Sorry it took me a while to get this next chapter uploaded! I thought I had updated it on here and then was looking and realized I didn't have the latest chapters up!
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Mako can design an entire new Drift system for a Jaeger. She can create joints that move with 120% the efficiency of any previous model. But she can't seem to find the right things to say to Jake while they're standing in the suiting room, preparing to Drift test in Gipsy Avenger, which Mako has spent the past twenty hours going over until she's fairly certain the system won't send her or her brother into limbo the second they go online. There might be a few bugs left, but Mako is used to bugs. She's glad it's her going in, not one of the trainees. They haven't ever dealt with the kind of shoestring repairs Jaegers struggled by on when the PPDC became the resistance. Mako knows how to compensate for shaky connectivity or loss of motor control to part of the Jaeger because some coupling came undone.
She blames some of this weird feeling on the bone-deep exhaustion. She's had two hours of sleep in over twenty-four hours now, and the Marshal is breathing down her neck to get this done. Newt's readings are growing, and while he hasn't spotted any actual Kaiju, everyone is sure it's only a matter of time. She hasn't actually seen Newt at all, but she can imagine him in his lab, empty coffee cups scattered around (he's had less sleep than her, he would be an absolute disaster to meet in person right now), hair wild from running his hands through it, racing back and forth across the lab and almost tripping on Hermann's cane. Gottleib flew back in today too. It looks like McTavish is trying to put the old gang back together. Except that more than half their original team is gone. Sensei, Chuck and Herc, the Wei Tang clan, the Kaidanovskys…Raleigh. Even though Newt and Hermann are here somewhere, Mako feels alone.
She wonders if Jake can tell she's hesitant about this. She has to commit fully to establish a solid neural handshake, and all she can think is that her co-pilot is somewhere alone and maybe even dying, and here she is getting ready to Drift with someone else. It feels like cheating on a spouse, only even worse somehow. She and Raleigh saved the world together. They were the perfect team. And now she feels like she's trying to replace him.
It isn't fair to take this into the Drift with her, to put all that on Jake. It isn't his fault McTavish decided Mako was more use in a Jaeger than out of one. A few years ago this would have been her dream. Preparing to fight side by side with her brother, knowing each other's strengths and strategies almost as well as they knew their own. Now, she can't stop thinking that this isn't what she is supposed to do. She can't just pick up a new co-pilot. Then she remembers Sensei. He lost Tasmin, and yet he still got back in a Jaeger with Chuck Hansen, because it was what they needed to do to save the world. She can do this. Sensei would tell her so. He would want her to protect Jake, and he would want her to stop the Kaiju threat that he died trying to destroy. Raleigh would want her to stop it. He died stopping them too, even if he doesn't like to admit to that or talk about it, but Mako knows there were minutes, far too many of them for her, where she couldn't feel his thoughts, where the Drift was dead. She's grateful she doesn't feel that now. The Drift with Raleigh is cold and distant, but it hasn't gone out. If it does, she's fairly sure that whatever she's doing she will simply collapse. Is this what Herc felt like when Chuck went off with Sensei? Is this what Sensei felt when Tasmin was in the hospital? It's horrible, a powerlessness and a cold dread in Mako's stomach. If something happens to Raleigh, she can't help him.
But the danger is mutual, and she wonders if Raleigh is feeling the same way. He must know about the Breach threat now, it's being broadcast all over the country, and it was being speculated about long before the Marshal even gave his official statement. One of the techs helping Mako check Venge (she refuses to call it Gispy now, because Gipsy was hers and Raleigh's and she could let someone else pilot her, but she can't get back in another Gipsy without her co-pilot) had the news playing on his phone, and Mako could hear it, and she made him stop, because it had gone from insane theories on the most powerful world governments reopening the Breach on purpose to control the economy to someone talking about why they thought Raleigh wouldn't be returning. When the woman speaking began talking about that unfortunate interview, and seemed to be suggesting that solo piloting had done more significant damage to Raleigh's brain than everyone was told, Mako wanted to throw the phone out Venge's viewscreen to the hangar bay floor.
She hates when people talk about Raleigh like he's the weak link. She has never seen him that way. Raleigh is so much stronger than almost anyone else she knows. He's survived the death of his brother, while in Drift with him, he survived five years in brutal conditions in the far reaches of Alaska, and he managed to get back in a Jaeger, despite every terrible memory, despite the physical damage Knifehead did, and closed the Breach with Mako. He died and then he woke up again, and Mako only can begin to imagine what that is like because of the ghost Drift. She sees his nightmares sometimes, feels the phantom pains in an arm that is for all intents and purposes dead. She knows how hard he struggles just to get through a day like a semi-normal person. No, Raleigh is not weak. But being strong for so long has worn him out, and she wonders if he's reached the breaking point. She should be there to help him through it, the way she sits and listens if he wants to talk about Yance or what he saw in the Breach, sitting next to him and rubbing some of the stiffness out of his arms and shoulders so he can sleep without waking up in excruciating pain. She wonders where he's sleeping now.
"Ready, Ranger Mori?" says a voice that is painfully unfamiliar, Tendo is gone too. She realizes the techs are done installing the spine plate and she's ready to be wired into the harness. Jake is grinning at her inside his helmet, the same wide smile she remembers when she would get the broom out of the hall closet and they snuck past Sensei's office to go outside and fight the neighbor's dog.
"Ready." Her voice sounds wrong in the comms.
"Let's do this!" It's something Raleigh would say but it isn't Raleigh's voice and she almost stops right there, yanks off the helmet, and says she's out. But it's Jake, and he's familiar enough.
She hasn't locked into a harness rig in two years, but it's like what Tasmin used to say about riding a bike. Once you learn, you never forget. She feels the neural uplink engage, but it's so much smoother than the wartime ones that she almost misses it.
"Ready to go kick some dragon butt, Mako?" She almost laughs. Sensei scolded Jake once for saying "kick ass" so he changed it and apparently he's never seen fit to change it back. She likes it; a little familiarity. It almost feels like they're back in the cardboard box with their hands and feet tied together with strings, like a three-legged race and cat's cradle combined. She prays they don't topple the Jaeger over like they used to get tangled up with the box.
"Initiating Drift sequence." Mako feels a blur of thoughts beginning. A few are unfamiliar, like a woman with long black braids and dark mahogany eyes, singing over a small child who is sitting in a flower pot in a garden. A letter in the campus mailbox with the PPDC logo and a black border. But most are mirror images of her own thoughts and dreams. A house with a broken porch post and a half-painted cardboard box on the lawn. A red backpack and a blue one, side by side on nails by the front door. The connection is establishing well, she and Jake are strongly compatible.
"Engaging Neural Handshake." Their brains are calibrating, the thoughts flash faster, and Mako sees Onibaba briefly but shoves it away. Don't chase the R.A.B.I.T. "Steady and holding at ninety-three percent. Calibration adjusting." Lower than it should be, but that's normal for a test run. Everyone is nervous, Drift compatibility wasn't completely certain, and it takes a while to adjust to the inside of someone else's head.
"How is the Drift holding, Rangers?" It's the Marshal, but it isn't Sensei, and all of a sudden Mako feels her fragile control fall apart. This isn't right. Marshal Pentecost isn't here. Raleigh isn't here. She can't do this without them. They're the reason she fought. Sensei is dead and Raleigh is gone…
"Right hemisphere calibration failing. Ranger Mori's falling out of the Drift." She only has a moment to think I really have turned into Raleigh before she's lost in the R.A.B.I.T.
Endless sea, all around her, and the faint smell of burnt metal and Kaiju Blue. She sits up in the escape pod and searches for another one, but there is nothing but sea and sky.
"Mako! Mako, come back!" Jake's voice slides through for a moment, but then he's gone again.
There's a splash, and the pod bobs to the surface. Mako swims to it, panting, gasping, salt water in her mouth. It isn't opening, Raleigh's vitals are dead, this can't happen, they can't have done all this for him to die. She opens the hatch and pulls off his helmet and pulls him close to her like she can still find him in the Drift, like she can will his heart to sync with hers like their minds do, like instead of memories they can share life.
"Wake up! Wake up! Please!" He's so pale, so quiet…
"Ranger Mori!"
"Disengage pilot-to-machine connection!"
"Mako! Wake up!"
"Mako. It's just a memory!" Raleigh's voice. No, he isn't here, how can she hear him? She staggers, feeling faintly through the Drift that she's being cut off from Venge. Just like last time. She's trying to come out, because she can feel Jake's panic. He's never seen anyone go under before, and he's terrified he's losing her.
This memory isn't hers but it isn't Jake's either. Something left in the Drift from Raleigh, even though he's miles away. Snow on the ground and wind that freezes her lungs every time she takes a breath. Someone sleeping on the ground, tucked in a corner away from the wind. Not someone. Raleigh. Is this a memory or reality? Someone coming up behind her, passing her, a man with a knife in his hands. She screams.
"Disengaging neural handshake!"
"Don't fuck with me, you got more than that."
"I promise, it's everything I have."
Blood, crimson on fresh snow, and pain lancing up her…Raleigh's arms. And something else. A perverse kind of release, like a vaccination hurting less because someone's pinching your leg. She stumbles, falling out of the memory and into Jake.
"Mako! Are you okay?" Her arms are burning and she half expects them to be bleeding under the Drivesuit. She doesn't know if that was Raleigh's memories or his present. What if he's dying somewhere in that alley and he was trying to reach out to her for help? What if he dies alone, and thinks she abandoned him?
"Ranger Mori, what the hell was that?"
"Bad reaction to the machine connection. Not an issue with the compatibility with her co-pilot." She's glad someone else answered for her, because all she wants to scream back is, it's your fucking fault for abandoning Raleigh.
"Well, then, check the connections and get them ready to go back in. I need that Jaeger and its pilots ready to deploy in three hours."
The last time this happened, she was grounded. Now, they're just going to send her back in. Sensei is gone, and now she knows McTavish is nothing like him. And more than anything, now, she doesn't care about killing any Kaiju. She only wants to smash a fist through the conn room and crush McTavish under it.