Bits of dialogue are lifted from Pacific Rim: Year Zero, mostly the dialogue in the plane.
The adoption is not easy.
There are questions about remaining family members (none try to claim her – only her family's property) and its legality (Stacker Pentecost was reminded that the US Attorney General does not handle this kind of shit, find a goddamn adoption attorney who's willing to muddle through international adoption laws. Jesus, Stack, shouldn't you be in recovery?).
There's a potential shit storm bubbling beneath the story of Tokyo's Daughter being taken by a foreigner (the photo of a small child in a bright blue coat, holding her red shoe, standing in front of Tokyo and Onibaba destroyed gains traction with each coverage of the attack), but nobody follows up on the girl and it takes Stacker Pentecost weeks before he finds her name then find the orphanage for the children displaced by the attack. It's months before she leaves with him.
Mako Mori is a quiet girl dressed in clothes the orphanage could spare – a faded pink dress that may have been red before its fiftieth wash. She is barefoot. Later, the orphanage will hand him the clothes she wore on the day of the attack in a plastic bag, blue coat folded neatly under her red shoes.
The first thing she says to him, in carefully separated syllables, is, "Coyote Tango."
One half of Coyote Tango dips his head low in response and replies, "Miss Mori."
She grows her hair, longer than it's ever been. Shapeless and with no real direction, hair seems so inconsequential now. At first, it's a matter of accessibility and convenience – who has time to find a salon in the ruins of Tokyo?
When it reaches past her shoulders, she realizes it's the last thing her mother touched of her. A kiss on the crown of her head, "Run, Mako. Run."
Her father was still in the ruins of the hospital.
So she keeps it long.
It's a strange mix of denial and commemoration.
Stacker Pentecost understands entirely.
When it's time to move on from the Tokyo Shatterdome, he offers to take her to Tanegashima to collect anything from her childhood home. Everything is in her name, her father and mother made sure of it.
She asks him in Japanese, too tired to have a conversation in English, "What am I suppose to do?"
He puts away the plans for the Jaeger Academy in Kodiak and looks at her and her overgrown hair. "You pick your things up and you rebuild. You move forward but you never forget."
A few days later, she'll ask him for a haircut and she'll say, "Like my mother did, straight across, please."
(Later, years later, a journalist that almost broke up the brightest candidates in the Jaeger program will ask him about family. And he will tell her, "Family isn't always a matter of blood. Sometimes it's something we build. It's a decision to care about someone else. It's the opposite of loneliness.")
She follows him to Alaska. He offers her four different international schools in Japan and five more scattered around the world. She refuses, bows low, and asks to see the new Mark III blueprints.
She followed him everywhere even before that.
She sat in a small conference room as a man with even more pins on his lapel dubbed him Marshal Stacker Pentecost. The night before, he explained the promotion, what Marshal meant in the PPDC. He explained that it was an honor and a reward for his work. Her eyes lit up and she scrambled for a plastic sword wedged between her bed and her desk. She said, pointing down to the ground, "Kneel."
He raised a brow to her and she added, after a pause, "Please?"
He sighed a big sigh and did so while she stood on her bed, not quite looming over him. She touched the sword to his right shoulder, then the left. "Kishi."
A knight. He bowed low and said, "Mako-hime."
He made no mentions of metharocins and kept any disappointment out of his voice.
(Later, in a plane to Kodiak Island, she will ask, "You don't have to drive a Jaeger?"
And he will say, "Not anymore.")
For the first few months, they seem to be stuck in a limbo.
She doesn't know what to call him.
She tries to say otōsan, but the word won't come out, her eyes looking for a different face. She remembers how the rebellious teenagers on her American shows would call their parents by their first names, but all she can see is her mother's disapproving face. Besides, the man who saved her deserved more respect than that.
So she avoids it. She avoids it until it eats her up a little inside.
What does she call the man who, when he saw her awake at 3 in the morning, pretended to stretch his arms above his head and declared that, that was enough paper work for tonight and, if she wasn't too busy herself, would she mind to keep him company while he watched some movies? Or the man that let her fill in the Jaegers in her coloring books with shaky lines that looked suspiciously like details from Jaeger blueprints? Pentecost-san makes her frown with distaste and sometimes she wishes she knew who he was like everybody else seems to when they walk down corridors in his offices, men and women saluting or giving his shoulder a firm pat and saying, "Stacks."
By the time they get to Alaska, she tries to put it out of her mind because he didn't seem to mind or notice her dilemma.
He lets her sit in his already cramp office when he has meetings to go to or, as Herc Hansen liked to say, recruits to menace. (Herc Hansen is another question to be answered – too friendly and around far too much for her to dismiss as someone she was unfamiliar with, but she doesn't live with him so that problem is infinitely less pressing.) She asks about how Jaegers worked and he answers them as clearly as he can and when she struggles to understand something, he pulls out print outs to show her, here, this is how it started and here, this is the progression, do you see it? That's how that became this and that's how this will become that.
She nods because she does and it reminds her so much of when her own father explained how to fold steel, how the heat of the fire was a test – the strong ones bend, but do not burn up.
Which brings her back to her dilemma.
She remembers one of the films he offered to her on one of her sleepless nights and finds it appropriate. How do you solve a problem like Stacker Pentecost?
Later, he is visibly agitated by something and she refrains from asking too many questions. Herc Hansen finds her in his office, alone, comparing the Mark II and Mark III blueprints, tacking on small, shiny stickers on the differences she can find in the wiring. Yesterday, she did the exterior.
She's swinging her feet, barely grazing the ground with the tips of her shoes, from the big chair usually reserved for the owner of the office. Hansen opens the door while still knocking and sticks his head in. His mouth starts forming a different name when he sees her. He looks at her gravely and says, "Marshal Mori."
She may be unsure of what to call Hansen, but she knows this game. She shifts so she's kneeling on the chair, giving her some height. It swivels a little and she has to grip the table to stay still, but she replies, with as much weight as she can, "Ranger Hansen."
He stands at attention and salutes her, like he does the men with even more authority than the Marshal.
He grins at her and she smiles back. He occupies the chair she usually does when the Marshal was in the office and he looks over the blueprints. He taps at an unmarked corner of it and says, "Rerouted one of the exhausts on the Mark III. Pilots kept complaining the Conn-Pod smelled like gas."
She nods and carefully places a purple star over the area. "Did it bother you?"
Hansen looks contemplative, "Problem about the Drift, yeah? You never really know who's smelling what when. That is to say, I love the smell of gasoline in the morning. It smells like victory."
Mako looks at him strangely and he laughs, "Where's the old man at?"
"The Kwoon. There's been… a problem, a fight between two of the pilots. I believe he is 'menacing' them." She gives him a pointed look and he laughs harder.
He stands, creaking at the knees, and knocks lightly on the table, "Well, it's past his and the Becket's bedtime, why don't we go disturb 'em?"
She shouldn't, but she nods. The Kwoon isn't a place she gets to visit often. It's usually crowded, either with candidates training or with spectators watching a compatibility test. It's easy to get underfoot.
It still holds a certain amount of mystique to it, like the Jaeger hangar did before she started spending time around the crew to pass time. The Jaegers were impressive, but easily understood. It was a machine, no matter how massive and grand and beautiful. There are (massive and grand and beautiful) blueprints and detailed schematics on every gear and wire.
The pilots are another thing.
For all the advancements in the field, Drifting is still a mystery. There are too many unspoken things between pilots that never leave the Drift and too many variables to ever guarantee compatibility. There is only trial and error and hope that the next one works.
And the Kwoon Combat Room is where it starts.
Every Kwoon Room is virtually identical; matted floors, open space, weapons stored to the side. Alaska is no different from Lima to Sydney. The only difference between all those rooms is that Stacker Pentecost is standing in the middle of this one, looking severely unimpressed by two retreating figures who were walking and talking in a way that Mako has seen countless times from two people coming out of the Kwoon. They are Drift compatible.
Hansen nudges her in and Stacker turns to them. His face is still pinched and he says, "Children. The both of them."
Mako goes over to the weapons, carefully adjusting a skewed hanbō. She can feel both men watching her. She hears Hansen reply, "Well they are."
She adjusts a sabre so it sat more securely on its stand. Hansen continues, "And they're getting younger. You heard 'em."
Mako has. The PPDC is considering lowering the enlisting age. Younger candidates prove to be easier to find matches for compatibility. She's read the reports (the publics ones and the not so public ones) and they all agree: youth translates to mental malleability and (ideally) less emotional trauma; it would be foolish and wasteful not to explore such avenues.
She turns and finds both men staring at each other, a continuation of an unspoken debate from earlier. Hansen cracks his neck and gives the Marshal a lazy salute, "Well, it's past my bedtime and I got a flight to catch."
He gives Mako a proper salute and she returns a bow.
There's still a pair of hanbō by the Marshal's feet and he picks it up. Mako straightens, ready to catch them and place them back with the others, just like all the other times he's tossed it to her.
He stretches his neck and examines the sticks. He asks, in Japanese, "Did your father teach you how to handle weapons?"
Something tightens in her. It's not that he never tries to talk about her parents, it's that she's been avoiding it. She answers likewise, "I was too young. He taught me kata."
"We'll run through that. Then we'll move onto the weapons."
She bows, "Hai, sensei."
(On the same plane to Kodiak, she had asked him what he would do in Alaska, if not drive Jaegers. He told her, "Teach people to drive Jaegers, I suppose."
"Oh," she looked out the window to the new Jaeger Academy. She asked him, "Will you teach me?"
He told her, "Maybe one day."
It tasted like hope.)
I tried reconciling the novelization timeline and the movie's timeline and NEVER AGAIN. But hey! Is the Pacific Rim bug still gnawing at the cockles of your heart? Come commiserate with me tumblr! I go as borncareful over yonder. Or just watch me continue to spiral about this movie to depths lower than the Mariana Trench!