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The first time he realizes he’s in love with her they’re sitting on the roof of the Shatterdome looking at Sydney.
He’s got a love hate relationship with the city, but he can’t dispute that its his city. She’s in her salvage uniform and he’s in the sweats he wears after piloting. His hair’s still wet from the shower and she’s got grease on her nose. The sun’s sinking down below the horizon and the red and golds make her hair a thousand colors but blue. She’s smiling and their bodies are pressed side by side on the roof as they watch the sky go dark.
They lay in the dark and make up the stories behind the constellations. They know the stars but not the stories so they make them up, tongues loosened by the liquor they’ve filched from the stash they aren’t supposed to know about. He can smell the metal and grease on her and the urge to kiss her is overwhelming. But he swallows it down like he does everything else and makes up a story about two constellations who love each other but know they can never be together.
She smacks him for making the story so sad.
The first time he kisses her its because he can’t not kiss her anymore.
They’re in Japan for the flower viewing and its night time. He’s dressed nicely but still feels a bit like an imposter, only catching snippets of the conversations. She taps one shoulder and appears at the other and then the only thing he’s feeling is like the luckiest person there. She’s in a kimono the color of the night sky, embroidered all over with fireflies.
She smiles unsurely and he knows he’s staring. He can’t tell her why though. He physically doesn’t have the words. So he ducks his head and presses his lips to hers. Its a chaste kiss, but it sings through everything they are. His hands gently touch her obi as she presses hers to the lapel of his suit. He pulls back when the petals of the tree they’re under shake free and fall on their noses.
She laughs and he can’t even finish the thought of how badly he wants to kiss her again because she’s already tugging him down. Their height difference isn’t that great but as she winds her arms around his shoulders and this time he holds her closer, though he tries to make sure he doesn’t crinkle her obi. He loses count of how many trees they kiss under. It takes them ten minutes and the arrival of a furious Stacker Pentecost to get them to say goodnight.
He doesn’t even comprehend how big his grin is or why his dad doesn’t ask if he had a good time.
The first time he prays she’s dying.
Well, not dying. not exactly. She’s fallen off the scaffold, taken a stupid risk that he can’t really fault her for. She managed to catch herself and instead of falling twenty five stories she’s only fallen one. But her arm’s broken and she’s smacked her head on the metal and the medically induced coma is a last ditch effort to keep her brain swelling down.
They’re easing her out of it and theres no way too know if its worked. He feels sick. He can hear the heart monitor and see the way her chest rises and falls but there’s no way to know if its going to be his Mako when she opens her eyes. One of her hands is in a big cast but the other is clasped between his.
He prays.
he hasn’t prayed since he was a kid, since before his life ended and then began again. His voice is hoarse, his words are slurred because the only time he’s left her side is to climb in to Striker. Pilots are supposed to rest after drops but he’s been in the chair next to her bed. He’s unshaven and looks worse than she does but he can’t think about moving until she opens her eyes, until he knows.
He’s still praying when she stirs. His eyes fly open and he stares down at her as she blinks her eyes open. She looks at him blankly for a moment, her eyes still heavy with sleep. Her brow draws together and her fingers tighten weakly in his crushing grip before she falls back asleep.
Twenty hours later she wakes up for real and scolds him for disobeying an order to get some rest.
For the first time since his mom died he tears up but shoves it away and blames it on the exhaustion.
He falls asleep on her bed, their hands still tangled together.
The first time they sleep together is the night before she deploys for Hong Kong with Gipsy.
The Jaeger program is being disbanded, his life is being ended for a shit wall a Cat 1 could rip apart. Stacker’s struck her name from the final list of candidates. On one hand he’s relieved, on the other hes mad because she’s got what it takes. He finds her sitting on the scaffolding looking at the Jaeger. She’s angry and sad and everything in between.
He pulls her to her feet and into the cockpit. It’s easy to disable the feed with a nod to the security guards letting them know he needs a moment. She runs her fingers over the rig and he catches her hand, guiding it over to the other one. her breath is shaky as she runs her thumb over the clamps she’ll never use and looks down at the controls she’ll never work with.
Her shoulders shake and he pulls her closer. Her fingers are tight and almost bruising on his chest as she criEs. He hates Stacker for doing this to her, for holding her back. When she quiets and looks up at him he brushes the tears from her cheeks and kisses her in the cockpit. She leans in to him and he holds her closer.
They stagger into his room blindly. He doesnt share a room with his dad and he’s pretty much always happy about that. Especially now when their clothes tangle on the floor and their limbs tangle on the bed. Both their worlds are ending and falling apart and they cling to the only thing they seem to have control over anymore.
It isn’t graceful.
They push and thrust and explore new areas of each other they haven’t before. it starts as a competition, seeing who can make the other cry out faster and cum harder. But in the end it becomes about both of them. They fall asleep tangled together and wake before the sun, before she has to leave. They just hold each other.
they don’t say goodbye.
The first time she says I love you he doesn’t hear.
he can’t hear where he is. He doesn’t hear it the third or the fifth or the tenth time she says it. She says it every night as she kisses his hand or his forehead or some part of him that isn’t heavily bandaged or stuck with tubes. She stays as often as she can, trying not to think about the words the doctors have said.
He hears her the twelfth time but it takes until the fifteenth for him to summon the strength to squeeze her hand.
The sixteenth time he says it back.