Chasing the Rabbit; Pacific Rim, Mako Mori/Raleigh Becket, PG13
Chasing the Rabbit
Mako Mori/Raleigh Becket, Pacific Rim
Oh, we said our dreams will carry us
And if they don’t fly we will run
It’s something of a cheat, Mako realizes, like falling in love in reverse. The chemical response her brain undergoes whenever Raleigh is close overrides what logic tells her is a trick of memory. They are ghosts of experience, haunting her dreams in light and shadow. Nothing is practiced or earned like this; there are no quiet secrets unearthed through time and patience, no bridges built across narrow channels or borders established through implicit trust. That scares her at first, like any loss of control or break in the orderly arrangement of her small and efficient universe. Eventually, this begins to change.
Her hands tell her how his bare back feels when he’s leaning over her to press their lips together. She knows the way his spine arcs and his shoulder blades jut under the thin skin, the way he easy smiles just before their mouths touch. The way he tastes after he’s tasted her. It’s not something she can unlearn, no matter how she rationalizes it. Sensory memories make new neural pathways, file themselves away in quiet places for quick recall. The sight of his neck when he turns to look away from her makes the edges of her lips tingle. Rain makes her think of smoke, smoke makes her think of night, night makes her think of his arms around her. Tight like Raleigh would never let her go.
Somewhere, while her memories collide with his in a glimmer of neurons and synapses, the distinction loses all meaning. Over time nothing about this scares her anymore.
--
The first time they have sex, it was complicated and strained and imperfect. She had just buried her father on a clear afternoon and his old house was still warm with her memories of him. After the wake, and hours spent accepting condolences and best wishes, the house was quiet. Only Raleigh was left; she didn’t ask him to stay but he knew better than to leave. It wasn’t quite dark yet and already she was feeling haunted in a way she couldn’t articulate. Raleigh knew that look in her eye like he knew the back of his hand, and made himself useful clearing the dishes from the sink.
They were standing in the kitchen, talking about nothing in particular when it got suddenly quiet. She didn’t need any more quiet and leaned in to kiss him instead of talking, getting on the balls of her feet to reach his mouth. He stiffened up like he knew better, like he wanted to do better. Eventually he gave in to the softness of her mouth, the dip of her tongue, closing his hands around her face to kiss her like she knew he’d been thinking of since they first met in the rain.
Down the hall and up the stairs to the guest room that Raleigh was supposed to sleep in, because her childhood bedroom was too tangled up in other memories for that. There she tugged his belt open and his trousers down, straddling him on the foot of the bed, watching him watch her. Watching him pull her underwear to her knees and push her skirt up to her waist, watching him enter her. The sex was fleeting and ragged, her arms tight around his neck, knees tight around his hips as she leveraged herself up and down in his lap. She murmured broken things against his mouth, language unraveling into fragments and sighs. He caught them, each of them, taking them in like air as he held her against him until orgasm caught her in its sharp and sudden grip.
When she could hold herself up again he maneuvered them over, laid her out across the mattress, kissing her face and neck. Tangling their hands together where they rested above her head, he rocked into her for a few more frantic moments before finally emptying into the condom he barely remembered to put on. They spent the night curled into each other, on the little bed in the guest room of her father’s silent house. It was the closest they had been since the last time they drifted together, when they closed the rift and ended the war and they shared more than just memories. In the morning they didn’t talk about it. Drinking coffee on opposite sides of the kitchen, separated by more than the island counter between them, it just seemed easier that way.
--
Drifting, she knows, is as emotional as it is physical. It has as much to do with brain waves as it does blood types, personalities and genetic makeup. This is why siblings made some of the best pilots. They already shared so much before ever setting foot in a simulation pod that synching up was easy as breathing. But families, that makes sense. Brothers and sisters, parents and children, sharing memories and compatible traits, thoughts and intents. It makes them into something far beyond what they could be apart.
Then to put virtual strangers through the same training, the same trial runs, simulations and tests, that gets tricky. That puts someone else in your head. It gives them access to your memories, to your private thoughts, and you theirs. It’s compromising; it changes the shape of everything. Whatever connections that could have been made in the natural world are accelerated, their affects amplified, blown out. It becomes deafening, all-consuming. The drift is silence like that.
--
“Some people just…belong to each other,” Raleigh said of the drift once. Casually, in that disposable way that he did, like nothing he said mattered to anyone. “Like family.”
“People don’t belong to each other,” Mako argued, if only half-heartedly. “People just are. Whatever happens between them, happens.”
“People are never just anything.”
He said that instead of the other thing. The other thing had a lot of loaded implications and made everything bigger than it might have been on its own. So he said that, and she let it rest.
--
Anything she may or may not have felt before Raleigh was inside her head pales in comparison to the bone-deep way she can feel him there now. The physical connection is the only thing left, the lightning rod that that let her catch that sensation again. To catch fire from the inside out, like being in the drift again. To share thoughts and breath and will, like a single shaft of light coming through the cloud line.
At first it’s the fire she thinks she missed. Eventually she sees that was just a means to an end.
--
Things changed, but they always did. Eventually Mako moved to Tokyo and Raleigh drifted off into the post-war restoration efforts. If she had told him to stay that morning, he probably would have followed. Something about that didn’t seem fair at the time, to decide that he was hers to tell anything. In Tokyo she was the project leader of a team of forty, overseeing the development of five prototype defense systems adapted from the various applications of the now-defunct Jaeger program. Like every other engineer left standing, she was absorbed into other initiatives and divisions while proposals were assessed and budgets were recalibrated. There was always work to be done. Research to conduct, data to collect, big ideas to chase down in fending off other teams for the security of government contracts. That was the world she was used to.
Raleigh, however, was just a civilian again. Turned back out into the world, no marching orders to fall back on or a coastal wall waiting for him back in Alaska. He was only ever really good at destroying things; he got good enough at building them just to scrape out an honest living. After the last attacks in Sydney and Hong Kong at the end of the war, the restoration crews both regionally and abroad were stretched thin. Even with the influx of laborers coming off the scrapped Coastal Wall project, every extra hand on deck meant lives could return to normal that much faster. The work kept him busy, moving around between sites wherever crews needed the most help. More than that, it just gave him something to do. After all, when you’re waiting for the world to end, you get out of the habit of making plans.
They had been keeping in touch for months, through letters and emails, postcards and photos. She wrote him about work and life, and coming back on familiar soil after years of being so far from home. About how her tiny windowless office atop three floors of R&D was her ocean of calm. He wrote her about the road and the job, about moving from site to site. The hole-in-the-wall bars he found wandering around Sydney at night and feeling lucky enough to watch Hong Kong put itself back together again. They didn’t talk about much. It was nice. It was easy.
--
It’s the most peculiar things about Raleigh Becket that stick out in Mako’s mind, even when the distance between them is so vast and unknowable. She knows all of the old songs his father used to play on the radio when Raleigh and Yancy were boys, how he’s good at fixing cars even though he doesn’t own one. She knows he’s had his heart broken by girls he doesn’t like to name but that he’s never really been in love. She knows how he used to get into fights as a kid, how Yancy was always there to bail him out of trouble, and how Yancy is still in his head like a waking dream, a part of his brother leftover from the drift.
Sometimes she wonders if what Stacker said was true. That he’s still out there, or whether it’s just a part of her that lingers in the ether instead. Maybe they each leave a part of themselves behind there, waiting to be swept up in an unseen ocean. Maybe that’s how families are forged in the drift.
--
The second time they have sex was in the summer, six months after the war ended. She came back to Hong Kong for a conference; he had a few days off from a six-week job putting most of Causeway Bay back together. He dropped her an email the week before to tell her that he had a leave coming up that coincided with her trip, and it all seemed fortuitous. It made packing that much less tedious, the flight into Hong Kong that much faster. The air that much lighter, like she was going to float away if she let her concentration slip.
Mako got off the plane, took a cab to the hotel, changed. Barely had time to catch her breath before she got back into a cab bound for the address he gave her, written on a napkin and dropped into her pocket. She found him at a little bar tucked away in a part of town she hadn’t seen before, the streets mostly quiet on a Tuesday night. He was waiting for her outside, hands in his jacket pockets, looking almost exactly the same as she remembered. Looking like he knew how stupid it must have looked, like he was half-afraid she wouldn’t show.
She smiled. “Hi.”
He straightened up. “Hey.”
Her eyes flicked over him, head-to-toe. She wasn’t subtle about it. “You look good.”
He laughed at that. “Why do I feel like we’ve had this conversation before?”
Inside they sat down at the long backlit bar and ordered dark beers in tall bottles. She swayed slightly on her bar stool, her feet not quite reaching the ground. He told her all about where he’d been staying and the people he’d met. The things he’d been up to in what little spare time he had, like reading the books she sent him when she realized her new apartment was too small for all of her bookshelves. She told him all about how Tokyo changed since she was last there as a child, visiting relatives with her parents, and how the city seemed to get smaller and smaller. Eventually the conversation drifted, the way their conversations always did, to other things.
“So I guess this is it, huh?” he asked with a shrug and a sort-of smile. “This is the real world.”
She shrugged in turn, pulling her sweater tighter to herself. “It’s what we wanted. Otherwise all of this was for nothing.”
If anyone else had said that to her, she would have been angry. She watched too many good people die, buried too many empty caskets. But Raleigh, he knew that as well as she did.
“You know, I barely a remember a time before the Kaiju. It’s been such a part of my life since I was a teenager, sometimes I don’t remember what life’s supposed to be like. It’s like - ” He shook his head, looked at the television above the bar, looked at anything but her. “It’s like I’m lost, you know?”
“This was all I ever knew for so long.” The alcohol warming her fingers and toes made it easy to let that truth slide between them. “I’m still learning what to do without it.”
“Yeah,” he sort-of smiled again. “That makes two of us.”
She wanted to tell him what it was like to realize that almost everyone ever she knew was dead. That the closest to feeling complete was having him in her head, under her skin, breathing her memories like smoke. It was pointless to tell him everything he already knew. Instead she followed him back to the tiny apartment he was renting, followed him to his bedroom. To undress him in that slow and careful way she always wanted, to kiss every inch of him, to make love in the dark like everybody else did. After that she forgot about the hotel room across the city and spent her nights there, in his small bed with her books on his shelves and her clothes on his floor. Listening to him tell her stories she already knew, from memories she could still see whenever she closed her eyes.
--
The drift can do a lot of things. It can make memories flesh, trick bones into thinking the shapes they recall are their own design. Make hands want things they can’t have, arms empty of things they never held. Whether she could have loved him without the drift doesn’t make any difference now, in the face of things. She fell in love with him there, like falling down a rabbit hole into something bigger and more complicated than she realized. Memory blurs in the spaces between electricity and reality, the tactile and the dreamed, where he ends and she begins.
Maybe, she realizes, she never had a chance. Maybe people just belong to each other. Maybe it’s all written in the drift, waiting for her to see it.
--
Mako left Hong Kong on a Friday morning, bound for Tokyo on the first flight out. If she thought about it long enough she could still feel her mouth tingling at the edges, her whole body warmed by the memory of his hands on her. Her work demanded her attention again; at home she unpacked her bags and tried not to dwell on such things. They only made everything worse, made it more tangled up than it needed to be. He told her that he would visit her the first chance he got, that he would spend the week with her, that they could figure things out from there. She trusted him; then again, trust was never a problem they had.
On Monday morning the knock at the door startled her, pulling her from her coffee in the kitchen to look through the peephole outside. Raleigh was in her hallway, hands in his pockets, looking stupid again. She pulled the door open. He took a deep breath like he’d been practicing this.
“I know what I said before,” was the only declaration he could muster. “I had a change of plans.”
She leaned against the door. “What took you so long?”
He smirked. “I got lost after I left the airport.”
That wasn’t really her question and that wasn’t really his answer. But, like most things between them, it didn’t need to be said.
Mako Mori/Raleigh Becket, Pacific Rim
Oh, we said our dreams will carry us
And if they don’t fly we will run
It’s something of a cheat, Mako realizes, like falling in love in reverse. The chemical response her brain undergoes whenever Raleigh is close overrides what logic tells her is a trick of memory. They are ghosts of experience, haunting her dreams in light and shadow. Nothing is practiced or earned like this; there are no quiet secrets unearthed through time and patience, no bridges built across narrow channels or borders established through implicit trust. That scares her at first, like any loss of control or break in the orderly arrangement of her small and efficient universe. Eventually, this begins to change.
Her hands tell her how his bare back feels when he’s leaning over her to press their lips together. She knows the way his spine arcs and his shoulder blades jut under the thin skin, the way he easy smiles just before their mouths touch. The way he tastes after he’s tasted her. It’s not something she can unlearn, no matter how she rationalizes it. Sensory memories make new neural pathways, file themselves away in quiet places for quick recall. The sight of his neck when he turns to look away from her makes the edges of her lips tingle. Rain makes her think of smoke, smoke makes her think of night, night makes her think of his arms around her. Tight like Raleigh would never let her go.
Somewhere, while her memories collide with his in a glimmer of neurons and synapses, the distinction loses all meaning. Over time nothing about this scares her anymore.
--
The first time they have sex, it was complicated and strained and imperfect. She had just buried her father on a clear afternoon and his old house was still warm with her memories of him. After the wake, and hours spent accepting condolences and best wishes, the house was quiet. Only Raleigh was left; she didn’t ask him to stay but he knew better than to leave. It wasn’t quite dark yet and already she was feeling haunted in a way she couldn’t articulate. Raleigh knew that look in her eye like he knew the back of his hand, and made himself useful clearing the dishes from the sink.
They were standing in the kitchen, talking about nothing in particular when it got suddenly quiet. She didn’t need any more quiet and leaned in to kiss him instead of talking, getting on the balls of her feet to reach his mouth. He stiffened up like he knew better, like he wanted to do better. Eventually he gave in to the softness of her mouth, the dip of her tongue, closing his hands around her face to kiss her like she knew he’d been thinking of since they first met in the rain.
Down the hall and up the stairs to the guest room that Raleigh was supposed to sleep in, because her childhood bedroom was too tangled up in other memories for that. There she tugged his belt open and his trousers down, straddling him on the foot of the bed, watching him watch her. Watching him pull her underwear to her knees and push her skirt up to her waist, watching him enter her. The sex was fleeting and ragged, her arms tight around his neck, knees tight around his hips as she leveraged herself up and down in his lap. She murmured broken things against his mouth, language unraveling into fragments and sighs. He caught them, each of them, taking them in like air as he held her against him until orgasm caught her in its sharp and sudden grip.
When she could hold herself up again he maneuvered them over, laid her out across the mattress, kissing her face and neck. Tangling their hands together where they rested above her head, he rocked into her for a few more frantic moments before finally emptying into the condom he barely remembered to put on. They spent the night curled into each other, on the little bed in the guest room of her father’s silent house. It was the closest they had been since the last time they drifted together, when they closed the rift and ended the war and they shared more than just memories. In the morning they didn’t talk about it. Drinking coffee on opposite sides of the kitchen, separated by more than the island counter between them, it just seemed easier that way.
--
Drifting, she knows, is as emotional as it is physical. It has as much to do with brain waves as it does blood types, personalities and genetic makeup. This is why siblings made some of the best pilots. They already shared so much before ever setting foot in a simulation pod that synching up was easy as breathing. But families, that makes sense. Brothers and sisters, parents and children, sharing memories and compatible traits, thoughts and intents. It makes them into something far beyond what they could be apart.
Then to put virtual strangers through the same training, the same trial runs, simulations and tests, that gets tricky. That puts someone else in your head. It gives them access to your memories, to your private thoughts, and you theirs. It’s compromising; it changes the shape of everything. Whatever connections that could have been made in the natural world are accelerated, their affects amplified, blown out. It becomes deafening, all-consuming. The drift is silence like that.
--
“Some people just…belong to each other,” Raleigh said of the drift once. Casually, in that disposable way that he did, like nothing he said mattered to anyone. “Like family.”
“People don’t belong to each other,” Mako argued, if only half-heartedly. “People just are. Whatever happens between them, happens.”
“People are never just anything.”
He said that instead of the other thing. The other thing had a lot of loaded implications and made everything bigger than it might have been on its own. So he said that, and she let it rest.
--
Anything she may or may not have felt before Raleigh was inside her head pales in comparison to the bone-deep way she can feel him there now. The physical connection is the only thing left, the lightning rod that that let her catch that sensation again. To catch fire from the inside out, like being in the drift again. To share thoughts and breath and will, like a single shaft of light coming through the cloud line.
At first it’s the fire she thinks she missed. Eventually she sees that was just a means to an end.
--
Things changed, but they always did. Eventually Mako moved to Tokyo and Raleigh drifted off into the post-war restoration efforts. If she had told him to stay that morning, he probably would have followed. Something about that didn’t seem fair at the time, to decide that he was hers to tell anything. In Tokyo she was the project leader of a team of forty, overseeing the development of five prototype defense systems adapted from the various applications of the now-defunct Jaeger program. Like every other engineer left standing, she was absorbed into other initiatives and divisions while proposals were assessed and budgets were recalibrated. There was always work to be done. Research to conduct, data to collect, big ideas to chase down in fending off other teams for the security of government contracts. That was the world she was used to.
Raleigh, however, was just a civilian again. Turned back out into the world, no marching orders to fall back on or a coastal wall waiting for him back in Alaska. He was only ever really good at destroying things; he got good enough at building them just to scrape out an honest living. After the last attacks in Sydney and Hong Kong at the end of the war, the restoration crews both regionally and abroad were stretched thin. Even with the influx of laborers coming off the scrapped Coastal Wall project, every extra hand on deck meant lives could return to normal that much faster. The work kept him busy, moving around between sites wherever crews needed the most help. More than that, it just gave him something to do. After all, when you’re waiting for the world to end, you get out of the habit of making plans.
They had been keeping in touch for months, through letters and emails, postcards and photos. She wrote him about work and life, and coming back on familiar soil after years of being so far from home. About how her tiny windowless office atop three floors of R&D was her ocean of calm. He wrote her about the road and the job, about moving from site to site. The hole-in-the-wall bars he found wandering around Sydney at night and feeling lucky enough to watch Hong Kong put itself back together again. They didn’t talk about much. It was nice. It was easy.
--
It’s the most peculiar things about Raleigh Becket that stick out in Mako’s mind, even when the distance between them is so vast and unknowable. She knows all of the old songs his father used to play on the radio when Raleigh and Yancy were boys, how he’s good at fixing cars even though he doesn’t own one. She knows he’s had his heart broken by girls he doesn’t like to name but that he’s never really been in love. She knows how he used to get into fights as a kid, how Yancy was always there to bail him out of trouble, and how Yancy is still in his head like a waking dream, a part of his brother leftover from the drift.
Sometimes she wonders if what Stacker said was true. That he’s still out there, or whether it’s just a part of her that lingers in the ether instead. Maybe they each leave a part of themselves behind there, waiting to be swept up in an unseen ocean. Maybe that’s how families are forged in the drift.
--
The second time they have sex was in the summer, six months after the war ended. She came back to Hong Kong for a conference; he had a few days off from a six-week job putting most of Causeway Bay back together. He dropped her an email the week before to tell her that he had a leave coming up that coincided with her trip, and it all seemed fortuitous. It made packing that much less tedious, the flight into Hong Kong that much faster. The air that much lighter, like she was going to float away if she let her concentration slip.
Mako got off the plane, took a cab to the hotel, changed. Barely had time to catch her breath before she got back into a cab bound for the address he gave her, written on a napkin and dropped into her pocket. She found him at a little bar tucked away in a part of town she hadn’t seen before, the streets mostly quiet on a Tuesday night. He was waiting for her outside, hands in his jacket pockets, looking almost exactly the same as she remembered. Looking like he knew how stupid it must have looked, like he was half-afraid she wouldn’t show.
She smiled. “Hi.”
He straightened up. “Hey.”
Her eyes flicked over him, head-to-toe. She wasn’t subtle about it. “You look good.”
He laughed at that. “Why do I feel like we’ve had this conversation before?”
Inside they sat down at the long backlit bar and ordered dark beers in tall bottles. She swayed slightly on her bar stool, her feet not quite reaching the ground. He told her all about where he’d been staying and the people he’d met. The things he’d been up to in what little spare time he had, like reading the books she sent him when she realized her new apartment was too small for all of her bookshelves. She told him all about how Tokyo changed since she was last there as a child, visiting relatives with her parents, and how the city seemed to get smaller and smaller. Eventually the conversation drifted, the way their conversations always did, to other things.
“So I guess this is it, huh?” he asked with a shrug and a sort-of smile. “This is the real world.”
She shrugged in turn, pulling her sweater tighter to herself. “It’s what we wanted. Otherwise all of this was for nothing.”
If anyone else had said that to her, she would have been angry. She watched too many good people die, buried too many empty caskets. But Raleigh, he knew that as well as she did.
“You know, I barely a remember a time before the Kaiju. It’s been such a part of my life since I was a teenager, sometimes I don’t remember what life’s supposed to be like. It’s like - ” He shook his head, looked at the television above the bar, looked at anything but her. “It’s like I’m lost, you know?”
“This was all I ever knew for so long.” The alcohol warming her fingers and toes made it easy to let that truth slide between them. “I’m still learning what to do without it.”
“Yeah,” he sort-of smiled again. “That makes two of us.”
She wanted to tell him what it was like to realize that almost everyone ever she knew was dead. That the closest to feeling complete was having him in her head, under her skin, breathing her memories like smoke. It was pointless to tell him everything he already knew. Instead she followed him back to the tiny apartment he was renting, followed him to his bedroom. To undress him in that slow and careful way she always wanted, to kiss every inch of him, to make love in the dark like everybody else did. After that she forgot about the hotel room across the city and spent her nights there, in his small bed with her books on his shelves and her clothes on his floor. Listening to him tell her stories she already knew, from memories she could still see whenever she closed her eyes.
--
The drift can do a lot of things. It can make memories flesh, trick bones into thinking the shapes they recall are their own design. Make hands want things they can’t have, arms empty of things they never held. Whether she could have loved him without the drift doesn’t make any difference now, in the face of things. She fell in love with him there, like falling down a rabbit hole into something bigger and more complicated than she realized. Memory blurs in the spaces between electricity and reality, the tactile and the dreamed, where he ends and she begins.
Maybe, she realizes, she never had a chance. Maybe people just belong to each other. Maybe it’s all written in the drift, waiting for her to see it.
--
Mako left Hong Kong on a Friday morning, bound for Tokyo on the first flight out. If she thought about it long enough she could still feel her mouth tingling at the edges, her whole body warmed by the memory of his hands on her. Her work demanded her attention again; at home she unpacked her bags and tried not to dwell on such things. They only made everything worse, made it more tangled up than it needed to be. He told her that he would visit her the first chance he got, that he would spend the week with her, that they could figure things out from there. She trusted him; then again, trust was never a problem they had.
On Monday morning the knock at the door startled her, pulling her from her coffee in the kitchen to look through the peephole outside. Raleigh was in her hallway, hands in his pockets, looking stupid again. She pulled the door open. He took a deep breath like he’d been practicing this.
“I know what I said before,” was the only declaration he could muster. “I had a change of plans.”
She leaned against the door. “What took you so long?”
He smirked. “I got lost after I left the airport.”
That wasn’t really her question and that wasn’t really his answer. But, like most things between them, it didn’t need to be said.