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Raleigh never was much for the sci-fi. He liked comics okay, but he wasn't a reader. After the Kaiju came, after the Jaegers, he started devouring every book he could find as a way of making sense of the world around him. Not that he thought about it like that. He read Asimov and Herbert and Shelley and LeGuin because he could relate, all of a sudden, to the people struggling in those books. He was piloting a two thousand plus ton, multi-story robot with his brother. If that wasn't science fiction he didn't know what was.
After Gipsy fell, he stopped reading the books. They couldn't help him. The mandatory therapists didn't help him, even leaving the Rangers didn't help although he convinced himself it did. Repeated to himself that getting up on top of the wall and building it higher and stronger to keep the goddamn monsters out would help someone, and that'd be enough. Most days, it worked. Most nights, not so well.
Pentecost came. Mako came. He sat on his front doorstep while they fixed what he'd done to Gipsy and turned over the bent and battered paperback in his hands, staring at it. God, if he'd written about this back then it would have made a kick-ass book. Comic book. Movie, you couldn't write this shit down, it had to be a movie. They'd get someone with a Captain America face to play him. He didn't know what they'd do with the robots, but the monsters would be animated clay figures, or people in suits.
Three years after it was over, he had his answer. Computer-generated images, created by the civilian counterparts to the simulation software he'd used to train on the Jaegers, the ones Mako had aced, the ones he and his brother had aced. Before they died.
"Raleigh. Raleigh."
He knew Mako's voice before he opened his eyes. Nothing to do with the Drift, she just had a way of saying his name that no one else did. Like she could hug him and then break his nose with her forehead.
"I wasn't asleep. I was resting."
Raleigh pulled up from the couch and stretched, feeling every muscle aching where he shouldn't have slept at that angle. They were still on call for the next two weeks. After the Kaiju War there were no more functioning Jaegers and the alliance immediately started to fracture without the outside threat, but they still insisted on rebuilding smaller, more compact versions of the damn things. Recruiting the pilots and continuing to test for Drift compatibility. They could act as a neutral global police force, and a patrol just in case the rift opened again.
Being on call with Mako meant staring at the digital image of the rift and waiting for it to vomit up another goddamn monster. He distracted himself with monster movies and waved her off when she pointed out the inherent masochism in escaping his nightmares by immersing himself in other people's nightmares.
She folded her arms and cocked the ball of one foot at him and he ducked his head. "All right, all right, I'm going. Real bed, all that crap."
"Real bed," she scolded him. "I don't want to see you passed out over something else."
"Cross my heart," he told her, grinning. The staggering back to his room was only half-pretend, though. He kicked his shoes off, made sure the intercom was on so he could hear if Mako needed him, and passed the hell out.
Suiting up for the Jaeger had to be the coolest, most fucking Hollywood thing ever. He got to strap on this armor straight out of Star Wars, hook up to computers in his mind, and fight monsters. In a robot the size of a skyscraper. He could lift buildings, he could move boats full of people out of the way. Top of the world, ma.
He was floating on adrenaline and fear and elation, swirling around him like the most vomit-inducing soup. They were hosed, they were blown, they were every goddamn metaphor for screwed he could think of, they were going to die in this skyscraper-sized robot, this walking miracle of human ingenuity. They did die, he felt them die, felt his soul ripped out of his body or some shit like that. He felt vertigo, the sensation of falling and being lifted at the same time, felt the piss run down his leg and tasted iron in his mouth and felt his heart beat a million miles a minute before it stopped. Just stopped.
When he stopped being lifted he dropped full-tilt into a Jaeger cockpit again. Good old Gipsy. They'd rebuilt her for something, he couldn't remember what, sweat pooling in the deeper crevices of his flight suit.
Mako looked at him with concern. As well she might, they'd gone through a bad first drift, she knew what it could be like. "Are you okay?"
"Fine. I'll be fine. Don't you worry." He didn't try for a grin, but for the truth, as much as he could stand it. He'd do his best not to let her down, not to let the Marshall down. Herc might not be his Marshall, but he had the rank, and he had Raleigh's respect.
They moved out on patrol. Guarding the rift just in case those creatures came back. Night patrol, this time, waves churning up around them as they walked through the ocean. Because they could walk through the ocean in a Jaeger. When he was a kid, when he'd go out with his brother to the beach, and they'd walk until they couldn't keep their heads above water and their feet on the sand. Now he could walk for miles and keep his feet on the sand. Head above the water.
"Is that..." he squinted.
"Two of them," Mako breathed. "There are two of them."
He remembered this battle. He knew this battle, but it wasn't this battle, it was the other one. Raleigh couldn't separate them, ocean splashing up around them like the world's biggest bathtub and two kids fighting in it. Three? Two? When he looked around again the Kaiju was dead. Skewered with Mako's chainsword.
"Let's check for a pulse," he rasped. His throat felt like someone had poured glass shards down it.
They aimed the plasma cannon but it was still alive, this time it was still alive even though that wasn't how this had gone down. That was how it had gone down with Yancey, not Mako, never Mako, he'd made damn fucking sure of that. But the goddamn monster reached down and peeled open the top of their Jaeger like peeling open a can of grapes, breaking into Gipsy, again, and reaching down and pulling Mako out, it pulled her out of there and he screamed. Felt the rising/falling again. Felt her fear and the hurt that he hadn't taken care of her, hadn't kept his promise. Then nothing.
When her hand dropped onto his shoulder he screamed again. Out of the black he screamed and opened his eyes to her worried face and those silly blue streaks. "Raleigh?"
"I'm okay. I'm here." He felt the sweat in every fold of fabric. Shouldn't have gone to sleep in his clothes.
"No, you're not," she told him, sitting down on his bed. "You're in the past. Where were you?"
Raleigh looked away, down at his knees. After a quick check to make sure, good, no, he hadn't wet the damn bed, that would have been really embarrassing. But the wetness on his bed was his sweat, not ocean water. Or blood. There hadn't been much blood when Yancey'd died. "You know where."
She moved her hand down from his shoulder to his arm, rubbing back and forth. "I am not your brother. You are not your brother. He is smiling on you now for what you've done, for saving all of us. But honoring him does not mean you have to live in his last moments."
"I'm not..." he shook his head, scooting forward till he was alongside her and could lean his head on her shoulder. "It's not where I want to be. I keep seeing it. Every time we're on patrol, every time I go to sleep. Maybe two times out of three," he corrected himself. Wasn't that bad.
"Maybe one time out of three," she teased, curling her arm around his head, cradling him. Running her fingers over the top of his head. "When the fear is bad, and the nights are too quiet, and you're too tired to shut it off or look for a distraction."
He felt a little dumb for saying that, if she thought he was claiming it all for himself. But she knew he'd been in the Drift, that he'd seen what she'd been through. She was just empathizing. And telling him, gently and in her own way, that she understood. She'd been with him in the Drift too, right?
"I don't know how to shut it off," he admitted, closing his eyes. "I mean, I'm exhausted. I can't sleep 'cause of the nightmares, and I'm exhausted. I keep seeing it. Him. That monster. I thought it was dead, we both thought it was dead. I can't turn my back on one of them now."
"I know," she told him, fingers sliding over his head and down the back of his neck. "It's why we patrol."
Why the patrol. Why he had blasted Leatherback into a pile of hide and blue slime and shattered bones. Why he made good and damn sure that every Kaiju who had come through that rift was put back in the ground that spat it out in the first place, and why he couldn't sleep at night. It was Yancey all over again. Just when he thought it was all over, the klaxons would start and they'd be back in their skyscraping robots pulling out just one more trick to keep the human race alive. Because it was never over. It could never be over for him, he couldn't rest. He'd done that once, and his brother had died.
Mako knew. Her whole family had died, even though she hadn't been in a Jaeger, had been under no obligation to save them. She'd been a little girl at the time. And they got her revenge. Which was probably why she slept easier than he did at night, fewer nightmares. She still had some. He guessed they were about Marshall Pentecost, but she didn't volunteer the information and since she hadn't had another episode in the Drift he hadn't pried. Some things you just left alone until the person was ready to talk about it, and if that never happened, maybe it wasn't any of your business in the first place.
He could barely keep his eyes open, he was that tired. Every muscle in his body pulled him down to the bed. And she wasn't helping.
"Don't chase the rabbit."
"What?" he lifted his head, laughing, because it sounded way out of place. They were in his room in their barracks, not in the Jaeger.
She chuckled at him. "Do you remember that, you told me that? My first time in the Drift. Don't chase the rabbit."
"Well, yeah, but..."
"You can see it coming in there, but you don't see it coming out here. It sneaks up on you. Don't follow it. Let it go hopping by, and maybe it will leave you alone." She looked so serious and earnest, and he was sure it made sense to her, but he couldn't figure out what the hell she was talking about.
Oh. "Oh. That rabbit." And at first it sounded cute, and then it sounded like a clever metaphor, and by the time he got to the logical conclusion of that metaphor he wondered why he'd never thought of it in the first place. "Heh. Easier said than done."
"But easier to do, now, isn't it?"
He wasn't sure. Maybe it would be, he was used to letting things pass over and through him when he was in the Drift. All the horrible shit his mind could come up with, he had to let it go, or risk losing control of the two thousand ton weapon. Could it work outside of the Drift? "Might as well find out?"
Mako nodded, then tried to stretch out on the bed. She had to push him over to do it. "Move over."
"What?" he laughed. "Why?"
"You'll need a co-pilot. Move over." She had a completely straight face, too. He kept giving her sideways looks as he scooted over, now conscious of how sweaty the blankets were and how much he reeked and how awkward and small this bed was. If she wasn't going to bring it up, he wouldn't. They'd already been about as intimate as it was possible to get. Didn't mean he wasn't going to be embarrassed.
He started to doze off quicker than he had expected as they lay curled up and towards each other, his forehead sliding down on the pillow to touch the top of her head. He was half asleep, and missed the first thing she said that ended in 'rabbit.'
"Mmm?"
"I said," she reached down to pull the covers higher over his shoulders. It covered half her face, too, just to reach that height. "Why do they call it chasing the rabbit?"
"Oh." He smiled, closing his eyes again. This one he'd gotten straight off. "Alice in Wonderland."
"... Oh. Of course it is," she laughed, bright and cheerful, and he laughed, too. And he drifted off with her, thinking of blue highlights around smiling cheeks and the heady rush of a solid partnership.