Work Text:
They never expected a happy ending; so, as all prophecies become self-fulfilling in the end, they never get one.
*
Gipsy’s second escape pod never makes it back from the anteverse; when she’d fallen through the breach they’d lost all signals from her. Mako sits on hers surrounded by green dye and blue water and somewhere a hundred miles east Chuck Hansen shouts ‘send the choppers’.
They pull her kicking and screaming from the oceans surface, with chapped lips and blue skin. Never mind the ache behind her eyes that renders the sky a sharp, bright white so that she can hardly seen three feet in front of her, how she can’t feel her fingers or her toes or how when they eventually pull her into the Chinook she’s trembling and dropping in and out of sleep. In her waking moments she is delirious; we did it we saved the world, Raleigh and me, grinning so wide that her teeth shine under the interior lighting. The medics look across at each other and furrow their eyebrows.
It’s hypoxia—they’ve all seen it before. They slap an oxygen mask over her mouth and tell her that yes, you saved the world, and tell her to lie quietly now, that everything will be alright.
If she hears them she doesn’t believe them. Everybody knows that doctors lie.
*
She sleeps and it is dreamless; one solid block of very dark red interspersed with murmured voices and on one occasion, booming shouts that make her want to screw her eyes tighter and roll over. She can’t though, she’s stuck, drifting, but this time she is very much alone. She reaches out for Raleigh but he is not there; there is gaping, echoing chasm to the right of her where he should have been.
*
Mako chokes on her own breath as she sleeps and next to her Chuck Hansen stiffens and scrambles to his feet, his broken arm throbbing and pressed awkwardly against his chest. She slumbers on, though; the coma is medically induced and she won’t wake up until the doctors say she’s ready. Still, he won’t be here when she does.
In a moment of softness he wonders what she’s dreaming. It was in a similar moment that he had brought Max into the medical bay for her; he’d been screamed out of the ward with such gusto he’d thought the sound alone would’ve woken her.
Things are never so easy as that, though.
*
When she wakes up, she is crying.
At least, there are wet tears on her cheeks. She reaches to wipe them off, but her hand stays stubbornly nested in the sheets beside her. Looking down, she sees why.
Sitting next to her bed is a broken-armed boy that she had known once, when their fathers wore military uniforms and clean-cut faces. His good elbow is pressed into the bed beside her arm, his face buried in the crook of it. She wants to push him off, but something loosens in her chest and instead she says, ‘Charles, wake up.’
He comes around violently; pulling himself away from her with such ferocity that she can only look over at him, wide-eyed.
One of you bitches needs a leash.
Mako Mori never did do what anyone expected of her.
The doctors were supposed to wake her up.
Chuck stands up and opens his mouth. He shifts his weight around on his feet, and then closes it again. She looks up at him, and then down at the line of her body on the hospital bed. When she looks up again, he has gone.
*
Things come back to her slowly. She’ll be working on an engine that will never come to anything when she’ll remember drinking chocolate milk and watching Gipsy’s heart, his fingers inching towards her hand and—
she’ll stiffen, wipe the black grease off her hands onto her overalls, and breathe the shatterdome in through her nose.
A bit of memory loss is common with the oxygen deprivation, they tell her, but it’ll all come back eventually. She is not so sure that she wants it to.
Mako Mori is controlled, she is composed, no matter how her pulse races or how her chest aches. No matter how much she wants to retreat into herself and spend the days lying in her room staring at the Katana’s on her wall and that picture of Raleigh and Yancy that she’d taken because no one else had wanted it. There was no one left to want it.
The worst days are the ones where she remembers Stacker; these are fewer and further between because most of those memories never left her in the first place. They are easier to bury.
But still: how her chest had caved in when he’d appeared in his drive suit next to Herc and touched her chin, hey, and rolled his shoulders back like some ancient warrior standing as tall and straight as some marble statue because it’s all he had left to cling to. She mirrored him; she always would.
She rolls her shoulders back now; she walks around the shatterdome like she hasn’t lost everything in the world that ever mattered.
*
The press events are inevitable.
What could have been avoided is this: her and Chuck sitting side by side in almost identical PPDC uniform.
The two of them are heroes; the only ones left in a long line of many. They have a lot to live up to. They can feel it pressing down on their shoulders, and alone, wonder if they have what it takes to live up to what is expected of them. He is not his father, and she is not hers. They are something else entirely, standing with their arms braced and almost-scowls on the glossy covers of Time magazine, Vanity Fair, the National Geographic.
They do not talk to each other much, if at all; they are frosty and remarkably accomplished at avoiding each other’s eye.
(Not much has changed between them.)
(Not since Chuck and his dad had climbed out of Striker’s rig and stepped out on the Hong Kong shatterdome hangar floor and walked towards Stacker until he’d seen her and wanted to climb right back up into his jaeger and get away; not since she wouldn’t even look at him anymore, not even after her fight with Raleigh in the kwoon where he’d been standing so close and looking at her so obviously that she must have noticed him. The only way she’d look at him was with disgust, when he’d brawled with Raleigh outside Stacker’s office. It should’ve been her leaving his face bloodied, not that fucking washed out has been who looked just fucking like him and had been in her head and—)
Yeah, that’s right; hold back your little girlfriend.
*
She reads snatches of her life in papers and magazines left in shatterdome as more and more personnel leave, but it is an article in a dog-eared copy of Glamour that finally does it.
*
‘Have you seen this?’ she is almost snarling (more control, mori-san), slamming his door back until it clatters against the wall and shakes in the hinges. His cheeks are slightly pink and his eyes are wide and he’s lounging back on his bed with Max at his feet and a bunch of ruffled papers on his lap. She doesn’t care if he’s having a vulnerable fucking moment, though; she throws the magazine at his face. He doesn’t make any move to dodge it, which makes its inevitable hit a great deal less satisfying.
And then he goes and has the nerve to look puzzled when he picks it up.
‘I didn’t think you read things like this,’ and there he goes again, that slight note of amusement in his voice.
‘Found it in the canteen,’ she growls, crosses her arms over her chest. ‘Read it. Page twenty-one.’
He scans the pages for a while, his face turning from impassive to amused until there is nothing left for her to read on it at all. He clears his throat.
‘Despite the fact that Mori and Hansen can be reserved in each other’s company, what remains is that they are the ultimate professionals. The two Jaeger pilots grew up together in various bases across the world; in their respective backstories they seem to be the other's only constant. How long can it be until these young heroes realise that some things are meant to be? We may have another Hansen/Hansen pilot team again before too long.’
He inhales too loudly and chokes and it turns into coughing and she wonders if he’s laughing: ‘it’s not funny,’ she says, staring straight over his head at the wall.
‘It’s what you get, with the press,’ he says, finally composing himself, ‘just ignore it.’
When he puts the magazine down it is next to him on his bed, as if he has all intentions of keeping it.
*
The shatterdome has to close, eventually.
They are unnecessary expenses to maintain; the world can be rebuilt from elsewhere.
Standing next to her, Chuck is silent and unmoving. The last helicopter starts its engines and without a word he slips his hand into hers. She can’t decide if she wants him to leave his hand there or if she wants to break his nose again. She sticks with the former; she links her fingers through his, squeezes, and then extracts herself. She can feel him watching her as she walks away. When he sits next to her in the helicopter she bows her head and her vision is tinted blue.