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Mako likes burying herself in blankets.
It’s one part physical comfort because drafts come through the cracks under doors. The other is emotional because she’s spent her life moving around from shelters to foster homes to different Shatterdomes. But blankets are a universal monster deterrent and when she’s buried underneath them, Mako feels like she’s safe. It drags into adulthood, even when she knows that monsters can be defeated by other monsters.
It’s a direct opposition to Raleigh who is never cold. He’s grown up with drafts and chills, he feels like they’re as much a part of him as his smile or his hair. He doesn’t like the cold, but with even a thin blanket he feels like he’s sleeping on the sun. He doesn’t wear anything to bed past a pair of cut off sweat pants and then only because he’s got a room mate.
Sleeping with another person takes some getting used to for both of them.
It isn’t just when they wake up gasping for air, tortured by dreams they can’t comprehend and terrors they can’t voice. It’s when they’re actually sleeping too. Raleigh sleeps on his right side because of his injuries or all splayed out like he’s trying to take over the bed. Mako curls herself into a tight little ball for most of the night, usually trapping Raleigh’s arm in her embrace.
Out of necessity they are both deep sleepers. Shatterdomes aren’t quiet places. There’s clangs and bangs and booms and voices echoing at all hours of the night. Even without the Jaegers there’s noise and when the program limps back to it’s feet, it gets even louder. So Mako’s snoring is no more grating than the fact that Raleigh grinds his teeth.
But they never fight over the blankets.
Raleigh always drags it up over both of them, but some during the night Mako will twist herself around the blankets and then his arm. Raleigh wakes up without any blankets and his arm trapped in Mako’s body. He loves the way she looks when she sleeps peacefully. His arm is warm but he just turns and fits his body around her, wrapping his other arm around her chest.
She makes a soft sound and her body relaxes, gently pressing against his. He smiles sleepily and adjusts his head so it’s resting over hers. She tucks neatly into him and he closes his eyes, glad they don’t have to fight over Mako’s blanket hogging tendencies.
She wakes up perfectly warm, with Raleigh’s chest rising and falling in her back. She can feel herself wrapped in the blankets, one of Raleigh’s arms trapped in their folds and the other wrapped around her. In the circle of his arms she feels like her blankets are just for warmth now.
They’ve defeated all the monsters already.