Designations Congruent with Things: A Coda In Two Parts

There is no pity in a Category Five Mako Mori hug.

Chapter warnings: Realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. War. Grief. Death. Mental illness. Regular illness. Panic attacks. Self-harm.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

A Coda

They arrive in the rain, stepping out of a strangely talkative taxi cab, Mako pulling her scarf tight over her hair, Raleigh raising the hood of his jacket to hide his face as he scans the streets for cameras and reporters.

He doesn’t see any.

That makes sense, because Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket are in Hong Kong.

Masako and Ray Lapierre are the ones vacationing in San Francisco.

“Did you see any?” Mako asks quietly in Japanese as they unload their luggage from the back of the cab.

“Nah, babe,” Raleigh replies with an affected drawl. He settles his bag over one shoulder and hauls their shared suitcase to the curb.

Mako makes a face, angling her head to the side and sticking out her tongue. She shoulders her bag and slams the trunk of the cab closed. 

They stand hesitating in the rain, looking up at the exterior of Bayside Towers.

Of course those nerds would live here, Raleigh thinks. Could one get more supervillain? If one tried? Really hard?

“Ominous.” Mako studies dark, rain-glazed windows against a gray-white sky. 

“I think this place is lined with lead,” Raleigh says. “So is every building in this zone. That’s what tints the windows.”

“Why are we standing outside?” Mako asks pointedly.

They pass through a locked door with a prearranged code, walk through a lobby of glass and chrome, then step into an elevator.

Raleigh pulls his hood back. He watches Mako remove her scarf and sunglasses, run hands over her hair, then stare impassively at the elevator door.

Her fear is his fear.

Her dread is his dread.

He says nothing, because there’s nothing he can say. Instead, he straightens the collar of her red blouse beneath the outer shell of her black jacket.

She meets his gaze.

“You look good,” he says.

She smiles. 

He smiles back.

“What if—” She doesn’t continue the thought.

“What if?” Raleigh echoes. “So what.” He hopes his nonsense words encompass all he’s said on planes and in hotel rooms, in dressing rooms, on beaches. We’ll make it work, Mako. We’ll always make it work, you and me. We’ll take what we can get and we’ll make it into what we need, like we always have.

She smiles again.

Raleigh really hopes that none of what he’s read about Geiszler is true.

He hopes it because he’d hope as much for anyone; he hopes it because he can’t stand to see Mako hurt any more than she’s already been hurt; he hopes it because sometimes now, in his dreams, Yancy turns dark-haired and snarky and soon enough it’s Geiszler he’s fighting in that bar in Anchorage with upended tables and shards of glass that turn to shards of words they never were; he hopes it because when he dreams as Mako, it’s Yancy who shows him how to tune a bass.

The elevator opens and they walk down a silent, empty hallway.

Mako’s hands close around the strap of her bag. Raleigh rolls their suitcase over a floor that’s gray and smooth and made of something synthesized.

They stop in front of the door.

Mako looks at him.

It is Raleigh who knocks.

Geiszler swings the door open, one hand on the doorframe, and raises his eyebrows at the pair of them. He’s dressed in a green sweater pulled over a white button-down shirt. He looks like a nerd and stands like a rockstar and Raleigh can’t decide if he wants to punch the guy or give him a hug. 

“Oh.” Geiszler feigns surprise like a guy without brain damage, “Were you people coming today? I—”

That’s as far as he gets before Mako’s bag hits the ground and he gets tackle-hugged.

Raleigh feels for him.

Mako hugs are intense.

Geiszler staggers back a step and loses his balance. Unfortunately for him, there’s no pity in a Category Five Mako Mori hug. She doesn’t stabilize him; she lets him drag her down. The only help she gives is the quick shift of her hand from his shoulder to his head so he won’t crack his skull against the floor.

“Mako,” Geiszler says, and that’s a tactical error. Raleigh knows from experience that people need to hang onto their oxygen during a Mako hug. It’s best to stop fighting and politely remind Mako that one needs to breathe. 

Dr. Gottlieb appears from behind a closed door, shoots Geiszler an unimpressed look when the guy uses his remaining air to gasp, “Help,” skirts the hug on the floor, and extends his hand to Raleigh.

“Mr. Becket,” he says.

“Dr. Gottlieb.” Raleigh shakes his hand. 

“Such formalities are hardly necessary.” Dr. Gottlieb waves a hand in a manner that’s a whole lot more laid back than Raleigh remembers. “Welcome to San Francisco.” 

“Thank you,” Raleigh says. “Call me Raleigh,” he adds, but it comes out more like a hope than a directive.

Dr. Gottlieb nods.

Mako lets Geiszler go, scrambles up, rocks back on her heels, and wipes her eyes. 

“Maks,” Geiszler coughs weakly, hands extended in her direction.

Mako stands, braces her foot against the edge of Raleigh’s boot, helps Geiszler to his feet, then steadies him. 

Raleigh watches her face close down as she realizes the man needs steadying.

Dr. Gottlieb pulls a handkerchief out of a pocket and hands it to Geiszler.

Geiszler presses it to his face. “Maks,” he says, “give a guy a little warning, will you please? I’m less scrappy than my historical baseline and you’re like a sixteenth degree black belt or whatever.”

It takes Raleigh an infinite, fractional second to realize the man is bleeding.

He snaps his gaze to Mako. He tries not to, but he can’t help it.

She’s already looking at him.

He can’t remember if he’s seeking or providing reassurance, but, really, it doesn’t matter because there’s no reassurance to be had; this is the kind of look exchanged by people standing on cracking ice.

Mako’s eyes lock back on Geiszler. “You are sick,” she says, her voice painfully tight. “You should have told me.”

Geiszler does look sick. All the subtle wrongs that Raleigh sees seem new and sudden, even though they aren’t. Geiszler had looked sick since he opened the door—sick and tired and not the right height. Raleigh remembers him as being tall, but that’s because his Drifts with Mako have pried up memories from two childhoods, where Geiszler and Yancy strode through halls and fields and labs and city streets while he struggled to keep up.

“Meh,” Geiszler says with impressive unconcern. “I don’t know about ‘sick,’ Maks. I have a venous plexus in my head that really despises me and a bone marrow in status: compensatory overdrive. My neurologist is on the fence about a possible seizure disorder, but I feel like she’s a counterintuitive alarmist cloaked in a misleadingly laidback demeanor.”

You have no idea, Raleigh wants to say, before he’s even said hello, you have no idea how those Mark One pilots died, do you? But Mako knows; Mako’s seen them. Mako’s walked through hospitals, carrying tissues she didn’t need and watching for other people’s blood. Don’t you die on her, Geiszler. Don’t you dare.

“I’m fine.” Geiszler pulls his handkerchief away from his face.

“May I take your coat, Ms. Mori?” Dr. Gottlieb asks into the tight silence that follows. 

“Yes, thank you.” Mako turns to give the man an informal bow before shrugging out of her coat. “It is very good to see you, Dr. Gottlieb.”

Dr. Gottlieb takes her coat and returns her bow.

“I will make everyone’s lives miserable if you guys don’t cut it out with the honorifics and the excruciatingly high levels of mutual respect,” Geiszler says. 

Dr. Gottlieb shoots Raleigh a long-suffering look.

Raleigh reciprocates with a look of jaded sympathy, because it seems like the thing to do. 

Mako stares at Geiszler, saying nothing.

“Okay,” Geiszler says, with a mildly put-upon sigh. “I can clearly see that you haven’t met your hugging quota, despite literally tackling me, so get in here already, Maks, god. Be normal about it, though.”

Mako hugs him again, this time very carefully.

Raleigh shifts his weight, drops his duffel next to the door, and tries not to feel like a fifth wheel, when he is, in fact, a bona fide fourth wheel. He doesn’t want to be forever on the outside of this dynamic that he knows, that he envies, that’s almost his own but never will be, not quite. 

There’s something about Geiszler that’s intimidating, and it’s not just the inappropriate tattoos and the aggressive deployment of his intellect—he’s got a wild edge that feels dangerous to the side of Raleigh that’s learned to toe the line and that feels like family to the side of him that’s never learned that lesson.

When Mako finally lets him go, Geiszler adjusts his glasses, loses the handkerchief, looks at Raleigh, and says, “Well if it isn’t Captain Sir Saves Everyone. Blown anything up lately?”

Geiszler is a dick sometimes.

But Geiszler is also the guy who let twelve-year old Mako paint his fingernails for practice. Not just once, but every week for a year and a half. Raleigh, in fact, can remember painting his fingernails.

He’ll never get used to this.

“Short Science.” Raleigh extends a hand. When Geiszler takes it, he pulls the man into a hug of his own. He’s missed Geiszler in a strange, confusing blend of the way he misses Yancy, with the hollow chest-ache of unhealed grief, and the way Mako has missed Geiszler, with a regret-tight throat and a frustrated protective streak that colors all her thoughts. 

The man tenses in surprise, then gives Raleigh a solid hug in return. “Drift partner’d,” Geiszler says, in a way that’s not a question.

“Yeah,” Raleigh confirms anyway.

“Mystical connection or no,” Geiszler says, extracting himself from their hug and appropriating Raleigh’s suitcase. “This isn’t gonna be a thing.”

“What’s not gonna be a thing?” Raleigh asks.

“‘Short Science.’ It’s not even witty. You can do better. I believe in you.”

“I can do better.” Raleigh follows Geiszler down a hall toward a darkened bedroom as Dr. Gottlieb offers Mako tea. “I just choose not to.”

“Eh,” Geiszler says. “That’s fair.” 

They stay two weeks. 

Dr. Gottlieb spends his days at UC Berkeley and his nights making dinner and reminiscing with Raleigh about the Jaeger Academy. They discuss the long dark of Alaskan winters, Raleigh’s time on the Wall, and a handful of other experiences they find they have in common—a distaste for public speaking, a love of fast cars and Kraftwerk, a near-spiritual gratitude for gyroscopic stabilizers. Dr. Gottlieb understands Raleigh’s confusion with memories that aren’t his memories—the dead parents he has that aren’t his dead parents, the opinions he holds that surprise him, the way he gets confused looking at gendered things like high-heeled shoes and mascara, not remembering whether they’re for him or not.

Dr. Gottlieb, Raleigh thinks, understands in a way that’s too deep, too extensive, too full of sympathy.

He asks Mako about it early one morning, his arm around her in the gray light.

“Do you think they drifted?” he whispers into her hair.

She tips her chin up towards him. “I think it’s better not to speak of such things.”

It’s answer enough.

Geiszler is harder to talk to. He’s harder because Raleigh wants to be Mako, and he wants Geiszler to be the guy who bought him rollerblades, who taught him to play the bass, who sat through manicures and Blue Planet and pipetted his distracted way through long talks about the secret heart of Skye McLeod, who gave him glitter to throw at Dr. Lightcap and Marshal Pentecost.

At the same time he doesn’t want that, because Geiszler will never be the guy who taught him to drive under a clouded sky, who showed him how to fight and then how to fight dirty, who explained how to kiss a girl and what to do after you’d kissed her, who’d been in his life and in his head right until the moment that he’d died. 

It takes days before he can start to see Geiszler for who he is, rather than who he should and shouldn’t be.

Mako is asleep between them on the couch, Dr. Gottlieb is in bed, and Blue Planet is playing on the television.

“Aw,” Geiszler whispers, when he notices Mako’s asleep. “she’s missing the reef sharks.”

“To the reef sharks.” Raleigh raises his beer.

Geiszler gives him an uneven grin. “And all that they’ve eaten. To dead things everywhere. Dead people, dead friends, dead monsters. Dead enlightenment philosophers. To things that want to die and can’t. To things that think about dying and don’t. To everything that’s dying, which is, in fact, almost everything. To thermodynamic equilibrium. To an ever-expanding universe that will, in the end, freeze down to zero Kelvin.”

“Sure,” Raleigh says. Then, “Must be tiring, being you.”

Geiszler arranges thumb and index finger into something reminiscent of a gun and fires an imaginary, approving shot in Raleigh’s direction. It’s amused and ironic and deeply tired. It matches nothing from Mako’s mental catalogue or Raleigh’s memories of Yancy.

For the moment, Newt Geiszler is just a fellow insomniac with a beer.

“I’m sure it’s so easy to be you though,” Geiszler replies. “So perfectly coiffed all the time. So handsomely American. Always ready to catch some sporting object that might be thrown your way.”

“Handsome?” Raleigh repeats.

“I’m taken.” Geiszler smirks. “And even if I weren’t, I don’t date people without at least one advanced degree. Master’s degrees don’t count.”

“I didn’t even go to college,” Raleigh admits.

“Oh god.” Geiszler’s grin widens and he takes another sip of his beer. “That’s it. Get off my couch. Get off my couch immediately.”

They watch the reef sharks.

Raleigh does not get off the couch. Instead, he says, “We missed you.”

“Aw, kiddo,” Geiszler replies, in a way that makes Raleigh’s eyes hurt; in a way that makes him feel like he’s Mako.

But Mako is asleep, leaning against his shoulder.

“The Marshal was dying,” Raleigh says. “Did you know?”

“Dying?” Geiszler fixes Raleigh with a sharp, wide-awake look. 

“Yeah,” Raleigh says. “Cancer.”

“The Mark Ones,” Geiszler replies, like he’s trying out the idea. “Shit shielding over a shit core.”

“Yeah. I guess. He uh—” Raleigh drags his fingers through the air next to his face, miming a nosebleed. “He didn’t tell me any details. He didn’t tell Mako much either, but he—did a lot of bleeding. The same kind of bleeding you’re doing.”

Geiszler takes a lazy sip of beer, his eyes on the reef sharks. “I was never exposed to any radiation,” he says, pale and exhausted. “It’s not the same.”

“You sure about that?” Raleigh asks.

“I am the sure-est,” Geiszler says. “My neurologist gets nervous about once every two weeks and scans my brain with one imaging modality or another. My entire head, vasculature and all, hates me, and will carry out a vendetta against me for the rest of my life; but I’m not bleeding because there’s a tumor disrupting a blood vessel. That has been ruled out. Do I need to, like, wake Maks up and tell her I’m not dying?”

“Tomorrow’s okay. But mention it, maybe.”

“You are mildly to moderately more thoughtful than you appear,” Geiszler says. “I approve.”

“You are marginally to mildly less of a dick than you appear,” Raleigh replies. “I also approve.”

“Good,” Geiszler replies.

Raleigh spends the days in a haze of growing attachment, driving Dr. Gottlieb’s car, watching Mako paint Geiszler’s nails black for old times’ sake, watching Geiszler draw Dr. Gottlieb into conversations, drinking games, and late-night classic movies, while Dr. Gottlieb calms Geiszler down to the point he can sleep. They have a synchronicity he’s only ever seen in pilots, and the longer he spends with them, the more certain he is that they must have drifted. If it happened only once, it must’ve been a strong one, because Geiszler knows when Dr. Gottlieb’s getting tired, he steals thoughts out from under him, finishes his sentences and steps in to seamlessly complete half-finished tasks. Dr. Gottlieb’s even more attuned to Geiszler, Raleigh thinks, it takes him days to catch the subtleties of all he does because the man is so good at mis- and redirection. He has to see Geiszler nearly panic and Dr. Gottlieb talk him down before he recognizes a more subtle version of that same exchange play out multiple times per day. The more he watches, the more he notices: the way Dr. Gottlieb will shift so Geiszler is forced to look away from the Wall, the way he’ll turn conversations and Geiszler’s train of thought away from the PPDC, the way he picks his battles and the times at which he picks them.

“You know,” Raleigh says to Dr. Gottlieb, when they’re standing on the balcony, watching the sun sink, “sometimes I think I’m more in sync with Mako than she’s in sync with me.”

“Really?” Dr. Gottlieb asks with casual curiosity. “How could you know such a thing to be the case?”

“You sound like Geiszler.” Raleigh glances at him quickly, then away.

“I confess I find his anxious obsession with epistemology extremely charming,” Dr. Gottlieb admits. “Do not tell him I said that.”

“I hear you,” Raleigh replies. “Mako’s afraid of moths. It’s pretty adorable.”

“You were saying?” Dr. Gottlieb prompts.

“The funny thing is,” Raleigh continues, “Yancy used to say the same thing about me. That he could read me like an open book and I could read him like an open pamphlet. He was overstating it some, but I think he might’ve been right.”

“Few pilots have drifted with more than one party,” Dr. Gottlieb studies him, like he’s upping the weight he gives Raleigh’s opinions. “Do you feel there’s an inherent asymmetry to the Drift?”

Raleigh nods. “I look to Mako, but Mako looks out. Out at the world, out for the next threat. I think about surviving, I think about resources, I think about Mako. But Mako? Mako thinks about swords. I’m not sure how well we understand what happens when two brains are forced together. It seems to me like someone looks out while someone looks in.”

“Interesting,” Dr. Gottlieb replies like a guy with volumes to say, not saying any of it.

“I think it has to do with intent and personality and the mental fight that is the initial neural handshake,” Raleigh continues. “When you look at pilot teams, you can tell. You can always tell who looks out and who looks in. Chuck was out. Herc was in. Aleksis was out, Sasha was in. Lightcap was out, D’Onofrio was in. Roles can swap, if partners do, I guess; I’m proof of that. But Mako is always going to be better suited to scanning, to powering a forward drive. She doesn’t think about reserves in the heat of the moment. It’s not who she is.”

“You ought to record some of these observations,” Dr. Gottlieb advises.

Did he just tell you to write a book, kid? Yancy asks from the back of his thoughts.

“Geiszler would be like that, I think,” Raleigh says cautiously. “Like Mako, I mean. Looking out.”

“Dr. Geiszler,” the other man says dryly, “cannot bring himself to kill a wasp, let alone a kaiju. He’s also possessed of a mind that would, I’m certain, ruin a perfectly good stereotactic interface.”

Raleigh looks down at the drink in his hands, more certain than ever that the pair of them have drifted.

“Yeah,” he says, unable to rein himself in. “Drifting with Geiszler? I can’t imagine it. You tried it though. In that alley.”

“We were incompatible,” Dr. Gottlieb says mildly, his eyes on the distant Wall.

“But imagine if you hadn’t been,” Raleigh replies. “What do you think it would have been like?”

“I’m certain it would’ve been quite illuminating. I’m certain I’d have been forced to acknowledge scores of things I’d avoided for spans of years. I’m certain I would have been incapacitated with doubt and indecision and cognitive dissonance for weeks after drifting, because Newton would have had to make an unconventional modification to his interface that locked us into a tighter neural alignment than had ever been previously achieved. I’m certain I’d have been forced to admit that he’s always been less quixotic than clairvoyant. But you know,” Dr. Gottlieb says, swirling the alcohol and ice in his own glass, “I find that I don’t think about that particular hypothetical much at all. There are others that trouble me.”

“Like what?” Raleigh asks.

“I find myself wondering if things might have been different had I not undercut his proposal. Had I advocated for an experimental Drift to proceed but with someone else wearing the interface. I wonder what might have changed had I left Hong Kong with him twenty-four hours earlier. I wonder, of course, what happens to a fraction of a hive mind, left behind, chemically cross-linked, its pieces separated by thousands upon thousands of miles, but all of them still alive, still communicating with one another via an unknown mechanism. I find myself wondering about that quite frequently.”

Raleigh suppresses the urge to shiver. 

Dr. Gottlieb tracks a passing seagull with his gaze.

“Is Geiszler okay?” he asks.

Dr. Gottlieb drops his eyes. “No,” he says. “I don’t think he is.”

Raleigh nods.

“I think perhaps he could be,” the other man adds, “given time and a place to stand.” 

“Well, he’s got that,” Raleigh says. “And he’s got you. I’d say things are looking up.”

Dr. Gottlieb’s expression turns faintly rueful. “Let’s go inside. I detest this view.”

Raleigh’s phone buzzes. He pulls it out to find that Mako has messaged him from a room away.

::Come play Portal, we have cake!::

“I’m supposed to be playing Portal anyway,” Raleigh says, sighing.

“Ah yes,” Dr. Gottlieb replies. “If you let him win, it will be over quickly.” 

“If I let him win,” Raleigh says, “Mako will out me.”

“Then again,” Dr. Gottlieb amends, “you may, in fact, be unable to win.”

Raleigh opens the door to find Portal 3 on the TV. Geiszler holds a controller. Mako sits on her hands next to him in a red sweater, looking excited.

“You said you had cake,” Raleigh says.

Geiszler ruffles Mako’s hair.

Mako gives everyone a pleased look.

“The cake, of course,” Dr. Gottlieb says, sliding the balcony door shut, “is a lie.”

“That’s it.” Raleigh points at Geiszler. “You’re going down, Short Science.”

“Oh you do NOT want to open the trash-talking door, Becket,” Geiszler replies. “I can guarantee you that much.”

“Whoever wins plays me,” Mako announces.

“I’ll be anywhere but here,” Dr. Gottlieb says. “I—”

“No!” Geiszler says. “What? You have to support me. This is your duty. We’re married, secular style.”

“Wait, you’re married?” Raleigh asks.

“Only on paper and in our hearts,” Geiszler clarifies.

Dr. Gottlieb rolls his eyes.

“I think that pretty much covers it,” Raleigh replies.

Mako pries Geiszler’s hand off the controls and swats his wrist with two fingers. “I cannot believe you didn’t tell me this you stupid miserable excuse for a half-brother,” she snaps in rapid Japanese.

“Half-brother?” Raleigh says, also in Japanese.

“Ow,” Geiszler says. “Maks. God. How do you make that sting so much?”

Mako shrugs at Raleigh. Geiszler drags Dr. Gottlieb down onto the couch. 

“Well, um, congrats. To everyone,” Raleigh says.

“Stop stalling,” Geiszler says. “You’ve been avoiding this for days. For days and days. Likely because you correctly assume I’m about to metaphorically wipe the metaphorical floor with actual you.”

Raleigh holds up his controller and reaches over Mako to hit it against the one Geiszler holds. “May the most contemporarily masculine man win,” he says. 

“You realize that in the end, I will win, yes?” Mako asks.

“Yes Maks,” Geiszler replies. “You’re the most contemporarily masculine person here. Congratulations. Don’t be weird about gender roles.”

“Later,” Mako says, “I’ll paint the nails of the losers.”

“Um, I don’t want that.” Raleigh’s eyes are on the screen as he learns the capabilities of the character he’s playing. “Can that not be a thing?”

“Becket, what did I just say?” Geiszler asks, in an annoyingly superior rhetorical style. 

“Don’t lose to me then,” Mako says sweetly.

“Will all of you simply get on with this, please?” Dr. Gottlieb asks. “I have things to do.”

“Go!” Geiszler shouts, activating two-player mode.

Oh it is ON, Yancy says inside his head. This kid doesn’t stand a chance.

In Two Parts

During Portal, Mako shouts in Japanese whenever she wants to shout, whatever she wants to shout, and switches allegiance when she cares to switch allegiance, which is often. She drinks half of Raleigh’s Hibiki. She makes misleading statements. She tries not to be sad.

The first round is a draw.

That’s good.

That’s not sad.

It is not sad at all.

Raleigh has never played Portal. Newt doesn’t play as well as Mako  remembers, but that’s all right, Newt has been doing other things recently and he’s had no time for Portal, not for years, so it doesn’t mean anything. It means nothing at all that Newt should have won and didn’t; it doesn’t mean anything.

For the second round, they swap. Raleigh plays Chell, and Newt plays Chell’s arch-nemesis, Hell. Hell was cloned from cells of Chell, but Hell was raised by GLaDOS. Hell grew up too fast and doesn’t understand who Chell is, nor why Chell pities her so much.

Newt prefers to play as Hell. Mako thinks this is because he prefers to ally himself with GLaDOS and because Dr. Lightcap would only play as Chell. 

“Is it a coincidence,” Raleigh asks, “that the voice of GLaDOS and the voice of the drift interface sound exactly the same?”

“Yes,” Newt replies. “Of course it’s a coincidence. No one would purposefully use the voice of a villainous and morally bankrupt AI in a system that you’re jacking into the top of your brainstem. Why would anyone do that? That’s ridiculous. It sends all the wrong messages.”

“It was you, wasn’t it,” Raleigh says.

“Nah.” Newt makes good use of a Conversion Gel.

“To my endless despair,” Dr. Gottlieb confirms, without looking up from his tablet, “it was indeed him.”

Mako thinks Newt will win this round. It was wise of him not to begin as Hell. He’s given himself a double advantage, arranging things as he has. Raleigh has adapted to the game and easily mastered Chell’s distinct battery of skills but he doesn’t yet realize Newt is significantly more formidable as Hell.

It’s not Mako’s job to tell him.

“Moon dust,” Mako whispers to Newt.

“Mako, I can hear you,” Raleigh says. “Stop helping Geiszler.”

“I’m helping everyone,” Mako replies, watching as Newt avoids the moon dust. “Don’t fall off your cube.”

“Thanks babe,” Raleigh drawls.

“What?” Newt says, and Mako can tell he’s speaking to her, even though his eyes are on the screen. “You’re just going to let him call you ‘babe’?”

“No.” Mako decides she would like Newt to win this round. She reaches over to give Raleigh’s controller a quick shove.

“Mako!” Raleigh barely avoids a Thermal Discouragement Beam.

“Yes,” Mako says. “That is a proper form of address.”

Newt laughs. It doesn’t last long, but it has been a long time since she has heard Newt laugh.

It’s nice.

Newt wins the second round.

Mako takes Raleigh’s controller and spends a few minutes getting to know Chell through the little circuits in her hands, dropping and rolling, creating a practice portal, ducking, running, firing her gun. 

“You let me know when you’re—” Newt begins.

“Go!” Mako starts the game. 

Raleigh cheers for Newt the whole time.

Mako decides that this is fair.

She doesn’t let Newt win, but she lets him keep pace because it is more fun that way. There’s an element of real danger, because Newt is fast with completing the puzzles that will open doors and Mako might hit one that takes her too long to solve.

She might.

But she doesn’t.

She raises her controller in victory. Newt tips his head back, theatrically clutches his chest, and sprawls on top of his former colleague, cracking his head against Dr. Gottlieb’s tablet in the process. Raleigh reaches across her lap to give Newt a commiserating thigh clap while Mako declares, “Nail art for all!” and Dr. Gottlieb tries to see whether Newt is bleeding.

She had a family and she lost them.

She made a new family, and she’ll try not to lose them.

Families change. They grow and shrink as people live and die and leave and join.

She pulls everyone together and takes a picture at a bad angle. 

That’s another thing she wanted. A thing she saw that Raleigh had. A stack of pictures. She has so few. She’ll have more. She’ll have so many. She will have pictures and pictures. She’ll print them so she can hold them. They will fill books. She won’t be sad about the ones she doesn’t have. That she never took. She’ll make sure she takes them, going forward. She’ll pick her favorites and carry them with her like Raleigh does. 

The days she spends in San Francisco are short and go by too fast.

The nights are long. Terrible and wonderful.

She spends them with Newt in the mostly dark, showing him pictures. There are already so many pictures, but he wants to see them all. He’s always wanted to see all the things she’s liked: interesting beetles, nail polish, Blue Planet, drawings she’d made, reports she wrote for different schools in different cities, music she liked. She’d had fewer things to talk about as the years progressed because he didn’t like to talk about how much and how badly she’d wanted to go to the Jaeger Academy, and so they’d talked less and less until that was the only thing she’d wanted and they didn’t talk at all and he had been annoying and she had been angry and they had each almost died like that, but hadn’t.

“This,” she says, her tablet held between them, “is Paris. Paris was my favorite.”

“So boring, Maks, come on,” Newt says. “Lie to me. Didn’t you say you went to Tierra del Fuego? Pretend that was your favorite.”

“That was Raleigh’s favorite.”

“Stop trying to make him seem cool. I’m on to you, y’know.”

Every night she tries to stay awake until Dr. Gottlieb comes to get Newt. Some nights it’s early, other nights it’s late, and sometimes, Mako thinks, maybe Dr. Gottlieb never comes at all because one morning she wakes up on the couch and sees Newt staring out the window at the dark and distant Wall.

When she sits, he glances at her, then back at the horizon.

“Kiddo,” he says. “I’m not dying. You can go sleep with Becket, you know?”

“I don’t think you’re dying,” she lies.

“He told me about the Marshal. About the whole bleeding thing? He said my bleeding thing looks the same, but it’s not.” 

“It’s never the same,” Mako says.

Newt looks away from the Wall in a way that seems physically difficult and leans back against the window, framing himself with gray sky. “You don’t sound ‘reassured,’ Maks. This is me, trying to be reassuring.”

“My real father also had cancer. It’s why we were in Tokyo that day.”

“Oh,” Newt says. “I didn’t know.”

“‘Try not to love an impermanent thing too much’, he said to me,” Mako whispers. 

“The Marshal. Or your biological father?” Newt asks. “Sounds like really terrible advice, by the way.”

“My biological father,” Mako whispers. “I don’t think it was intended as true advice. He certainly didn’t follow it himself. But it was the last real thing he said to me, before he said, ‘Run, Mako’.”

Newt puts his hands in his pockets.

Mako looks down at her own fingernails, painted red.

“You do it correctly, I think,” she says. “You seem like you do it correctly.”

“Maks,” Newt says, sounding choked.

“I do not know, Newt, but I think you must. The way you do it must be the right way, because you love people, but you have an ideal that is not your own love for the sake of itself. Or that love turned to anger. Or that anger turned to vengeance. Or that vengeance turned to grief. I think this is what my father meant. That he meant I shouldn’t fix my life to my love for him. That I should fix it to a craft or to an art or to a science. To a thing that can’t be destroyed when a single person dies.”

“If I’ve done that,” Newt whispers, “if that’s better, and that’s a big if, Maks—I’m not sure I think there’s a ‘better’ or a ‘worse’ here, but if I have and if there is—it was only because I never had any people who would let me love them too much. Don’t make me into a template to follow because I’m the worst template, Mako. You know this about me. Just be yourself for a while, kiddo. Take up knitting or speed-skating or whatever, then find something you want to do career-wise. You’re twenty-two? Go to college, why don’t you? Write a book before Becket writes one. Write a book after Becket writes one and make yours better than his.”

Newt doesn’t understand.

Maybe Newt does understand, but doesn’t want to and won’t say that he does.

That’s a thing Newt would do.

That’s a thing Newt has done.

Don’t tell her she can be a Jaeger pilot, he’d said to Caitlin Lightcap when he thought Mako couldn’t hear.

Why not? Dr. Lightcap had replied. Maybe she can be.

Get out of my lab, Newt had said.

Geiszler, c’mon, Dr. Lightcap had said.

Get out of my lab, Newt had repeated.

Mako has changed, in one instant of neural grappling, more than she’ll ever change again. It was Raleigh, she thinks, Raleigh who calls his grief “grief” and who carries his sorrow quietly, who began to erode her anger. He didn’t do it all at once, but their Drift was strong and his mind works in hers still. But for all she’s changed, for all she will change further, she doesn’t think that, even if she tried, even if she wanted to, she could change herself in this. 

Mako will always love in a deep, wide, quiet swath that makes up too much of who she is.

Mako loves Newt so much. She thinks of him always because she likes to think of the people she loves. She buys things for him and saves things for him because she wants him to see them. She worries about him because he’s not sleeping, because he’s different than he used to be, because she hasn’t seen his tattoos, because he’s so pale, because sometimes when he thinks she’s not looking he’ll drop his head onto Dr. Gottlieb’s shoulder in a way that looks so tired and Dr. Gottlieb will touch his face in a particular way, the same way every time.

So Mako smiles at him and says, “You’re so old.” 

“Finally.” Newt smiles back at her. “I’ve been waiting to be old my whole life.”

Newt takes her on a cab ride around the ruined bay and shows her how to get into the Wall and where the stairs are. They climb up in the dark and Mako is worried because it’s far and high and they have no water and they have no food and Newt is tired.

When they make it to the top, the view is beautiful. Mako can smell the Pacific. It smells different than the Atlantic. It’s wider and wilder and stretches so far so brightly. They sit on the concrete, their feet hanging over the edge, their arms hooked over the lowest horizontal bar of the guardrail, and they look down at the waves that crash along its base.

“Are you kind to Dr. Gottlieb?” Mako asks. “Because I believe he loves you very much. I believe he has loved you for a long time.”

This captures Newt’s attention. He smiles at her like he’s trying not to. “Nah. You think so?” 

“Yes,” Mako says. 

“Impossible,” Newt replies. “It’s a post-drift thing. Er—I mean, like, post my Drift. I almost died, you know, so ah—”

“Yes.” Mako shifts closer and threads her arm through Newt’s arm. “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.”

“Oh god,” Newt says quietly. “I’m sure you do. Do, er, other people know, do you think?”

“All pilots who see you together will know,” Mako whispers close to his ear, over the roar of the surf and the whistle of the wind. “If you appear on national television, behavioral algorithms will create suspicions.”

Newt says nothing.

“So don’t go on television,” Mako whispers. “Don’t see other pilots. You’ll be safe. I will keep you safe. I have the power to do that. Marshal Hansen and Raleigh will help. Dr. Gottlieb’s father has come to like me very much.”

“I’m not worried about me so much, Maks,” Newt says. “But what happened to me can’t happen to Hermann. It would be worse. It would be so. Much. Worse. For him.” 

Mako hooks her chin over Newt’s shoulder, squeezes her eyes shut behind her sunglasses, and gives him a hug. “I will keep both of you safe,” she murmurs. “Both.”

“Not even one time, though, Maks,” Newt replies. “One time is too many.”

“Not even one,” Mako whispers.

Newt nods.

“I’m very dangerous,” Mako says.

“I know.” Newt smiles.

“You may tell me whatever you wish to tell me,” Mako says. 

“Aw, kiddo, well, likewise, y’know,” Newt says.

Neither of them tell anything.

So Mako says, “I don’t agree. I don’t think it was a ‘post-drift thing’.”

“No?” Newt says.

“I believe it was every time that Dr. Lightcap would try to get you to sing and you said no. I believe it was the few times that Dr. Lightcap would try to get you to sing and you said yes.”

“Maks.” Newt tries not to smile. “Get outta here. First of all, the singing doesn’t do it for him. It’s definitely the guitar. Second of all, I’m pretty sure it was the nematocyst incident because he was not wild about the whole Newt-being-impaled thing on a visual level, but he stayed with me. The whole time.”

“Skye McLeod saved you.” Mako smiles at the memory of a handsome child with a bone-saw.

“Mako. I saved me. Skye McLeod just did what I told him to do.” 

“I don’t remember it that way,” Mako replies, even though she does. “You must be kind to Dr. Gottlieb,” she says, picking the thread of her thoughts back up, “because he has worried for you for so long.”

“I know,” Newt replies.

“This is not good. This drive, this far climb. This sitting on the edge of the Wall,” Mako says. “You should get up and turn around. Look over the other side. Toward home.” 

“It’s a thought,” Newt replies.

“It’s more than a thought.” Mako stands and tugs at his jacket. She helps him rise because she doesn’t trust him this close to the edge; he is so tired and he’s not as steady as once he was. They walk across the top and look back, in the other direction, over the cement and the city and Oblivion Bay.

“I find this less satisfying,” Newt says.

“Then it’s time to go.” Mako wants to tell him he should never come back, but it’s not a thing that can be told to him, she thinks.

Later, as she helps Dr. Gottlieb make dinner while Newt and Raleigh walk a block to choose some wine, he asks, “Did he take you to the Wall?”

“Yes,” she says.

Dr. Gottlieb sighs.

“It’s too many stairs for him,” Mako says. “It makes him too tired.”

“It helps him sleep,” Dr. Gottlieb replies. “But, on the whole, I agree with you.” 

Mako nods and begins to slice carrots.

“How does he seem to you?” Dr. Gottlieb asks.

Mako is taken aback at this, because there’s nothing she knows about Newt that Dr. Gottlieb doesn’t know.

“Troubled,” she replies.

Dr. Gottlieb nods in agreement.

They chop vegetables in silence.

“I confess, Ms. Mori, I’m curious about something,” he says.

She meets his gaze, invites his question.

“Had Mr. Becket not been found—was there a contingency plan in place regarding who would pilot the fourth available Jaeger?”

The question surprises her.

“I’m sure there was a plan,” she says. “I wasn’t informed of its particulars. I suspect it involved me.”

“Ah,” Dr. Gottlieb says. “Did you speculate any further?”

She had not. 

But she cannot help thinking of it now. She looks at the carrots she’s sliced to pieces and thinks of the closing of the Jaeger Academy. She’d been one of the last to complete the training program. Her name would have been on a short list. In the absence of an experienced pilot, she had the best scores.

But not by much.

Her eyes slide to Dr. Gottlieb. “You weren’t on Raleigh’s list,” she says, “because his injury mandated Interface Right positioning. You also require Interface Right.”

“The thought had occurred.” Dr. Gottlieb speaks lightly, but he doesn’t look at her. “And if Mr. Becket had not been found?”

“They’d have gone down the list,” Mako says. “I was at the top.”

He nods.

She understands what he wants to know, and she feels a warm glow at how easily the words come. How true they are. “I would have attempted a neural bridge with you prior to interviewing any other candidates.”

“Why on Earth would you do that?” Dr. Gottlieb looks surprised at himself. 

“Because you wanted it so much,” Mako replies. “Too much. I also wanted it too much. I believe that alone would have made us compatible. I’m not sure how strong the bond would’ve been. It’s impossible to know.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Gottlieb says.

“But Newt would never have forgiven me if I’d selected you,” Mako adds. “I think he would have hated me until the day he died.”

“I doubt that, Ms. Mori,” Dr. Gottlieb says. “I doubt that very much.”

“I don’t. I believe he would have hated me for only days. For only days, maybe for only hours because it was during the time I drifted with Raleigh that he drifted with that brain. I believe he would have died in that initial attempt had you not been there to find him. I believe he would have timed his own Drift with any trial we did out of theatrical spite. I believe he would have died, and then I believe we all would have died, piece by piece, scattered into smaller and smaller groups, in helpless rage and grinding fear. You should call me Mako.”

Dr. Gottlieb looks at her with raised eyebrows.

There is a silence.

“I shall certainly do so,” he says. “Please, call me Hermann.”

“Newt will be so happy,” Mako says.

“Insufferably so,” Hermann replies.

“You’re helping him,” Mako says. “He’s not making it too hard for you?”

“No.” Hermann looks at the sink. “I manage that well enough on my own. Newton remains himself, and I’ve mostly ceased to find that genuinely trying.”

“Yes.” Mako smiles a small smile and lays aside her knife. “We would have been compatible. I am sure.”

“I cannot imagine a higher compliment.” Hermann gives her an informal bow.

She returns it, touched by the gesture.

“I didn’t know,” she says. “I didn’t know what had happened until it was too late. I’m so sorry for the manner in which you left Hong Kong.”

“I apologize for not writing to you,” Hermann replies. “I fear you suffered undue distress because I failed to adequately apprise you of what was happening. I wasn’t certain—I was anxious myself of communicating too much or too little, and he—he genuinely could not write to you; he was pushed past his ability to cope. He’s a terribly resilient person but I thought it might be too much for him, I thought he might not recover, he hasn’t recovered fully, he may never recover fully; you’ve seen how he is, the way he looks at that thing across the bay, how much he’s bleeding; I don’t understand it. His EEG is not normal and it’s stopped normalizing and there are other things; things I can’t explain, things I only suspect—”

Mako takes his hands and holds them. She nods, clutching his fingers. “What things?” she whispers. “You may tell me what things.”

He looks pained. He looks like he might tell her.

She waits, but he says nothing.

A key grinds into a lock. Mako drops his hands and steps back.

They let the moment pass, but that, too, is a kind of promise. 

“Next time he takes you somewhere,” Hermann says, turning back to the stove, “try to get him to show you the lab he’s supposed to be equipping rather than the Wall.” 

Mako nods. 

She spreads a suitcase worth of gifts over the span of two weeks so that it doesn’t seem like too much—art and articles and alcohol and glassware and vac-packed snacks from everywhere she’s been, ties and t-shirts and books and pens and tatami zori and fancy hashi and a wind chime made of shells. She doesn’t give them these things, she just puts the books in the bookshelf and the zori in the closet and the hashi in the kitchen and the shirts in their shared room and the alcohol in the cabinet and the glassware and snacks in the kitchen and the articles on the coffee table and the wind chime on the balcony because she’s brought them too many things and not enough things at all.

She’ll get their belongings from Hong Kong.

She’ll go back to the Shatterdome and she’ll neatly pack Dr. Gottlieb’s items and she’ll see if Newt’s things are full of mold, and if they aren’t she’ll pack those as well and she’ll ship them. She won’t ship Newt’s guitar, she’ll bring it back when she comes, because she’ll come back soon.

The morning before she leaves, her phone wakes her with a slow rise of streaming music. She listens to all of Dreaming Correctly while Raleigh does sets of pushups on the floor. It’s long and eerie. As she listens, she thinks that he must have meant it as a love letter to a civilization examining its own end. It already makes her miss Newt, even though she hasn’t yet left San Francisco. 

When Mako leaves her room, she finds them standing together at the window in the gray light of early morning. Newt is looking at the Wall. Hermann stands at his back, his arms around Newt’s shoulders. They frighten Mako there in the dim light. They look like they’re listening to things she can’t hear. Newt’s gaze is too fierce and too hot for a silent room and a distant vista; there’s too much unity in Hermann’s stance. She thinks they’re thinking the same thing. She thinks she doesn’t like what they’re thinking.

Thoughts can kill.

It was Dr. Lightcap who turned intent into victory.

It was Dr. Lightcap who turned intent into death.

Thoughts have almost killed Mako.

And Mako has killed with her thoughts.

She knows then, looking at them, that it will be hard for Newt to go to Berkeley and to study neuroscience. It will be so hard for him to do it that it might be impossible. It will be difficult for Hermann to hold him to the confines of a normal life because Newt has never had that. He’s never lived like this before, trying to sleep when he’s supposed to sleep, trying to eat when he’s supposed to eat, trying not to lose himself in what he’s doing, always saying no to what he doesn’t want to want. 

They turn and see her.

Hermann steps back. Newt smiles.

Mako doesn’t smile. “What were you thinking of?” she asks.

“Oh y’know,” Newt says. “The usual. Insanity. Vivisection. Death. Dopamine. Breakfast.”

Hermann looks away and closes a hand on Newt’s shoulder. He walks into the kitchen, leaving them alone.

“I was serious,” Mako says.

Newt’s expression changes into something else and back again, a break too fast for Mako to decide what was written on his face—whether it was grief or pain or, maybe, despair.

She knows then that he was serious too.

They look at each other and when he starts to bleed she doesn’t cry and she doesn’t look away. She hands him a tissue. 

“What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?” Newt whispers.

She has no answer for him.