Chapter Text
Breakfast has improved. They’re heroes, after all. The food wasn’t bad to begin with. For the first time in months, years, the first day Raleigh got to Shatterdome Hong Kong, he’d smelled fresh bread. He hasn’t lost that touch of awe since. And toast? Eggs. Raleigh Becket considers himself a simple man, and a breakfast like fresh bread and eggs after a morning run leaves him quiet like prayer.
“Kimi no se-ta- ni wa shimi ga aru?” He looks up first, then down, where there’s a smear of ketchup on his sweater, and Raleigh’s face falls. Mako sits across from him. Neither notices that their ankles touch, it simply is. She showered. Raleigh did not make the same choice. She’s always better put together than he is. Button-downs, work boots. She’s never had dirt outlining goggles around her eyes. Not to say that she can’t get just as down and dirty. Mako just cleans up better.
“Yeah, that’s not comin’ out,” he sighs.
One of the several sweaters he knitted after Knifehead. None of them are exactly clean by now. The white wool now looks like steel wool. This one, kind of blue, looks kind of gray-blue. They all lose their color in the end. The threads start coming undone, he snags them and they fray. His sweaters have more patches than his bomber jacket.
“You can make a new one.” Mako smiles softly over her oatmeal, and that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. Raleigh started making them to cope, to distract himself, and even in the celebration, there’s still plenty to cope with. Needing a new sweater makes the list, somewhere long down the line past memorials and paid respects, rebuilding, conferences, interviews.
“I think I will.” He looks down at the worn cuff of his sleeve, and Mako reaches out to take his hand. She is a subtle woman, and her strength flows so subtly to her companion that he might mistake it for his own, if he weren’t so acutely aware of every quark of her existence.
“I’ll have the closin’ figures in your email by mornin’ your time.”
“Thank you, Marshal Hansen.”
“Told ya, not a Marshal anymore.”
He sits back. This isn’t supposed to be his chair. He isn’t supposed to be wearing a monkey suit. Can’t pull them off. Everything about...everything, these days, is duty and discomfort. He joined ranks to be the boots on the ground, not the brass, but here he is. Good man, soldier on.
Herc opens a new file, because if he sits too long he stews. Max grunts in the corner, drawing his eye, and shuffles to his stubby legs, huffing toward the door.
“Don’t drool on the lady,” he mutters, but he knows the dog won’t listen. Max slobbers up on Mako anyway, and like the perfect dignitary she is, she kneels and rubs the dry parts of his jowls. She even presses her forehead to his.
Chuck never had a girlfriend. Not a surprise, really.
“You wanted to see me, Marshal Hansen?”
“I’ve told ya to call me Herc.” He rubs between his eyes, where a tension headache has burrowed in, made itself at home, put on some tea and turned up the telly.
“I am having trouble adjusting.”
“Aren’t we all, Miss Mori.”
“You insist I call you ‘Herc,’ but I am Miss Mori to you.”
He looks over at her, where she crouches petting this man’s best friend. Fair point. Always a logical one, no matter her feelings. Gets it from her dad. “Too right. Mako.” She smiles, and he feels he’s done something correctly for the first time in a while.
“What did you need...Herc?”
“I wanted a report on the salvage operations for the Jaegers out of the bay.”
“It is slow progress. There is not much left.”
“Whatever you have found, whatever your projections are, I’d like them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One more thing. Close the door.” She does. He remembers her at seven, and ten, and thirteen, sixteen, nineteen. Growing up alongside Chuck. Closer to her father, not further away, and she lost more. Herc picks up a pen from his desk, but does not play with it. “How are you doin’?”
She considers. She does not brush him off. He asked her a question, and she doesn’t close the bay doors, batten down the hatches, or throw him attitude. It has never been her way. “I am fine,” she says. If she says it, he believes her. Mako does not lie, or wiggle around direct questions. “It has been hard, but it has always been hard.”
How?
It isn’t a professional question, he knows, but there’s a tightness in his begging to be unwound, holding on too tightly until his neck and jaw and head hurt by the end of the day every day.
How’re you fine?
“How are you handling things?”
“As well as I am able.”
“No, I mean….” He is an old fool, seeking advice from someone young and brilliant. He’s never been the smartest bloke on the block. He made his life following orders and going with his gut, but his guts are all twisted up these days. Herc isn’t too proud to ask. “How. Exactly.”
“Oh,” she says, just a little puff of breath, and she drops her eyes to the desk. He would be embarrassed for himself if he didn’t know she was thinking of just the right way to phrase it, compiling a report in her head before she speaks. He has learned--the Shatterdome has learned, from the head of the Mark III Jaeger Restoration Project and now the Asset Inventory and Recovery Operation--to listen when she speaks. “I have not let the loss of one connection prevent me from having, or forming, others.”
“Connections.” The man nods. There are people left. Not his people, but a lot of people that he lost a lot of people to save, and each of them knew that. He doesn’t mourn sacrifice--this is the hard part for him to articulate. He doesn’t wish Stacker and Chuck had hung back. He lost a wife, too, long before this, and then a son to make sure it wouldn’t happen anymore. A best friend right along with him. Nearly, but not quite, Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket. But they came back.
They’ve still got each other, and he’s still got...them, at least. A sharp sheila with dyed tips and a quarterback looking bloke who doesn’t know what to do with himself with no wall and no giant robot.
He’ll hang before he lets that boy go back to ‘construction.’
“We lose people. We keep them with us, but we do not let them hold us in place. Sensei told me that we must always move forward--to retreat into the past is to surrender.”
“Smart man.”
Mako nods stiffly, and Herc drops it, setting his pen down on the late Stacker Pentecost’s desk. “Thank you, Mako.”
“Knitting.”
“What?”
“Raleigh took up knitting, after his brother died. It is a simple, repetitive motion with a physical product that helps to keep his mind in one place.”
Herc...smiles. A little. Everything about that makes sense. “I’ll keep that in mind. Doubt Max would chase a ball’a yarn.”
She smiles back. He can’t tell if it’s pity, but he doesn’t think it is. He thinks it’s the look she’s always had in her eyes: Tentative hope.
Raleigh's back is a warm, hard plane, made up of muscle and scar tissue. It does not hurt him when she traces the lines of the past with the tips of her fingers; the burns have long since healed over. Mako often wonders if she would have the fortitude to carry on, like Raleigh, like her adoptive father, if she found only herself and a Jaeger in the drift. She has theories about the ghosts in the machines. Gipsy was a part of her long before she stepped into the ConnPod. Gipsy will be a part of her long after sinking. She thinks, withGipsy, she could have.
"I think, with Gipsy, you could have," Raleigh mutters, facing the wall with his arm stretched out under a pillow. Mako smiles against his skin. He snatched the thought from her head. Or perhaps she did from his.
"Yes," she agrees, almost sure of it. She will never know now. She'll never have to know. Mako wraps her arm around Raleigh's waist, presses her body to his back, chin on his shoulder and face pressed between his head and the pillow.
"How's the Marshal holdin' up?"
"He is not."
"Yeah, I got that feeling."
All that goes unsaid: He's lost everyone but Max, all he's done is give, he deserves better than what he got, he traded his son for the world and he wishes he'd died down there with him, or Stacker, or someone.
"We can help him." She is not sure how. He has been a figure in the background--and then foreground--of her life almost as long as Stacker Pentecost had been. (A time will come when it has been longer.) And yet, she does not know how to close his holes. Her mouth quirks in silent frustration, and Raleigh can see it in his head.
"I could teach him to knit," he suggests, half-joking, but Mako can see neither the humor nor the harm in it. She kisses the back of his neck and presses her face to his short hair, he takes her fingers between his larger ones. Raleigh understands his orders.