Gipsy Danger's heart fills the Anteverse with searing light.
The next thing Raleigh can see is Mako, Mako and the new sun rising over the world that hasn't ended.
After that there's nothing, a wave of nothing as a physical sensation, and Raleigh unravels into gray space. (Shock, someone is saying as he goes under, neural overload and cognitive shutdown, but he's already past the realm of understanding.)
It's not like the Drift - nothing is like the Drift - but it's not unlike Drifting, either. It's not completely unlike the neural handshake, riding the roiling swell of memories familiar and alien, seeing but not looking, unfocused, ungrasping. Don't chase the rabbit. Stacker and Chuck vaporized, leaving nothing in their wake but a tsunami of radioactive, Kaiju-tainted water; don't latch onto it, you'll drown. The Kaiju gone for good, never again to stomp landward on Tendo's radar screen; you can't catch it, don't try. You just saved the world; don't reach for it, it's too big, like trying to snare a Kaiju in a fishing net.
Raleigh lets the rabbits run, one after another, rising and subsiding, none of them breaking through the numbness, the leaden exhaustion, dimension-travel, oxygen starvation, drugs.
He rides the silence until, at last, there is light. Slowly, his vision begins to clear, and he floats up to the surface - to reality, which turns out to be the cool, quiet darkness of his bunk underneath the Shatterdome. There's a metal creak and Mako is there in the doorway; he can't see her face but he know it's her because the harsh fluorescence of the hallway light shines through the blue in her hair, and seeing it is like seeing the clear blue sky over the escape pod again. Raleigh can breathe.
He had thought himself numb in the aftershock, Drifting with oblivion, still distant from the emotions that will level him when they arrive, that he can see coming but can't feel, not yet. This, though, he can feel; Mako comes into the room and his heart speeds up, his throat closes, he is crying because she's here, she's alive, she is all he wanted to save in what he was so sure would be his last minute, and just the relief of it is nearly enough to break him.
She leans toward him to examine his arm, and only then does he notice the horrific but oddly painless circuitry burns twisting from his right shoulder down to his knee. "Are you in pain?" she asks, darting a glance up at his tear-stained face. "I'll call the doctors. They said the morphine would be enough, but they can sedate you until -"
"No," Raleigh croaks as she starts to move away. His good hand clamps around her upper arm like a vise. "No, don't go."
"But your arm -"
"It doesn't hurt, I promise. Feels peachy." The words are mangled by sobs, there's no way she understood that, but she's still half in his head and she hears the desperate need in his voice. The bed creaks as she settles next to him, and at first her hand on his back is cautious, circumspect, like she's read manuals and fully grasped the theory of physically reassuring one's copilot but even now isn't so confident of the execution. 51 sim drops, 51 kills, Raleigh thinks, but drowns in the first Drift, and that's Mako all over - thinking she's prepared for the incomprehensible, falling short and reforging herself in the heat of shame and failure, forever growing stronger, burning the impurities away until her soul blazes like the mouth of a plasma cannon.
Raleigh is still half in her head, he knows she doesn't see that fire in herself and he wants to tell her, but he doesn't know how. Instead he leans into her, buries his face in the crook of her neck and breathes in the scent of her, warm and human and undeniably real. "We did it," he gasps. Mako's other arm is around him now, careful of the burns, and her fingers are stroking through his hair, gentle and steadying. "You're alive."
"We're alive," she corrects him, and then she says "Raleigh," like he's never heard her say it before. He looks up to see tears in her eyes, too, but she's still holding herself with iron control and she doesn't them fall; she just bows her head and presses a soft kiss to his forehead, and that's enough.
When his breathing has evened out a little, she says, "You've been heavily medicated. You should try to sleep."
"I won't, without you," Raleigh says solemnly. It's not a threat or defiance, just a statement of fact. The Drift lingers, everyone knows that, and on top of the Drift he's terrified and shell-shocked and entangled in love. With her, he may be a broken man, but without her he's less than half of one.
She slides off the bed and moves toward the door, and his body seizes in terror until she slides off her flight jacket and hangs it neatly on the hook, then retrieves his from the floor and hangs that, too. She comes back to the bed and with a few deft movements manages to get Raleigh propped up on a mound of pillows, under a light blanket (nothing heavy; no dreams of restrictive flight suits, of suffocation or drowning, not today).
It's strange at first when she slides into bed next to him, strange like something he's known forever and never felt before. They start off huddled together, then twist and tug, separate and return, until at last they settle lying back-to-back, their spines pressed together where the nerves run shallow under muscle and bone. Facing outward, they anchor each other, neither one left vulnerable or unguarded.
Raleigh feels, or imagines he feels, the reciprocal pressure of their breathing; Mako exhales as he inhales, he lets out the air she takes in, and the push and pull of their respiration settles into something perfectly balanced, dynamic and immoveable.
"Sleep now," she murmurs.
It's the first day of the rest of the world.
Raleigh sleeps and does not dream.