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They go days and days without speaking. If it weren’t for the demands made on them by the bustling Shatterdome and the grateful world, Raleigh’s sure they could go weeks without saying a word to each other. Maybe months, maybe years.
He daydreams, sometimes, what it would be like. A little house somewhere, a cabin maybe, on the edge of wilderness so there would always be broken branches to clear off the roof after a storm, rough edges to be sanded, endless things to do with his hands. And silence, the deep sort of silence you can only get in the midst of vast, wordless, indifferent noise. In his mind the silence he and Mako would build together takes root, a growing, flourishing silence.
There’s no room for a peace like that to grow in the Shatterdome, no space, so instead they cultivate little hushes – an hour alone in his bunk, nights sleeping back-to-back in her narrow bed, not speaking, just breathing.
From the outside it might look like anger, or even distance, if it weren’t for the way he’s always reaching out to graze his fingertips over the back of her hand, the way she presses her shoulder against his in the narrow corridors and hooks her ankle around his under the table in the mess. It's not that they have nothing to say to each other; it's that they can say it all and more with just this, just touch and glances, and beyond that words aren't needed or missed.
When you Drift with someone, you feel like there’s nothing to talk about. For Stacker Pentecost’s daughter and an introverted has-been back from five years’ solitary exile, silence is a comfortable common ground. They rest on it together.