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He kisses her for the first time outside her door.
It’s a good kiss, gentle and lovely and Mako thinks they could kiss forever. His hands are shy on her waist and she has one hand through his hair and the other around his shoulders. They kiss and it’s wonderful and when they pull apart he presses his forehead against hers and she thinks she could stay like that forever too.
It’s a fitting goodbye.
He discovers she’s gone when he knocks on her door for breakfast. He thinks about getting it for her but he doesn’t want her to think that he’s changed because of their kiss. So he thinks they can walk down together. But there’s no answer when he knocks and when he raps a little harder, the door swings open. Mako doesn’t leave her door unlocked. He’s in the room in a second.
She isn’t there.
Most of her stuff is but he can see the few things that are missing. Her original blue print of Gipsy Danger, the red shoes, Stacker’s handkerchief. He doesn’t even feel embarrassed when he pulls open her drawers and yanks her closet back to see some things are missing as well. He turns in a slow circle, his eyes scanning desperately for something—for anything. But there’s nothing. She’s just—
She’s gone.
He staggers out of his room and down the hall. He has to tell someone. He goes for Herc because you’re supposed to tell the Marshall. Herc bolts to Mako’s room and Raleigh realizes no-one knows where she is. His stomach is somewhere near his ankles and has no intention of coming back up. Especially not when Tendo swears and Max sits in Mako’s room and begins to whimper. She’s gone. Raleigh stands there and isn’t sure if he should be cursing like Tendo or crying like Max. Both options are equally appealing.
He leaves her door open when he finally goes back in to his room.
It’s horrible, the silence is horrible. But worse is the ache he can feel in his bones. LIke her being far away is causing him physical pain. Which isn’t that far from the truth. The scars on his right side ache viciously, no matter what he tries. He gives up being in his room and sits on the steps leading up to his door and watches, half expecting her to step out of some hidden corner and ask what he’s doing.
She doesn’t, he checks them all again anyway.
Worse, she doesn’t come back. He barely leaves his steps for two days, consumed by the fear that if he isn’t there he’ll miss her. Rationally he knows she’s gone. He would feel it if she was close. But he still stays there. Max appears one day and he has some company. Together they sit there and wait for their ghosts to come home.
They don’t.
He doesn’t know if this is worse than Yancy dying in his head, but its on par. Losing a copilot is an agony no-one should have to face once, let alone twice. The fact that she’s just gone hurts in a different way. With Yancy there was no choice. Mako had one and she chose to go. That makes the hollow feeling so much worse. With Yancy it was an all encompassing agony, radiating through him. With Mako it is a sharp-sweet pain that pulses from a very specific part of him.
You aren’t meant to rip your heart out twice. He loved Yancy, like a brother and a best friend and another half all rolled in to one. He loves Mako differently and the same. She’s a best friend and another half, but she’s a thousand things on top of that. He presses his fingers to his lips and remembers the press of hers, wonders if she knew she was leaving, if that kiss was her way of saying goodbye. He can’t remember who moved first, but he knows they probably moved together.
He always thought they would be together. He would never force her to be with him, he isn’t that kind of guy. But she’s in love with him. He knows that, he’s been in her head after all. The fact that someone as incredible as her could love someone like him still isn’t something he can wrap his head around. And now she’s just not there. She’s gone. Everything in him is screaming to go find her, but he doesn’t think she wants to be found. It’s the doubt that freezes him in place. The fact that he isn’t sure she wants to be found, thats what makes it impossible to move.
He knows its irrational but Hercs acceptance of the situation is infuriating. He understands, so he gives Raleigh tasks that can be done from his steps. Raleigh wants to slap him, hit him again and again until he understands that accepting misery because you think it’s what you deserve is wrong. He’s wrong. But he can’t move so he takes the work without complaint.
He hits Tendo though.
It’s the worst moment of his life, just like it was the last time. Tendo does something that would be helpful. Before he tries to give him his jacket so Raleigh won’t freeze to death in the Alaskan winter. This time he marks Mako’s room down for cleaning. Not cleaning out, literally just cleaning because its starting to smell. He even supervises it to make sure they don’t damage anything.
Worse though, Tendo lets him hit him. He’s the closest thing to someone whose been inside his head, some days Raleigh thinks the tech might know him better than if he had. Tendo lets him hit him before he takes him down and pins him, one hand shoved against his face hard enough that Raleigh can feel the old scars from the Kaiju blue on his skin. He sometimes forgets that Tendo fought the Kaiju before the Jaegers, that there’s a reason he can be outside the twenty five story machines and his voice will be steady.
Raleigh feels the metal pressing in to his cheek and fights the howl on his lips as Tendo holds him there and makes him watch as some poor worker vacuums and dusts as fast as his tools will let him. Then Tendo lets him up to inspect everything. Her scent has faded slightly and he almost decks Tendo again, like this is somehow his fault even though it isn’t. Her scent was fading anyway, replaced by that of dust and decay. At least it smells clean now. He takes her pillow anyway.
Blaming himself is, naturally, the next step.
He’s weak, broken, not good enough. limping after her, it’s pointless if his own failures are the reason that she left. So he resolves to be better, resolves it with the vicious passion that only pain can inspire. His first step is the infirmary where he finally lets them look at his shoulder. There’s nothing to do for the scars but the internal damage can be helped. A woman who he orders to ignore his reactions spends hours digging her fingers in to the joint, rotating it and dealing with the mess of five years of neglect. In the end he still needs surgery.
It’s harder to deal with the mental side of it.
Being a Jaeger pilot is the only thing he’s ever been good at. It’s the only thing he’s ever understood. He thinks about other things but forgets them. Instead he focuses on helping Herc shoulder the burden of dealing with the United Nations. It works better than it has any right to, their own mini-multinational alliance facing down the suits. Herc doesn’t accept their particular brand of misery and that’s refreshing enough to drive Raleigh onwards.
In the back of his mind he hopes Mako’s watching, in reality he doesn’t think she is. Still its easier to step back into the role than he would like to admit. Sometimes he thinks if he holds his gaze forward he can see them, Yancy on his right, Mako on his left. When he answers questions he answers for all of them and learns to chose his words carefully. If he answers something wrong he thinks he can see one of them shake their head, and his scars on that side itch more than normal. Like there’s still electricity running through his skin.
They aren’t the worst ghosts to have around, all things considered.
He makes himself stronger, better, works to correct everything he can think of that would have made her want to leave and she doesn’t come back. So he works harder still and she’s still gone. He gets angry, viciously angry for all of two seconds until it hits him that she may not be coming back. That it may not have anything to do with him and she may just be gone.
Thats the thought that has him finally close his door. He returns the pillow that doesn’t smell like her anymore and ignored the messages from his torture woman. He keeps his door shut and his eyes closed. He opens it once when Max knocks against the frame. The dogs still depressed and Raleigh can’t blame him. They started waiting for their ghosts, now they huddle in the bed and mourn them.
Their presence seems to fade from his mind, which is the worst of it. It’s hard to torture himself with Yancy’s laugh or Mako’s chin jerk if he can’t remember them. He wonders if Max is having trouble finding Chuck’s scent and that’s what’s making him sad. The research he does mentions things like the mind protecting itself and not being ready. So the things are there, they’re just being pushed aside by another well meaning but ultimately misguided entity.
He feels tight, like he’s clinging to something he has no right to hold on to. His ghosts aren’t solid for a reason. One is living, one is dead, neither are there. Both are gone. He’s glad he has Max to muffle his tears in. The dog licks his tears and sleeps on his chest, wheezing through the night. Ultimately it’s Max who gets him out of the room and at least down the hall so he can do his business.
On the day he finally steps outside her postcard arrives.
There are no words, he only knows its her because the thing is written in Japanese. Tokyo is laid out beneath an autumn moon, lights bright against the dark sky. Tokyo tower, rebuilt both as a memorial and a signal station, is the central focus of the card. Written across the bottom in almost cartoonish kanji are six words that roughly translate to ‘wish you were here’. It stays in his jacket pocket for three days before he takes it out to translate the address of a P.O. Box.
He sends her a blank one of Anchorage two weeks later, the tundra broken only by a wolf howling up at the sky. There aren’t words on his card. Or the northern lights, which is a favorite of the postcards. He leaves it blank and it takes him two days to drop it in the mail. He does it after his first interview, eeking out the last scrap of bravery he’s got.
Hers comes a few days later. This time it’s France pictured there, the Eiffel Tower high against the sky. It’s still night, the spire a bright point against the blackness. He’s barely had it for a week, still trying to decide where to send her one from when the next arrives. The Freedom Tower is framed by the sun. initially he thinks its setting but he sees on his tenth look that it’s actually rising. Faint, still hidden but undeniably there. The words on this one are in English. ‘Thinking of you’.
He wonders if those are places she’s been to, it’s been almost a year since she vanished after all. Some of the cities are ones that are little more than rubble, others are rebuilt and others still are virtually untouched by the Kaiju. The only thing they have uncommon is a tall signal tower that rises above everything else. The night he realizes that he remembers being on the wall and how dizzying it is to be so high without the conn pod and without Tendo’s voice in your ear.
The wall was hell but it was also a refuge. There was something almost healing about the dizzying height and the wind in your hair. Like you were saying you didn’t need the Jaeger, you could get to that point on your own. It was a twisted, defiant lie but Raleigh knows he needed it. He wonders if Mako did too.
The last card doesn’t come from a P.O. Box.
It comes from a hotel in Hong Kong.
The picture is just of the city. It’s daytime out. For the first time there’s writing on it. Just a time, 8:00. There’s no question mark, it’s an invitation, nothing more. A quick search tells him there’s only one bar in the hotel. he gets there at 8:15, looking for someone who is both his other half and a complete stranger. He finds her instantly, sitting against the window. Her blue has been traded for black, from her clothes to her hair. But her shoes are red. There are secrets in her eyes but she sees him coming in the reflection and the smile is honest. She turns and rises in a smooth motion as he stands in front of her, her own eyes moving over his longer hair and the beginnings of a beard on his cheeks.
"Sorry I’m late," he says, the Japanese on his tongue strange from disuse.
"Don’t be," she replies, "it was my turn to wait."
They’re cautious when they sit, wary even. He has no idea how long she’s in town for or what this is. If she’s going to vanish on him again or stay forever. He’s good at idle chit chat now and asks her about the places she’s visited. She tells him about them and compliments him on his interviews. It’s more pleasant than it has any right to be as his mind slowly categorizes the way she moves and speaks and smells. When she goes to the bathroom he does have to force himself to remain still. He has no idea if she’s coming back or not.
Outside the sky breaks finally and it begins to rain. Not a drizzle but a torrential downpour, the kind that soaks you to your bones. He leans back in his chair and finally remembers every detail of their first meeting, how she looked at him, the way the umbrella felt in his hand. Most of all the way she brushed against him as they made their way to the elevator. He watches the rain for what feels like forever. He thinks he hears her footfalls but he doesn’t turn around and forces himself not to look in the window.
He hopes she’s coming back.