Kinesthetic

His hand brushes by her nape as she rises slowly out of slumber.

His fingertips press into the small of her back as he herds her away from the reporters, refusing to answer the shouted questions.

His palm flattens against her knee when she tenses at the sheer impoliteness of interviewer's question about her 'favoured position' with sensei.

–

The rain cascades down in sheets and the blowing winds yank the second umbrella out of the aides hands and into the grey fog that made for a hellish descent. Mako doesn't need to look at Raleigh to know what he's remembering – they're both recalling it.

Sensei's absence stings for a moment.

Mako forces the ache away.

"We'll share," Raleigh says, and ducks under Mako's umbrella, closing his fingers around the handle, his hand engulfing her own. Not the comfort of sensei but a comfort nevertheless.

It means walking close, but they never miss a step.

–

She finds Raleigh on the beach, sitting where he came to shore all those years ago. If she concentrates she can imagine the broken, shattered visage of the fallen Jaeger in the churning surf, and in spite of the warming air that portends spring, a shiver slides through her bones.

He reaches up for her hand without looking, and she lets herself be drawn down to sit between his knees so he can wrap his arms around her waist and press his cheek against her nape.

Drifting, sensei once said, was about common experience – not merely the physicality of the disciplinary exercises, but the matching of pilots' emotional and psychological scars without either pilot falling into the other.

He still misses Yancy and he always will.

She still misses her parents and sensei and she always will.

Sitting here in the twilight, their ghosts surround them, walking past on feet that leave no prints – only the faint warmth of love remembered.

And Mako rests one hand on the arms around her waist, and rubs his knee with the other, comforting and content with the heavy heat of him at her back and around her.

fin