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5) Sasha doesn't say a word to break the heavy silence in the elevator. Pentecost does not look like he wants to talk. Instead she just tilts her head at him as she boards, thumbs the space between her lip and nose, and passes a him a tissue without meeting his gaze for more than a moment.
He takes it and steps out silently two floors down with his hand pressed to his face.
Later a new box of tissues is on her doorstep
-
4) "You will have to choose a darker color when you dye, I think, but only to look right with your eyes." Sasha advises as she mixes up the ammonia. "It takes some time, certainly, but especially for a little bit bleaching is not so hard."
Mako digs a hand into the shopping bag and pulls out the dye box, her choice already made. "It's called 'Kaiju Blue'," she says, making a face. "But it's pretty perfect otherwise."
"Kaiju KILLER BLue, the blood of your enemies." Sasha corrects, neatly parting Mako's hair with a practiced hand. "War paint for a warrior."
-
3) In the hospital after they wash up on the coast Cheung sits awake late at night, watching his brothers sleep.
"Hey," Sasha whispers from just beyond the curtain. He does not react so she repeats it a few times, adds his name, until finally, like the lapping tide dislodging a shell from the sand, her voice rouses his attention and pulls it to her.
"You should be sleeping, ah?" she whispers, low enough not to wake Hu or Jin but loud enough to be heard over Aleksis' groaning snore in the next bed over.
"You too." he replies, and rests his chin on one folded up knee. Sasha steps inside the circle of the curtain around Hu's bed, adjusting the sling on her piloting arm as she surveys the two sleeping triplets.
Hu has yet to wake since they arrived, machines and medications wearing away at his injuries too slowly to really be seen. The pressure beneath his skull is less now for the shunt, but it has not yet made a visible difference in his body. Unconsciousness remains the miserable norm. Thanks to this fact neither Jin nor Cheung has been easy to convince to rest. Jin has finally succumbed to exhaustion, asleep with his head on one arm, sitting in a hard chair and slumped forward onto his brother's bed. Cheung sits on the end of the mattress, vigilant.
"I've never asked but you're the oldest aren't you?" Sasha says after a moment, smiling a bit when Cheung nods. He looks at her with curiosity and she shrugs her good shoulder.
"It shows," she says, "The way you watch over them." Gently she reaches out a hand and lays it on his shoulder. "I am not tired. I have napped all afternoon while they made Aleksis take tests. If they wake up I will wake you too."
Cheung hesitates at her offer, swallows before slowly putting the words together.
"When I close my eyes, all I can see is the ocean flooding in..."
"Ah." Sasha nods then, and shifts her stance, leaning on the bed beside him, her good shoulder against his. "Well... then if you like I will just keep you company."
When Hu stirs awake in the dawn hours of the morning Cheung is finally dozing a little against her side. He jolts to full awareness with a single nudge of her elbow and Sasha smiles as the sleeping two rise to meet their missing third with a flood of relief and happiness that is palpable even without understanding a word they say.
She slips back to her side of the curtain without a sound.
-
2) Sasha does not even make it to the end of the hall before Raleigh’s door groans open and he bursts out of it, the package she’s just pushed through the mail slot in his door clutched in one hand. He jogs up to her, sock-footed, hair half-brushed, sputtering.
“Is this JERKY? Really for real?! Wha - how did you know I - where did you GET this stuff!?”
“The same store where I get nuclear weapons. Great discounts.” She quips, crossing her arms over her chest, and a laugh bursts out of him, his shoulders sagging a little with the release of tension.
“Well... thank you! I just... what’s the occasion?”
Sasha blinks, stares at him like he has two heads. “You are asking what it is for?”
“Yeah. It’s not my birthday or -”
“Becket.” she cuts him off, giving him a good natured little smirk. “You saved the world this week, you know. Mori and you, and Hansen and Pentecost... this is my way of thank you. It is not much but.” she shrugs. “A treat is sometimes the nicest thing about a day.”
Raleigh swallows, staring back at her, the realization that she is correct sinking in anew, before finally he smiles again.
“Well... it’s been the nicest thing about this day for sure.”
-
1) Herc doesn’t leave Chuck’s side from the moment he is released from containment and for the first time in a very long time Chuck doesn’t storm away as soon as he is able either. Chuck is rattled visibly at the hospital and even more at home at the shatterdome, as anyone who’s narrowly escaped death ought be, and for the first 72 hours or so after the Hansens’ return home they are somewhat attached at the hip.
Their first meal in the mess after they are released by medical, a breakfast, is an obvious stress - so many people stopping and asking and congratulating both Herc and Chuck. Chuck just nods and smiles and shakes hands with the distant air of a man who hasn’t slept. Herc is a jumpy mess of protective instinct by Sasha’s measure, looking like he wants to put a fork through the next hand that’s held out to either of them for half the meal..
When they are not at lunch she fixes them both a plate and goes up to their quarters afterward. She can hear Chuck’s snoring from inside when she leans close to the door to knock with the knuckles of her still-slung hand. It takes a moment and another knock before Herc answers.
"I thought you may not want to come down.” Sasha says when he finally opens the door. ”Noisy in the mess, da?"
She holds up a tray with two plates of food - all the things they each like and none of what they don't - in her good hand and Herc, despite his clear weariness, smiles at her, leaning on the bulkhead frame and accepting the tray with HIS good hand.
"Well, aren’t you sweet. Didn’t have to do that.” he mutters, but he looks at the plates and at her with a grateful gaze all the same. “I'd have come down if I'd known you were going to be there.” He quips after a second. ”We coulda teamed up on the busted arms. I know you don't usually pilot left but..."
Sasha laughs. "Aleksis says I am a terrible left. I cannot write or open jars now. To use a fork?" She huffs a bit. "Well I am getting better but I can tell he would feed me himself if I let him."
"You should let him." Herc grins and waggles his brows at her. "But only if he brings you breakfast in bed."
-
0) Herc is eating breakfast, chewing a mouthful of sausage when Sasha drops into the seat across from him and says without preamble. "I want you to know this is entirely your fault."
"Uh, it is?" He replies, looking at her with a knit brow. He looks around, looks her up and down, trying to find something out of place.
"What did I do? Is your husband going to hurt me? Are YOU going to hurt me?"
She snorts. "You and your suggestions. Is that how you ended up with him, ah?" She jerks her head at Chuck sitting, equally bewildered on her left and frames her next words with air quotes. "'Breakfast in bed?'"
It takes Herc a second to put it together, but when he does he laughs.
"Well I didn't say don't be careful!"
-
1) They only actually announce their news twice - to the Cherno crew and the Hansens. The rest are taken care of by the wildfire rumour mill of a Shatterdome in want of Kaiju to kill. Mako shows up at their doorstep with a beaming congratulatory smile before the first day is over.
“Are you excited?” she asks over the cup of tea she’s invited in for.
Sasha chuckles. “As I can be while also nauseous.” A pause. "Not an uncommon combination for a jager pilot, really.”
Mako groans at the memory. “There is a reason the first simulator drop is a no encounter, yes...”
“This will be … different.” Sasha says thoughtfully. “A little the opposite of killing things for a life’s work, hmm?”
“I don’t think any of us really wanted killing kaiju to be our WHOLE life’s work, right?” Mako asks, raising a brow and Sasha smiles.
“I suppose we did fight a war to win.”
-
2) Her head snaps up from the book she’s buried in before Raleigh even says hello, nostrils flaring, her eyes a little wide.
“Боже мой! Is that what I think it is?”
“It is jerky, yes.” his smile is utter cheek as he swings the bag in his hand a little, holding it out to her with a welcoming nod. “And it is for you.”
Her jaw drops open and her book is put aside as she pushes up out of her chair, approaching him with a shade of disbelief. “But even the people I asked wh- WHERE did you-?”
“My mom makes her own. She sent me a batch plus some extra.” he grins. “Aleksis might have mentioned -”
Sasha cuts Raleigh off with both hands clasped on either side of his head and a kiss on each of his cheeks, smiling from ear to ear.
“You precious man! You have made my day!”
-
3) Three little stuffed tigers show up on their doorstep one morning with the rest of the mail but lacking any postmark. One has an extra ring on his tail, another a black mask in representation of sunglasses. A little soft basketball is packed with them.
Aleksis thinks they are charming but does not quite expect Sasha to cry when she sees them neatly lined up in the box. Perhaps it is less the tigers, he thinks, and more the note that does it.
The letter, enclosed in a crisp red envelope, references in phrasebook Russian some time in her company Aleksis does not recall himself, so probably during the long days he’d spent drowsing in a morphine cloud after Otachi and Leatherback... He can only imagine what they might have talked about but is sure that Sasha was her usual calm self in a time of chaos.
He bends down to kiss the top of his wife’s head as she sniffs and wipes at her eyes, much too smart to suggest otherwise when she blames that tearfulness on her condition.
The tigers get a place of honor on the edge of the crib.
-
4) Herc finds he’s of the most help by giving Aleksis a place to hide and vent his well justified terror. He’s never seen a man with such presence look so helplessly upset in his life. It seems wrong that there should be any problem the guy couldn’t solve with a threatening fist-pound, but that wasn’t really the way to deal with one’s wife...
“It has never been hard before to keep her happy.” he says miserably, huge hands wrapped around one of Herc’s spare mugs. “I thought, ‘I am so lucky to have an easily pleased wife’, ah? Now no matter what I do something will bother her temper or make her uncomfortable.”
“Well, for better or for worse, right?”
“It is not that I mind to be with her through this, we’ve seen far worse times, but... it is my fault she is so miserable.” He cringes, putting his bearded chin in one hand. ”She says so all the time, ‘you’ve done this to me, ah?’. Of course she insists in a better mood that she is joking but...”
“Now now, s’not your fault.” Herc pats Aleksis’ hand consolingly. “She told me for a fact that it was all MY fault, so you’re off the hook. You remind her of that next time.
He does, Herc hears later, and it is the first time in a week Aleksis hears her laugh.
-
5) It’s an old gift, a part of Sasha’s conditions for coming to Hong Kong.
'If we are going to come to your Shatterdome we will need something decent to drink.’ she’d told Pentecost and he had obliged them with a bottle of vodka waiting in their new quarters, one far too nice for just any occasion. Breaking in new barracks was not really enough for something that fine, they’d agreed.
To celebrate a daughter it will do nicely.