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: Witching hour.

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 while scanning the streets for cameras and reporters.

He doesn’t see any.

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

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

“Did you see any?” Mako asks, very quietly, in Japanese as they pull their luggage out of the back of the cab.

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

Mako makes a face at him, cocking her head to the side and briefly sticking out her tongue as she shoulders her bag and slams the trunk of the cab closed. 

They stand, hesitating in the rain for only a few seconds, 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 says, in English, studying 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 pre-arranged code, walk through a windowed lobby, and step into an elevator.

Raleigh pulls his hood back. He watches as Mako removes her scarf and sunglasses, runs hands over her hair, and then stares impassively at the elevator door.

Her fear is his fear.

Her dread is his dread.

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

She looks at him.

“You look good,” he says.

She smiles. 

He smiles back at her.

“What if—” she whispers.

“What if?” Raleigh echoes, equally quietly, when it seems that she isn’t going to finish. “So what.” He hopes that his nonsense words encompass all that 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 at him again.

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

He hopes it because he’d hope that 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, in his dreams, Yancy turns dark-haired and snarky and soon enough it’s Geiszler that 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 sometimes, 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 are closed around the strap of her bag. Raleigh rolls their suitcase noiselessly over a floor that’s gray and made of something synthesized. 

They stop in front of the door.

Mako looks up 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 rock star and Raleigh can’t decide if he wants to punch the guy or give him a hug. 

“Oh,” Geiszler says, feigning 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 is no pity in a Category Five Mako Mori hug, so she doesn’t stabilize him; she just lets him drag her down. The only help she gives him is the quick shift of her right hand from a cross shoulder grip to come up behind 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 just 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 whole thing happening on the floor, and extends his hand to Raleigh.

“Mr. Becket,” he says.

“Dr. Gottlieb,” Raleigh replies, shaking his hand. 

“Such formalities are hardly necessary,” Dr. Gottlieb says, waving a hand in a manner that is significantly 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, rocking back on her heels, wiping her eyes. 

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

Mako steps back, braces her foot against the edge of Raleigh’s boot, helps Geiszler to his feet in a rapid pull, and then steadies him. 

Raleigh watches her face close down into neutrality as she realizes that 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 slightly less scrappy than my historical baseline and you’re like a sixteenth degree black belt or whatever it is that you are.”

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

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

She looks back 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.

Her 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 now 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 recent 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 somewhere 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 little bit of 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 says again, pulling his handkerchief away from his face.

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

“Yes, thank you,” Mako whispers, and 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 literally 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 total 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 have not yet met your hugging quota, despite literally tackling me, so get in here already, Maks, god.”

Mako hugs him again, this time very carefully.

Raleigh shifts his weight, drops his shoulder bag 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 is 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 tow 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 year and a half. Raleigh, in fact, can remember painting his fingernails.

He will literally never get used to this.

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

The guy tenses in apparent surprise, but then gives Raleigh a solid, Geiszler-style hug in return, saying “drift parnter’d,” like it isn’t even a question. 

“Yeah,” Raleigh confirms anyway.

“Mystical drift connection or no,” Geiszler says, extracting himself from their hug, and appropriating Raleigh’s suitcase. “This is not going to be a thing.”

“What’s not going to 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 says, following Geiszler down a hall toward a darkened bedroom as Dr. Gottlieb offers Mako some tea, “I just choose not to.”

“Eh,” Geiszler says. “That’s fair.” 

They stay two weeks. 

Dr. Gottlieb spends his days at UC Berkeley, his nights making dinner and reminiscing with Raleigh about the Jaeger Academy, 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 gratefulness for gyroscopic stabilizers. Dr. Gottlieb seems to understand Raleigh’s confusion with memories that are not 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 is too deep, too extensive, too full of total 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 head up towards him and whispers back, “I think it is better not to speak of such things,” she replies.

That is answer enough.

Geiszler is more difficult 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 base, 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. But 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 him a few days before he can begin see Geiszler for who he is rather than who he should or shouldn’t be.

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

“Aw,” Geiszler whispers. “She’s missing the reef sharks.”

“To the reef sharks,” Raleigh says, raising his beer.

Geiszler gives him an uneven grin. “And all that they’ve eaten,” he says. “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 is 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.”

“It seems like it would be exhausting to be you,” Raleigh says.

Geiszler arranges thumb and index finger into something reminiscent of a gun and fires a metaphorical shot in Raleigh’s general direction. There is something about that silent acknowledgement that is amused and ironic and deeply tired and that matches nothing from Mako’s mental catalogue or from Raleigh’s own memories of Yancy. For the moment, Geiszler is just a fellow insomniac with a beer who has, however briefly, stopped letting down some part of his perpetual front.

“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 kind of sporting object that might be thrown your way. 

“Handsome?” Raleigh repeats.

“I am taken,” Geiszler replies. “And even if I weren’t, I don’t date people without at least one advanced degree. Masters degrees don’t count.”

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

“Oh my god,” Geiszler whispers, his eyes half shut as 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 he’s not Mako. 

Mako is asleep, leaning against his shoulder.

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

“Dying?” Geiszler says, almost too loud, but not quite, his eyes snapping open as he fixes Raleigh with a sharp, wide-awake look. 

“Yeah,” Raleigh whispers. “Cancer.”

“The Mark Ones,” Geiszler replies. “Shit shielding over a shit core.”

“Yeah. I guess. He ah—” Raleigh says, dragging his fingers through the air next to his face. “He didn’t tell me any details. He didn’t tell Mako much either, but he—did a lot of bleeding. Specifically? The same kind of bleeding that 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 vicious 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 acutely dying?”

“Tomorrow is probably okay. But mention it, maybe,” Raleigh says.

“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 gently draw Dr. Gottlieb into conversations, drinking games, and late-night classic movies, while Dr. Gottlieb occasionally calms Geiszler down to the point that he can sleep. They have a synchronicity he’s only ever seen in pilots, and the longer that he spends with them the more certain he is that they must have drifted and that if it happened only once it must have been a strong one, because Geiszler knows when Dr. Gottlieb’s getting tired, he steals thoughts right 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 for Geiszler because the man is so good at mis- and re-direction. 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 that Dr. Gottlieb will shift his position so that Geiszler is forced to look away from the Wall he so often stares at, the way he will 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 are standing on the balcony, watching the sun go down, “sometimes I think I’m more in sync with Mako than she’s in sync with me.”

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

“You sound like Geiszler,” Raleigh says, glancing at him quickly and then away.

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

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

“You were saying,” Dr. Gottlieb prompts him.

“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 have been right.”

“You are one of the only pilots who has ever drifted with more than one party,” Dr. Gottlieb says. “Would you say that you feel that there is an inherent asymmetry to the drift?”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Raleigh replies. “But it felt like, it still feels like—I look to Mako, while Mako looks out. Out at the world, out for the next threat. I think about bringing everything together. I think about surviving, I think about resources, I think about Mako. While Mako. Mako thinks about swords. And I see that, and I feel like I’ve lived this partnership from the other side. I don’t just feel it. I know it. Despite what the interface techs and the science guys will tell you, I’m not sure how well we really understand what happens when two brains are forced together. And it seems to me like someone looks out while someone looks in.”

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

“I think its has to with intent and personality and pre-existing feelings, and the mental fight that is the initial neural handshake,” Raleigh continues. “I feel like when you look at pilot teams, you can tell. You can always tell who looks out and who looks in. Chuck was out and Herc was in. Aleksis was out, Sasha was in. Lightcap was out, D’onofrio was in. The Weis had their own thing going. Different people, different drifts; those roles can swap, I guess, but I’m not sure how often they do. How often they would. Mako is always going to be better suited for external scanning, for powering a forward drive, than for internal systems monitoring. She doesn’t think about reserves in the heat of the moment. It’s just not who she is.”

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

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 even bring himself to kill a wasp, let alone a kaiju. He’s also possessed of a mind that would, I’m certain, manage to 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 even imagine it. You tried it though. In that alley.”

“We were incompatible,” Dr. Gottlieb says mildly, looking at 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 have been quite illuminating. I’m certain I would have been forced to acknowledge scores of things I had avoided confronting for spans of years. I’m certain I would have been nearly incapacitated with doubt and indecision and unpleasant cognitive dissonance for weeks post-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 that I would have been forced to admit that he has 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 drift proposal. Had I advocated for it 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 an hive mind, left behind when a transdimensional portal has been shut, chemically cross-linked, its pieces separated by thousands and 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.”

“Yeah,” Raleigh says, suppressing 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 that, 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 turns to look at him, his expression faintly rueful. “Let’s go inside. I detest this view.”

Raleigh can see why he would.

His phone buzzes. He pulls it out of his pocket and finds 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 displayed across the TV, Geiszler holding a controller, Mako sitting on her hands next to him in a red sweater set, looking excited.

“You said you had cake,” Raleigh says to Mako.

Geiszler reaches over to ruffle 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 says, pointing at Geiszler. “You are 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 will be anywhere but here,” Dr. Gottlieb says. “I—”

“No,” Geiszler says, “what? You have to support me. This is your duty. We are 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 pulls Geiszler’s right hand off the controls and swats his wrist with two fingers. “I cannot believe that 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 as 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 that I am 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 that Geiszler holds. “May the most contemporarily masculine man win,” Raleigh says. 

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

“Yes Maks,” Geiszler replies. “You are the most contemporarily masculine person here. Everyone knows this. Don’t be weird about gender roles.”

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

“Um, I don’t really want that,” Raleigh says, his eyes on the screen as he learns the capabilities of this 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.

“Go,” Geiszler shouts, abruptly starting 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 allegiances when she cares to switch allegiances, which is often. She drinks half of Raleigh’s Hibiki and she makes misleading statements and she tries not to be sad.

The first round is a draw.

That is good.

That is not sad.

It is not sad at all.

But Raleigh has never played Portal and Newt does not play it as well as she remembers, but that is all right, Newt has been doing other things recently and he has had no time for Portal, not for years, and so it does not mean anything. It means nothing at all that Newt should have won and did not; it does not 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 does not understand who Chell is, nor why Chell pities her so much.

Newt prefers to play as Hell. Mako thinks that 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 right 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 replies, making 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 has 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 does not yet realize Newt is significantly more formidable as Hell.

It is 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 says, deciding that she would like Newt to win this round. She reaches over to give Raleigh’s controller a quick shove.

“Mako,” Raleigh shouts, as he barely avoids a Thermal Discouragement Beam.

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

Newt laughs. It does not last long, but it has been a long time since she has heard Newt laugh, and it is 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 shouts, starting the game. 

Raleigh cheers for Newt the entire time.

Mako decides that this is fair.

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

She might.

But she doesn’t.

She raises her controller in victory while Newt tips his head back, theatrically clutches his chest, and sprawls mostly 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 determine whether Newt is bleeding.

She had a family and she lost them.

She made a family and she will 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 is another thing that she wanted. A thing she saw that Raleigh had. A stack of pictures. She has so few. She will have more. She will have so many. She will have pictures and pictures. She will print them so that she can hold them and they will fill books. She will not be sad about the ones she doesn’t have. That she didn’t take. She will just make sure that she has them, going forward. She will 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 she has taken. 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 over the course of her life, interesting beetles, nail polish, Blue Planet, pictures she’s drawn, reports she wrote for different schools in different cities, music that she liked; but she’d had fewer things to talk about as the years progressed and 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 so they hadn’t talked 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 predictable, Maks, come on,” Newt says. “At least lie to me. Didn’t you say that 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, you know.”

Every night she tries to stay awake until Dr. Gottlieb comes to get Newt. Some nights it is early, other nights it is 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 up, he glances at her and 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 is never the same,” Mako says.

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

“My real father also had cancer. That is 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 do not think it was intended as true advice. He certainly did not 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 the fingernails she has 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 simply 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 sometimes that this is what my father meant. That he meant I should not 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 cannot 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. Not because I made an enlightened choice about anything. Don’t make me into any kind of template to follow because I am the worst template, Mako. You know this about me. Just be yourself for a while kiddo. Take up knitting or speed skating or whatever and 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 does not understand.

Maybe Newt does understand, but does not want to and will not say that he does.

That is a thing that Newt would do.

That is a thing that 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, don’t be a dick, Dr. Lightcap had said.

Get out of my lab, Newt had said.

Mako has changed, in one instant of neural grappling, more than she will ever change again. It was Raleigh, she thinks, Raleigh who calls his grief ‘grief’ and who carries his grief quietly, who began to erode her anger. He did not do it all at once, but their drift was strong and his mind works in hers still. But for all she has changed, for all she will change further, she does not 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 is not sleeping, because he is different than he used to be, because she has not seen his tattoos, because he is so pale, because sometimes when he thinks she is not looking he will 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 says, smiling back at her. “I’ve been waiting to be old for my entire 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 is far and high and they have no water and they have no food and Newt is very tired. But when they make it to the top, the view is beautiful and Mako can smell the Pacific. It smells different than the Atlantic. It is 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, and he looks away from the horizon and smiles at her like he is 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 says, shifting closer and threading her arm around 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, very 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 be performed that will create suspicions.”

Newt says nothing.

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

“I’m not worried about me so much, Maks,” Newt whispers. “But what happened to me can’t happen to him. It will be worse. It will 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 of you.”

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

“Not even one,” Mako whispers, shaking him gently.

Newt nods.

“I am very dangerous,” Mako says.

“I know,” Newt replies, smiling faintly.

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

“Aw kiddo, well, likewise, you know,” Newt says.

Neither of them tell anything.

So Mako says, “I do not agree with you. I do not think it was a ‘post-drift thing’.”

“No?” Newt says, in a way that implies that he does not think that either.

“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 says, “get out of 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 entire time.”

“Skye McLeod saved you,” Mako says, smiling 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 do not 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 must get up and turn around and look over the other side, toward home.” 

“It’s a thought,” Newt replies.

“It is not a thought,” Mako says, standing and then pulling insistently at his jacket. She helps him rise because she does not trust him this close to the edge; he is so tired and she knows he is 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 is time to go,” Mako replies. She wants to tell him that he should never come back, but that is not a thing that can be told to him, she thinks.

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

“Yes,” she says.

Dr. Gottlieb sighs.

“It is too many stairs for him right now,” Mako says. “It makes him too tired.”

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

Mako nods and begins to slice up carrots.

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

Mako is taken aback at this, because there is certainly nothing she knows about Newt that Dr. Gottlieb does not know.

“Troubled,” she replies.

Dr. Gottlieb nods in agreement.

They chop vegetables in silence.

“I confess Ms. Mori, that I am curious about something,” he says.

She looks over at him an inviting manner.

“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 am certain there was such a plan,” she says. “But I was not informed of its particulars. I suspect that this was because it involved me.”

“Ah,” Dr. Gottlieb says. “Did you speculate regarding of what such a plan might have consisted?

She had not. 

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

If there had been no Raleigh, whom would she have chosen as a potential partner for Mako Mori?

Her eyes slide back to Dr. Gottlieb as she realizes what he means by his question.

He does not look at her.

“You were not on Raleigh’s list,” she says, “because his previous injury mandated Interface Right positioning. You also require Interface Right. Had a pilot with no positional requirements been selected, I would have put you on the candidate list. Had I been the selected pilot,” she continues, “I would have attempted a neural bridge with you prior to interviewing any other candidates.”

“Why on earth would you do that?” Dr. Gottlieb asks. He 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 drift compatible. I am not sure how strong the bond would have been. It is impossible to know.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Gottlieb says.

“I think that Newt would not have forgiven me if I had selected you,” Mako says. “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 do not. I believe that 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 attempt 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 pleased,” Mako says.

“Insufferably so,” Hermann replies.

“You are helping him,” Mako says. “He is not making it too hard for you?”

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

This answer pleases Mako.

“Yes,” she says smiling a small smile, laying aside her knife. “We would have been drift compatible. I am sure.”

“I cannot imagine a higher compliment,” Hermann says, giving her an informal bow.

She returns it, touched by the gesture.

“I did not know,” she says. “I did not know what had happened until was too late. I am 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 did not adequately apprise you of what was happening, but 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 entirely past his ability to cope. He is a terribly resilient person but I thought it might be too much for him, I thought he might not recover, he has not recovered fully, he may never recover fully; you have seen how he is, the way he looks at that thing across the bay, how much he’s bleeding; I don’t understand that. 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 in the space between them and nods at him, clutching his fingers tightly.

“What things?” she says. “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 and 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 is supposed to be equipping rather than the Wall.” 

Mako nods. 

She spreads an entire suitcase worth of gifts over the span of two weeks so that it does not 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 has brought them too many things and not enough things at all.

She will get their belongings from Hong Kong.

She will go back to the shatterdome and she will neatly pack Dr. Gottlieb’s items and she will see if Newt’s things are full of mold and if they are not she will pack those as well and she will ship them. She will not ship Newt’s guitar, she will bring that back with her when she comes, because she will come back soon.

The morning before she leaves, her phone wakes her with a slow rise of streaming music. She listens to all ofDreaming Correctly while Raleigh is doing sets of pushups on the floor. It is long and it is eerie and, 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 has not 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 and Hermann is standing at his back, his arms around Newt’s shoulders. They frighten Mako there, in the dim light. They look like they are listening to things that she cannot hear. Newt’s gaze is too fierce and too hot for a silent room and a distant vista; there is too much unity in Hermann’s stance. She thinks that they are thinking the same thing. She thinks she doesn’t like what they are 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 has never lived like this before, trying to sleep when he is supposed to sleep, trying to eat when he is supposed to eat, trying not to lose himself in what he is doing, always saying no to what he does not want to want. 

They turn and they see her.

Hermann steps back, and Newt smiles at her.

Mako does not smile. “What were you thinking of?” she whispers.

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

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

“I was serious,” Mako says.Newt’s expression changes into something else and back again in 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 does not cry and she does not look away. She hands him a tissue. 

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

She does not have an answer for him.