On the ride back to the Shatterdome, it occurs to her that the new world means that someday she might eat kuro maguro again, the bluefin tuna that was her mother's favorite. After the sixth or so kaiju died off the coast, its toxic brains and blood staining the ocean, they declared maguro wasn't safe to eat anymore. Her mother was dead by then. It would be years, probably, before the sea cleared itself and the kuro maguro reclaimed its old hunting grounds, but now that it would have a chance to recover—
The side of Mako's head hits the window harder than she intends. Raleigh, sitting next to her wrapped in his own giant blanket, raises his head. "You okay?" he says quietly.
The choppy blue waters rush furiously beneath them. The kaiju were gone, maybe forever, and her sensei was definitely gone forever, swallowed by the same nuclear holocaust that had been nibbling at his bones for years.
And she is thinking about tuna. Mako chokes on an ugly, painful laugh.
Raleigh leans over and bumps his shoulder against hers. After a moment, she leans back, and they stay like that until the Shatterdome rears up in the window.
The morning after, Raleigh wakes up unbelievably sore all over. He's barely dragged himself out of bed when the door pings and one of the lower officers, in full military dress, tells him he's expected to report to medical in thirty minutes. At least they let him sleep in, he thinks, rubbing his eyes, and then he looks in the mirror and sees a guy that helped save the world and he finds he feels like smiling at himself for the first time in a long, long time.
The doctors spend a lot of time poking and prodding and taking blood from the guy that saved the world. He and Mako had both gotten a small dose of radiation, they tell him. Less than a gray, exposure spread over their entire bodies instead of concentrated on one area, so it isn't serious. The doctors didn't expect any long-term consequences. They don't seem to have picked up anything from the other dimension, either, although nobody really knows how to look for that, exactly.
When that's done there's an equally thorough debriefing. He spends the better part of a day and a half locked in the airless room going over and over the battle in excruciating detail. They had no data from the moment he and Mako disappeared into the other dimension and they want to know everything he can remember and a bunch of things he can't.
When they finally let him go he goes to change out of his uniform and lingers with the door open, hoping to see the person across the hall, and finally Mako comes down the corridor. He's surprised at how much he missed her face after only two days. She looks happy to see him too, and they go down to mess together.
They debriefed her too, but since she was unconscious for the better part of the trip to the other world hers ended a day earlier.
"So you haven't seen anything on the news yet?" she asks.
"No."
"It's..." she hesitates. "Crazy. I think some people have not stopped partying since the battle. Our faces are everywhere. On the TV, and on signs, and T-shirts."
"You get used to it," Raleigh says. "I used to keep a collection of stuff with me and Yancy's face on it. I think the weirdest thing we found was Raleigh-and-Yancy saltshakers."
Mako pushes rice back and forth on her plate. She looks worn, drained from battle and haunted by loss. "It is very strange."
"They'll forget about us in a few months," he says. "There are some good parts, anyway. You have to pay for a lot fewer meals in restaurants, for one."
One corner of her mouth tugs up, which is enough for him. "You ready for all these interviews tomorrow?" he asks.
She nods. "I am glad you're going with me, though," she says quietly, looking at him sideways through her blue-and-black bangs.
"Yep, I'm a pro at all this," he says, grinning at her. "Just follow my lead."
Everyone from Mumbai Live to Chile 77 wants them to repeat the story over and over and pose for photos and pry into their relationship, so it's a relief when they finally break for lunch.
"Do you miss her?" Mako asks, finding Raleigh sitting in the scaffolding that used to support the Gipsy Danger.
There's been talk about recreating Gipsy, a monument to the end of the war. Mako never really thought about it that way before, being a player in events that spawned monuments. She'd wanted to kill kaiju for so long that it feels like a stone pillar of her identity, maybe the stone pillar, but being part of the team that ended them—she wouldn't have dared to hope it.
"Yeah," Raleigh says. She folds herself down next to him and they sit in thoughtful silence, watching the engineers repairing the Typhoon, the only jaeger in a big enough piece to salvage. They still want to keep a jaeger functioning. Just in case. She thinks about the just in case a lot.
"But I'm glad she's gone, too," Raleigh says after a while. "One thing the Drift teaches you is that living in old memories isn't worth much, and she was all of them, for me."
"She went to an honorable end," Mako says.
"Very honorable." When she looks over, Raleigh is grinning affectionately at her and she looks down, away. "Wouldn't have it any other way."
She focuses on a figure far beneath them: Herc, walking across the bay as people move respectfully out of his way. He doesn't seem to notice them. He moves through the dome like a ghost. Mako thinks he probably isn't long for this world unless he finds something to live for other than keeping his son's dog alive. She's seen soldiers who walked like that. They died, often on routine missions. She hopes that Herc finds whatever it is he needs.
Too soon it's time to face the cameras again.
They are coming back from the third long day of interviews long into the night. Base is quiet, almost everyone in their bunks except for the sentries still manning the breach detectors.
"Hey, Becket," says one of the engineers as they pass in the hallway. He recognizes the face, one of the techs who worked on Gipsy.
"Hey, Ocampo," he says.
"Got a poker game going in the mess hall. Wanna join?"
"Sure," he says, and raises an eyebrow at Mako. "You in? Do you play?"
Mako looks surprised for a moment, and then she grins, the first real smile he's seen out of her all day, and maybe Raleigh's imagining things but he thinks there's a whiff of shark about it. "Yes."
Mess is deserted this late at night except for a half-dozen other engineers gathered around a worn-edged deck of cards and a bottle of rum. He and Mako sit down across from each other and there's a momentary hush.
"What's the buy-in?" Raleigh says into the silence, cracking his knuckles. It's all part of the show.
"We usually start at fifty and go from there," says a woman with "Liu" stamped on her motor oil-spattered jumpsuit.
"My kind of game," Raleigh says.
Liu deals while Ocampo pours them all a long generous slosh of rum. Raleigh's picked up his cards before he realizes that everyone else hasn't touched theirs but reached for the rum instead. He hastily puts his cards down and joins in.
"To the apocalypse being canceled," one says, and three or four of the others pound the table a little and murmur in agreement, clinking their glasses together. The rum has a searing, medicinal afterburn. It feels good.
They settle down to the business of cards. Raleigh's got a pair of threes and not much else. He throws everything else away and picks up nothing.
When he looks over at Mako, she's examining the cards in her hand with nothing, nothing on her face. He blinks. She's not normally easy to read—especially when you didn't know her well or hadn't drifted with her—but he's pretty sure he has never seen quite such a completely blank face before. Long Alaska nights mean he's played a lot of poker, too.
"Bets?" says Liu.
Raleigh doesn't even try to bluff it out. He tosses his cards in and watches Mako openly as the others put their bets in.
"Raise," she says, when it comes to her, and she adds a few more coins. He watches the other engineers try to read her, then shrugs when they look at him.
Mako stays in when the others raise, too, and soon it's just her, Ocampo, and another engineer from C-deck in the final round. "Things looking good for the hero?" Ocampo asks her cheerfully, and she smiles at him in an astoundingly informationless way—all teeth and courteousness.
"Okay, lay 'em out, folks," Liu says, and Mako lays out a full house.
Raleigh stamps on the floor and whoops. No one's got her beat. For a moment he's the only one to cheer, then Ocampo's face widens in a grin and he raises a fist to bump. Mako raises hers back, smiling a little shyly. "Nice one, hero!" he says, and pushes the pot over.
"Must be first draw luck, eh?" Ocampo teases. "You guys sure are lucky sons a guns, let me tell you. We were all listening in on your transmission, you know. They piped it in to the whole bay."
"You ain't wrong," Raleigh says.
"Next round's to luck, then!" Ocampo says, reaching for the rum bottle. "To luck!" they all echo.
Raleigh's luck does come around a little on the second round. He picks up a pair of jacks on the first round and then another one on the next. Liu's got a straight, but it's okay; the rum is starting to kick in and so is the cameraderie. He'd missed this, drinking and trading war stories with people who'd saved his life and whose lives he'd saved.
"Hey now," says another of the guys on the third round, eyeing Mako's steadily growing pile and Raleigh's decent one. "Is this fair? Seeing as how you two basically have the same mind now, right?"
Raleigh and Mako share a look. "That's not really how it works," Raleigh says, tapping the ends of his cards on the table to align them. "You can't remember everything you see in the meld. You just wind up with this kind of...familiarity, I guess."
"So you don't have...I mean...her entire memory downloaded into yours?" Ocampo asks, leaning forward, his biceps straining against the ripped-off sleeves of his tech suit.
"Nah, nah," Raleigh says. "I have solid memories of only like, ten percent of my own life...where do you think you'd have storage for every moment of a whole other person's life?"
"Huh," Liu says. "Same for you, then?" she asks Mako.
Mako pauses. "He stole a bunch of candy from his day care center when he was eight," she says.
Raleigh spits out a mouthful of rum, and the table erupts in laughter. "You saw that?" Raleigh says, wiping his mouth.
Mako smiles. "He shared it with the other kids, though," she tells the table. "Raleigh's right. I don't have all his memories, but sometimes he will do or say something that sounds familiar, and one of them pops up. It's like...a dream that you don't remember until you see something in real life that reminds you."
"I got into lot of trouble as a kid," Raleigh admits. "I did a lot of things I'm not proud of."
Mako shrugs, one-shouldered, sliding long fingers up and down the edge of her cards. "You were a good kid," she says.
Raleigh grins. "So good that I won't even tell them what I saw in your mind," he teases, and her ears turn a little pink.
"We betting or what?" the C-deck engineer demands, and they pick the round back up.
Talk turns around to the new world and what it'll be like. "It won't be the same," says C-deck, who is old enough to have spent most of his life before kaiju. "Even if they never come back."
"I just can't wait to get off rations," Ocampo sighs. "We used to eat chicken all the time when I was a kid. Like, twice a week at least."
"Chicken?" C-deck scoffs. "Beef, kid! Beef. I used to have steak whenever I felt like it. Steak for breakfast. Steak for dinner."
"Get off it, old man," says one of the younger techs. He's probably even younger than Mako; he's never known that old world. There's only a few places where they raise cows anymore. They're too inefficient, eat too much and give too little. Raleigh remembers eating hamburgers as a kid but by the time he was in high school they were already getting expensive as the population grew and the carbon threw the growing cycles out of whack.
"I can't wait to get back home," says Smith, a stocky guy with wiry red hair and a New Zealand accent, softer and deeper in the valleys than Australian. "People are already starting to talk about going back. My pop says they've already filed claim for their old spot in Wellington. He was heartsick when they left."
Almost the entire population of New Zealand had fled to Australia in the middle years of the kaiju war. Raleigh remembered that well. That was before they'd gotten really good at making jaegers, in the dark years when no one talked about the very real possibility that the kaiju would win, and New Zealand just didn't have the military to keep its borders secure anymore.
"What about you, Liu?" Ocampo nudges her. "What are you waiting to get back?"
She stares at the cards. "My brother," she says softly.
Raleigh raises an eyebrow.
"Her brother's a 'ju-head," C-deck says, a bit louder than necessary. "Off somewhere mourning the kaiju while we're all celebrating getting our lives back. You think they're gonna pull their heads outta their asses now? I ain't holding my breath for that."
Raleigh clears his throat. "Hey, how about some respect, huh?"
"For them?" C-deck snorts. "For the goddamned Church of the Breach-borne Angels? The people that celebrated when those fucking monsters came out of the breach and killed people?"
"Hey," Ocampo says, serenity against the other man's rising indignation. "Liu ain't a ju-head, that much's obvious, and family's family, even if they wanna worship kaiju."
Liu's lips have been steadily tightening the entire time. She pushes back her chair. "I'm going to take a leak," she says.
They watch her go, her back very straight.
"Whatever," C-deck says. "She's not gonna get her brother back. Them ju-heads are doubling down. I saw them on the news, holding prayer services to forgive us all our sins for killing the kaiju. That's something you don't come back from."
"Doesn't mean you have to rub it in her face," Ocampo says. "Let her hope, yeah?"
"What's the point of pretending?" C-deck says, but they seem to all listen to Ocampo, so he throws his head back and drains his glass.
Raleigh drinks more rum, too, and loses a bunch of his pile. Ocampo proposes a toast to the new world. C-deck follows it up with one to the old. When it's Raleigh's turn he toasts the engineers; without them he and Mako would be sitting on top of a pile of rusty bolts. He gets a round of cheers and pounds on the back and an extra shot poured just for him, which he downs obligingly. Sometime during this Mako starts hiding smiles when she looks at him. She's pretty great, Mako.
"What?" Mako says, and he possibly just said that out loud. "Whatever, it's true," he says.
"You are drunk," she says.
"I'm excellent," he corrects her.
"You are really drunk," she says, and he laughs.
They pour out the last of the second bottle of rum for a final round. "Heroes! What are we toasting to?" Ocampo shouts. He's gotten progressively louder with each round.
"To Marshal Pentecost," Mako says.
The chatter hushes down, and their glasses hover in midair. "To the marshal," they echo solemnly, and drink in respectful silence.
Raleigh blinks and he's walking down the hallway. Well, walking is maybe an overstatement; his legs keep going places he didn't mean for them to go, and he's leaning really heavily on someone whose arm is under his shoulder.
"Oh, it's you," he says.
Mako rolls her eyes. "Of course it's me," she says. "Baka."
"Hey," he says. "''M not an idiot."
"Only someone who didn't see you try to wrestle Ocampo would agree with that," Mako says, hefting his weight a little higher.
"He challenged me," Raleigh objects. His hand brushes against the side of her jumpsuit. There is a bulge that he doesn't expect and he pats it again.
"RALEIGH," Mako says dangerously.
"Is this your winnings?" he asks.
"Yes."
"You're a fucking card shark, you know that?" he says, looking closer at her. He's pretty sure her cheeks are a little pink. "Mako the card shark. You know why that's great? You're a Mako shark!"
"You stopped making sense a long time ago," Mako informs him.
"It's a thing!" he insists as she pulls his arm higher across her shoulders again. "Mako sharks!"
"I do not know what you are talking about," she huffs.
"You, you're amazing at cards," he says.
Unexpectedly, and delightfully, she giggles. Mako Mori is giggling. Raleigh remembers that she's had a fair amount of rum too.
"Where'd you learn to play like that?" he says.
The smile slides off her face and he is instantly sorry. He knows the answer even before she says softly, "Stacker-sensei enjoyed poker very much."
"Sorry," he breathes.
There's a silence.
"It's okay," Mako says. "Everyone tries not to mention him around me, but I...do not want to pretend he didn't exist."
Oh shit. Raleigh is way too drunk to be having this conversation. He takes a moment to hope fervently that he doesn't fuck it up. "You can always talk about him with me."
"I know," Mako says, and then she doesn't say anything. Raleigh shuts his trap. After a minute, she says, "I'm pretty good at chess, too."
Pretty good probably means she was nationally ranked in chess, he thinks.
"That game I learned before Stacker-sensei," she says. "I was very good at it as a child. But Stacker-sensei said chess was good but it does not teach you everything. We played a lot of card games. Poker was my favorite."
A blurry image of Stacker, looking younger in military-issue gray T-shirt and dog tags, dropping his cards across a metal table and laughing openly, swims into Raleigh's mind. There is a flush of warm pride glowing within the memory. "He sure loved you," he says.
They stop for a moment in the hallway, swaying a little, and then she keys open a door, flooding both of them with light.
"It's strange," she says, "to have someone else's perspective on my own memories."
"Oh-sorry," Raleigh says, again. He focuses his eyes and realizes they're at the door to her quarters, not his. She shoulders him inside and dumps him fairly unceremoniously on the couch. Then, to his surprise, she sinks down on the arm of the couch beside him.
"I hope you are right," she says, displaying a rare moment of uncertainty. "I hope I did not...disappoint him."
"I know you didn't," he says.
She stays there a moment, very still, and Raleigh follows the lines of her profile, those impossible cheekbones outlined against the overhead fluorescents.
"Wish I could have seen you play," he says after a minute, tipping his head back against the couch. "I'm terrible at chess."
"That does not surprise me," she says, and he's not even insulted. "Do you want me to teach you?"
He can't stop a big stupid grin spreading across his face. "Yes."
"Okay, then," she says, getting up and clapping him on the shoulder. "You're going to learn from the best."
"Wouldn't have it any other way," he says, still grinning at her as she moves across the room to her bunk. "Um—is it okay if—'m I gonna stay here tonight?"
"If you want to," Mako says.
Raleigh sort of flops sideways on the couch—he's sobering up a little bit but he's still got what feels like a handle of rum sloshing around inside him—and curls up on his side. The couch smells a little bit like her.
"So you'll teach me tomorrow?" he says.
"Go to sleep, flyboy," she says, warmth and something else in her voice.
"G'night, Mako," he says.
A/N: Well folks, I went in to this movie super excited for a male-female friendship movie. Like Watson and Sherlock in Elementary! Then they had so much damn chemistry the whole thing went up in flames halfway through. Hope you enjoy! I hope there aren't too many tropes; I was afraid if I read too much of the amazing stuff that's already out there I'd get too discouraged to write. Next chap: Motorcycles & buns. Heh XD