't call me that. That was always Stacker. Me, I'm just…"
Raleigh nods, the set of his jaw firm. Don't need a drift to read that either.
-
He loiters in Japan for as long as Herc lets him. There's news on the horizon ("Think maybe the Japanese and the Australians'd be up for being co-backers as long as it doesn't weigh on their pockets too heavy," Herc says, all grim, measured optimism.) but Raleigh's having trouble figuring out if he wants to go back to piloting or find something else.
Piloting has been his anchor, and he keeps running from it only to find himself back at its door again. And he isn't like Herc, or like Stacker. He isn't a bureaucrat. There's no piece of him that could be.
"You waiting for her to come back?"
Raleigh huffs. "Well, right now, I'm just waiting for you to shut your mouth and get to the point."
Herc knocks him one upside the head. "You never did know how to respect authority, did ya?"
He punches the old man good-naturedly in the arm.
-
The conference drags on for another week - according to the news channels, anyway - and he sees her in pantsuits, with her hair clipped back neatly, the blue streaks poking through to flash at the camera - and he finds a job at a nearby restaurant.
The man looks at him askance. It's one of those old noodle restaurants that goes back generations, and he watches them throw raw noodles between their hands like pizza dough between hands back home, and hopes for something to do with his hands. Until then, there's bags of flour and other menial work. He's always been a big fan of menial work. Scalding hot water to plunge his hands into to scrub at dishes with crusted-over food.
It doesn't go the way he anticipates. He walks home from a late night shift, bursting through into Herc's apartment with more effort than usual because of his exhaustion, his dirty apron slung over his shoulder, and finds her. Her hands are clasped together in front of her, the nails digging into the skin.
He opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.
From her position across the room, she nods furiously.
They come together in the middle.
-
His fingers brush the ends of her hair and she breathes into his shoulder. Oh, it's been months, it's been months, it's been way too long for him to have gone without seeing her, without touching her, without feeling like she's in his head and out of it, like she is part of him and part of his house and belongs to him and owns him all at once.
She nods, keeps nodding, sniffles quietly with her head tucked against him, her lips brushing against his pulse point.
"You are…" he says, "but you understand I had to…"
She pulls away from him, and he grieves the loss of warmth immediately but then there is her face; there are tears shining in her eyes, and he leans forward to touch his forehead to hers, and feels it. Feels the connection beating like a strong pulse, like finding someone alive when they had been cold and still a few minutes before.
He remembers seeing himself unconscious.
He remembers the escape pods.
She says, "I want…"
He looks up, meets her gaze. "Kyoto," he says. And she grips his back, his shoulders, sobs against his frame. He kisses the crown of her head, and thinks of stars.
-
Kyoto is two weeks off.
Herc has work for her, has data to collate and analyze and finances to examine, but they are all invested in the future of the Jaeger program so she doesn't sleep and just runs through all the numbers. He stays up with her because he wants to, because he can't do anything else, because his body remembers what it feels like to live by her.
The nights when she finishes early, he has cups of warm milk with cinnamon and sugar and she takes it from him gratefully, sipping at it until the cup's completely empty.
He washes it up, rinses it in cool water, doesn't burn his hands.
Herc comes over sometimes, usually with new stacks of data or (on the rare occasion) a dinner for the three of them to share in silence, and makes small comments here and there. (god, you're just as bad as the russians used to be, he groans to raleigh as mako fetches the three of them chopsticks) Max is glad for the company, though, and they all sit in her apartment and pretend it feels the same as the Shatterdome.
There's more space here, more comforts, but Raleigh knows that more than part of the three of them would trade it all in for the noise of combat boots against metal grating. For the chance to drift again.
Mako watches him sometimes, too; he catches those.
(Their first night together in the same apartment, he opts to sleep on the couch and she presses her lips together and nods. Once. A decisive motion. In the middle of the night, he has the dream he keeps having: her, drawn in light blue, wrapped around him, taking him in her hand, in her mouth, guiding him inside her.
There's a moment when he hears her cry out from the other room, when he jerks awake and hears a soft moan float from the other room, and wonders.
In the morning, he stares into his oatmeal, and dares one glance up at her. She blushes but doesn't look away.)
He says, "We really should talk about this."
She's spearing a piece of melon on the end of her fork, pops it in her mouth and chews thoughtfully. "Kyoto."
"You promise?"
She looks up, her eyes hard. "I don't run from…"
He bristles, the chair scraping loudly against the floor as he stands. "Right. Fine."
-
That night, she offers him a space beside her in bed. He isn't quite that dumb (or that honorable) to say no. She smiles at the silent remark, despite herself, and leads him back to the bedroom.
It's a small mattress, but she doesn't even turn to register his look of incredulity. She strips off her shirt, her pants, and crawls beneath the sheets. Same as before. But there are new lines to her body that he hasn't gotten to see - a bruise along her hip, a healed scar along her shoulderblade - and he reaches out to brush them with his fingers.
She turns to face him, her lips so close to the underside of his jaw.
"They were just training exercises."
"You don't usually get hurt in training."
"I'm learning. Comes with the lesson."
He leans down before he can think about what he's doing, presses a kiss to the bruise. Listens to her quiet gasp, to the wince hiding behind the noise.
better?, he thinks of asking.
She smiles, reaching for his hand. Turning it over in her hand to peer into his palm. Presses a kiss to a new callous along the knuckle. Flicks her tongue against the spot, eyes fixed to his with a challenge.
He sucks in a breath through his teeth, and can see with her eyes, can see his own grow darker, can see the way it mirrors hers. He shifts closer to her in bed, and she reaches under his shirt, pulls it over his head and tosses it in the corner. Throws her leg over his hip, pushing her heel into his ass to force him closer.
"Mako," he whispers, and she presses her thumb against his mouth. Watches, transfixed, as he kisses the pad of it, as he scrapes his teeth lightly against the skin.
She moves her hand, kisses him softly on the mouth. When he opens his eyes, meets her gaze, he can hear the word float on the air.
kyoto.
"But that doesn't mean…" he starts, and she grins, a devilish scrap of a thing.
She closes the distance between them, her fingers threading in his hair and pulling. And, god, he wants to drown in this feeling, wants to feel swallowed whole, wants to never stop kissing her for the rest of his life. She laughs under his mouth and he wonders if she heard any of that, hopes she did, hopes she didn't, hopes she likes the idea, but her hands just scrape along his scalp and he growls, a low, guttural noise that makes her groan in response.
kyoto, she repeats.
-
They spend the night wrapped in that embrace. Kissing. He presses worshipful kisses against her mouth, against the corners of her lips, against her eyes; quicker, hungrier kisses later on when they can't bother with the rest of it, when it is only ever lips and tongues and teeth, and the feeling of her hips rocking against his.
He does allow himself one indulgence - crawls down the length of her body to pull the scrap of underwear off of her legs and buries his head between her legs. She cackles at first, yelping with the scrape of his stubble along her thighs, but then - it's incredible, how her body can so easily become fluid, can become tide, rocking against him, keeping rhythm with her soft airy breaths and the desperate whimpers, the rise and fall of her hips.
He licks her, tastes her, uses his fingers to open her up, nudges at her with his nose. She tastes a little like sea, brine and tang heavy on the tip of his tongue, and he thinks - he knows - he could never tire of her, could never get used to this feeling. He looks up at her, and she looks back at him, and for a moment, he can see himself as her looking at him, and feels the blood rush from his head.
Her thighs grip him as her hips slam against the soft mattress, as she throws her head back and grunts his name, a soft, indelicate noise, and he grins against the muscle of her leg.
"Enjoy yourself?" he grins, all cocky swagger and boyish pride, and she has to laugh. He wipes his hand across his mouth and crawls back up towards her.
She reaches down between his legs, wraps her hand around his cock, and grins at the sight of him, neck fallen back to expose the throat, groaning.
"I don't know," she says, leaning in to bite gently at his neck. "Maybe we should try it again to make sure."
She pumps him in her hand a few times, watching as his hips roll against her, as his muscles ripple with his movements.
"Well," he grits out, as she moves down his body to lick him once, twice, "I've always been a fan…" -- she takes the tip of him in her mouth, her nails scratching along his hip, and he nearly loses the syllable altogether -- "of empirical research."
There's a loud, wet noise as she drags her mouth up and down a few times, and when she pulls her mouth off, he whimpers. "Big word," she says, voice low and husky. "Been studying?"
Her hand reaches for him again, and god, the sound of her voice just like this could get him off, he's pretty sure of it. She looks at him then, her rhythm slowing deliberately, and grins, biting down hard on her bottom lip. "Mako," he moans, pressing his hand over hers to try to force her to speed the pace.
She clicks her tongue. "Impatient boys don't get what they want," she says, voice low and raspy -- intentionally so -- and he'd narrow his eyes at her if he wasn't so entirely at her mercy right now.
He whimpers again to really emphasize the point, and she laughs as her hand finds the pace again, until his hips are bucking against her hand, and he's groaning her name.
-
They fly to Kyoto a week later.
There isn't any grand tour of the city, and the plane is small. They get rocked by turbulence on the way over, and he flashes back to sparks arcing from the exposed wiring as her air grew thin. She grips his hand on the armrest.
Her apartment is close to the center of the city. It isn't anything large by any means, but it's cozy. Warm. He can feel her presence across the entire space. There are knitted sweaters hanging in the closet, shoes laid neatly by the door on a mat, a cup full of chopsticks on the kitchen counter, and even a small tv.
Small pictures of the Marshal and her from who-knows-when, and other photos from the academy. The piece of the Anchorage wall.
"You kept it," he says, and she shakes her head, as if offended at the notion that she wouldn't have.
He drags his fingers across the exposed brick of one of the walls - an aesthetic detail - and relishes the coarse grit feeling of it scratching along his skin.
"So what do you do?"
She looks around, fussing with the window shades on one of the walls, drawing more sunlight into the room. "I help Marshal Hansen," she says. "He's really … fighting for it, you know. Preserving the Jaeger program."
"You think he's going to do it?"
"Hard to knock a man like that down," she says, and he can pick out the bits of his own drawl from it.
"So what else?"
She looks around, fusses with the spines of books on her bookshelf. "I help them figure out how to best prepare a city for something like this again. How to lay it out for the most minimal loss of life. So people can live without being afraid."
He looks at her, tries for a smile, but feels thoroughly awed instead. "Still saving the world, huh," he tries, and she beams. "The Marshal… he'd be proud of you. Making a difference."
"And you?"
"Me, I've been kicking around the coast for a while. Not doing much of anything."
She shakes her head. "No, you were - there was the cleanup. Marshal Hansen told me about that."
"He likes that you call him that?"
"He wouldn't know what to do if I suddenly stopped calling him that."
At that, Raleigh laughs. "Cleanup," he says, with a roll of the eyes. "It was a shantytown for Chinese immigrants. Bunch of 'em just fucking around."
She crosses the space between them in three strides, takes his hand. "Well, you make a difference to me."
His eyebrows lift, mouth tucking to the side, and she drops his hand. "Oh, do I now?"
She clicks her tongue, turning on her heel. "I don't know why you have to…" she pauses, looking for the right words. She finishes with Yancy's words, "be such a shit."
He laughs then; it rings through her apartment.
-
Her bedroom is exactly how he never pictured it. Drawn up in blues of all shades, with the Marshal's stars framed and hanging on the wall. The only ornament in the entire room.
She peels off her shirt and pants. Then, her bra and underwear. Climbs into bed completely naked.
He rubs at his mouth for a moment when she huffs, "Are you going to take all night?"
He coughs a laugh and follows his suit. His shirt, then his pants. Then, the rest of it. Slips into the bed beside her.
"Don't you think…" he starts, and she bursts into giggles.
"Timing," she says. "Not your strong suit."
He leans in, kisses her softly. "I'm here now, though, aren't I?"
She reaches to twine her hands behind his neck, drags her leg over his thigh. "Yes," she says. "You are."
She presses a kiss against his mouth. Soft, at first, before growing harder, more demanding. Until her forehead rests against his in the beats between, when they're just panting for breath before closing the gap again. He winds his hands in her hair - her longer hair, and god, just as dark as he remembers with the streaks of blue still at the ends - and pulls lightly, listens to the soft noise of approval she makes in the back of her throat.
He rolls them over, his knee settling between her bare legs, dragging his mouth from hers to the left side of her neck, to her collarbone, to the tops of her breasts.
Her elbow knocks awkwardly against his shoulder when he moves further down her body; her breasts small and warm against his hands, her lower body moving to touch more of him, to gain more access. And when he thumbs one and kisses the other, engulfing it in his mouth, she makes a soft hiss, small pieces of Japanese tumbling from her mouth.
When his fingers dip lower, going between her thighs, he finds her wet, and god, the thought of that just makes him ache. She closes her hand around his wrist then, guiding him as he pushes a finger - then two - inside of her. It's been a while since he's done this, but memory - instinct - takes over and he curls them, pumps them in and out of her, listens to the way her breathing goes shallow and quick, the way her hips rock against his fingers.
She looks to him, then reaches down with her own hand to rub against herself before she suddenly clenches around his fingers, hips jerking against his hand as she cries out.
When he moves back up to kiss her, her hands reach for him, grab at his shoulders. Less patient tonight than she was in Tokyo. "I want you," she murmurs, catching his glance. The rest of the sentence drags on, loud as static in the drift.
He leans his weight onto his hands, touches his forehead to hers.
"Raleigh," she groans, "please. Please, please, please."
She can't wait, and he doesn't want to make her wait any longer. There's the noise of baubles knocking together as she fishes in the nightstand before pulling a foil packet free from the drawer. She tears it open hurriedly, and he takes it, rolling it over himself.
When he pushes into her, he exhales against her collarbone, waiting for her to settle, for her to adjust; when she throws her leg around his waist and rocks, he moves with her (always with her, always moving, and it's always been her, hasn't it, no beginnings and no ends until she showed up in his life) and she hears it, hears him, sees herself through his eyes, and digs her fingernails into his back.
The bed rocks against the wall with a quiet rhythm, and she reaches up to press a kiss to his neck, to any part of him she can reach, her hands settling on his hips. She grinds her hips then, just as he speeds up, and he can hear her urgency, can feel how close she is.
She pulls him down for a kiss, her teeth scraping against his bottom lip and drawing a little blood; when he pulls away, she throws her head back with a keening cry.
He slows his rhythm, changes it, waits for her to come down again before he pumps into her; her hands grasp at his arms, and he mumbles her name - murmurs prayers, exultations - against her skin, against her damp hair when he comes with a grunt.
They lie there for a few moments, just like that, with him still inside her, and try to remember being whole again. Just for a moment.
(In the morning, or years later, who can remember, she'll tell him it had to be kyoto and he knew, he always knew -
to return home was only ever a thing they could have done in her apartment. nothing so transitional as a hotel room or a conveniently empty bed.)
-
When he wakes up, she's already in the shower, so he tosses on the t-shirt on the floor and a pair of boxers and heads out into the kitchen. There's scallions and eggs and he decides on a simple enough omelet. The frying pans are where he remembers them, the utensils where they'd be most easy to reach, and he goes through the show of narrating his actions as he cooks.
She pads out a few minutes later, when the pan sits on the hob and heats, waiting for the oil, in one of his shirts. A crisp one she must have fished from his bag.
"It's not nice to steal, you know," he says, pouring a small amount of oil into the frying pan.
"It's not stealing," she answers, moving to sit at the counter. "I thought you liked to say finders keepers."
"It's not finding if you had to go in my bag," he says.
She smiles with a forced nonchalance as she moves to stand. "Well," she intones, "I could always just take it off."
The eggs go in the pan with a loud sizzle and he tries not to turn around, or to let his imagination go crazy. Setting fire to her apartment would probably not be a good idea.
"You need to eat first," he says, and her laugh rings. "Take care of yourself. Get more sleep."
At the last one, he can feel her eyebrow arch.
"Well, you know what I mean."
"I like late breakfasts anyway," she says. And then there's the noise of fabric hitting the floor. "Come on."
He switches the hob off, and nearly trips over himself racing her to the bedroom.
-
At dinner with Herc a month later, her hand is in his lap, sandwiched between his own, and the Marshal looks like he'd rather be facing three kaiju than looking at this right now.
"Do you have to do that while we eat?" he grouses. "It's bad enough, the rest of it, without needing to see this too. Like the goddamn Russians. Every single time we're eating, and all of a sudden, it's time for a show."
Mako arches a brow, and Herc sputters.
"I wouldn't expect a show," she breezes, and the Marshal glares at him so hard, Raleigh can feel the earth beneath him warm.
"Well, anyway, I'm not here to see you two make faces at each other," he finishes. "So you might as well just stop it."
Mako turns to him with a flash of a smile.
-
It's a question he's asked some years later, one he's never thought about answering ever. The reporter is loud, the lights bright in his face, for some kind of interview about the commemoration of the first museum to the Kaiju War.
And can you tell us what it's like to have the same drift partner for so many years?
He shakes his head, pulls at Mako's arm and leads her further into the throng of people heading out of city hall, hoping to ditch the reporter. The only answer that comes to mind - that he could never think of life without her, that she has become the spaces in him that would never have been able to be filled, that sometimes she is part of the space that he already occupies, that it is about being whole and over-whole, so completely part of something else that he can't conceive of any other kind of being.
Instead, he turns to her and says, "I love you."
She grins, knew the words before he was going to say them, but listened to him say them anyway.
(His answer, decades later: What it's like to have the same drift partner for years? …like you're never going to be lost in the drift ever again.)