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The realization that Mako Mori is still alive does not come as some grand revelation. There is no vision of her sensei telling her to wake up, no last minute save from the ghost of Yancy Becket left trailing in her mind, no hand of her Jaeger clutched protectively around her in her bleary, waking vision.
No, the realization that she still breathes life comes with the taste of ash and blood in her mouth and the cold, hard ground against her bruised body.
She blinks her eyes, still processing what had just happened. Obsidian Fury had attacked her helicopter, had started a fight with her brother. Her brother had tried to save her. He missed. She’d leapt out her seat in the last seconds, taking the controls, trying to slow the crash. When it had proved impossible, she’d watched the window. Using every ounce of patience and control her sensei had left her, she’d leapt through the glass, balling up, even as she felt the heat of the helicopter’s explosion behind her, and-
And she survives.
She sits up, then immediately regrets it - from the pain alone she’s nowhere in the territory of this being a complete miracle. Her right arm screams with a pain she hasn’t felt since she piloted, and her ribs on the same side match. Ejecting herself through the glass of a helicopter cockpit had done her no favors either. Glass digs into her body, a million little razor cuts that seep through and stain her clothes and face. She takes a deep breath, forcing the air through, and looks around.
She’s in an alley. The streets outside are silent now. She can hear the distant whir of choppers. The obvious memory flickers through her, of stepping out after Onibaba’s attacking into the dusking hours of Tokyo as a little girl, but she brushes it aside. She has no time to chase the RABIT, no illusions of a shining knight in armor stepping out from a Jaeger to save her.
Not after a Jaeger had tried to kill her.
She takes this in like a bitter pill. Her life’s work had been the maintenance and restoration of these glorious, living hunks of machine-made muscle, humanity’s metal hunters against the Kaiju threat. She’d made it her life’s goal to live up to the monumental effort of her sensei, and it’d been used against her. Whether it was Shao Corporation trying to prevent her from voting against their drone program or some other force at work, she did not know. But if she hadn’t been found alive by now, it was clear forces at work were trying to ensure she wouldn’t be.
Somewhere in her, a resentment that is distinctly Raleigh’s blooms within her. The feeling of staggering, bleeding on the Alaskan shoreline, echoes through her muscles like an old acquaintance back for a vengeance. She is tired, so tired, she hasn’t had a break since she was a little girl. Her entire life has been either war or protecting against it. Not even after she’d helped save the world was she ever afforded true peace. And this is how she was repaid?
If he was here she’d have chastised him, for getting in her head like that. And he would’ve given that ‘sorry-not-sorry’ she not-so-secretly loved that told her it wasn’t really him telling her how to act but really reinforcing her own opinion. She’s always been vengeance-driven, after all, but that drive is no nuclear turbine. It can still burn out.
So she hobbles to her feet, and she knows that her next plan is exactly the kind of thing she chastised him for once upon a time: rash and irresponsible. In a sense, she feels she’s owed it.
Mako disappears.
-
She’d snuck away, bleeding and dragging her feet, joining masses still moving away from the disaster site, until she’d made her way to a secret little stall welcoming survivors with open, greedy arms. Stacker had drilled his sense of pragmatism into her, and with it came a little black book that had let Mako secretly keep deals going with Hannibal Chau’s syndicate. The black market group had undergone a surprising boom in the post-war years: the ever-growing scarcity of Kaiju remains coupled with the just as rapid growth in the sale of Jaeger parts had proved lucrative enough to expand all along the rim, only helped by miraculous reports of the man’s survival of being eaten.
They patch Mako’s wounds using in-house doctors, and she begrudgingly accepts their use of Kaiju-borne home remedies to do it. Anything to speed up the process, because she knows exactly where she wants them to charter a private jet to. She doesn’t want to fly, doesn’t want to chance the idea of a giant metal hand reaching out to crush her in her grip, but she’d rather take that than the long anxious wait of a boat and the lingering memories of a beast rising from the sea capable of crushing battleships against its back. For the promise of certain deals on Jaeger scraps, promises they don’t know she won’t fulfill, they’re all too willing to agree. Within a week she’s bandaged and sitting on a plane, waiting without moving the entire flight because she knows as exhausted as she is that she can’t sleep until she gets where she’s going but that if she moves a single muscle she’ll end up deconstructing this plane piece-by-piece out of restlessness.
The plane lands on a private airfield in Anchorage, just a few miles out from the Shatterdome, and a car waits for her. The driver doesn’t ask questions besides where she needs to go, he knows better than to ask questions when it comes to dealing with Chau’s people, but she’s smart enough to catch the little lingering, questioning glances, the contours of a face begging to ask. Her face is probably everywhere in the news, she realizes. He must think he’s seeing a ghost.
She didn’t know if he was. She’s trying to find out for herself.
He pulls up a long dirt road two hours later, winding through forests closer to the center of the state, intentionally built away from the shoreline and the mass population, where a Kaiju would have to be desperately, ravenously hungry to look to feed on anything human the way she is. She catches a small, white post where a mailbox should be when the driver does not, and beckons for him to stop so she can get out. She limps, still feeling the ache, the cuts, the exhaustion coursing through her, but she knows she is in the literal home stretch. She still falters, just for a second, her eyes falling closed, until of all people it is Chuck Hansen’s voice that echoes out to her. Eyes on the prize! he shouts. Six hundred meters from the drop! She swears at him, she’d never liked him, even when they were kids growing up in a Shatterdome, but she heeds his words and keeps going.
The sight is as familiar as ever, when she crests the final hill. While she’d thrown herself into her work over the last decade, her other half had decided to use the money gained from saving the world to find and buy a small, discrete plot of land over the six months after K-Day, when the PPDC had begun its transformation into something she now didn’t recognize. He’d promised her he was going to make something that lasted, not a Jaeger bay, not a Wall, but a home. He’d followed up on it a year later when he had covered her eyes and brought her to this exact spot, where a small home made of wood and brick instead of concrete and steel stood. She’d been delighted if not surprised, hands clasped over her mouth with joy even as the fact that her duties still beckoned lingered in the back of her mind. She smiles at the memory, letting it give her the strength that she needs to cross the last few steps to the door.
The miracle comes when she doesn’t need to open it. He’s there, Raleigh’s there standing before her, and she doesn’t even need to physically look at the lines creasing his face or the way his beard’s grown out or the furrow of his brow to feel what he radiates out to her. That he knew, he always knew she was fine because she was Mako goddamn Mori and she’d never leave the hole in his head that his brother left.
She tries to speak, tries to say something, but finally the exhaustion overtakes her. She collapses in his arms, the way she did after their first test run, her eyes going blank as she just lets her body feel his warmth against hers for the first time in what feels like an eternity.
She’s not okay, not at all, but she’s a little more okay with him there.
-
Recovery is slow and painful, out on the Alaskan homestead. The two of them barely talk for the first few days, Raleigh more focused on fussing over her and her more than willing to let him. She sleeps at first, for a day straight like she had after Operation: PITFALL, and he teases her lightly when she wakes up about how she was falling off her usual schedule. She brushes it off with a soft smile because he knows that he’s really echoing the own chastising she would give herself.
Mako doesn’t want to think about the program, so they don’t discuss it. Instead, she spends her time reclining, watching her partner as he goes about his day. Raleigh’s time in retirement has only proved to build him up, turn him into a natural outdoorsman. It surprises her, in some ways, because kids raised in Shatterdome are often unaccustomed to the wilderness and she’s no exception, but it’s a very welcome surprise.
She still finds herself calling him out when he splits firewood wrong, though, if only because she knows he’s already thinking the same thing.
Over time, Mako heals, breathing easy and able to move her arm once again. She starts opening up a little, telling Raleigh how they used a mix of peroxide and powderized Blue to clean her wounds, to dissolve whatever glass fragments had been left in her body that they simply couldn’t pull out. He chuckles and tells her in turn about how someone down in town had succeeded in making Kaiju liquor, how it at once burned the tongue and yet been sickly-sweet. Still, he holds something back, and she sees it and it saddens her. If they could Drift again, she’d know.
The next morning she wakes up early and goes for a run, her first time properly out of the house in two weeks. The forest’s vast geography is no less familiar to her than the nooks and crannies of Hong Kong Shatterdome, despite her previous, fleeting visits. She loses herself for a moment in the pace, though, eyes closed shut as she breathed in and out just as her sensei had taught her when she needed to control her anger, and almost runs straight into a tree as a result. The temper briefly overtakes her, surges back, and she lashes out at the strong bark with a striking kick that only serves to remind her that she’s still sorer than she wants to pretend.
If she could Drift again, Stacker could tell her the answers to all these feelings that bubble up inside her, all the loss of identity that rakes through her like the claws of a monster.
When she gets home, back to limping a little, Raleigh’s sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, clearly expecting her, clearly finally ready to talk.
“There was a Breach. And an attack on Tokyo.”
The words hit her like Danger’s rocket punch. They had stopped the Kaiju! They had sacrificed their friends, they had sacrificed their Jaegers, they had sacrificed her father! They had canceled the apocalypse! Was nothing sacred? Was her entire life, all of her achievements, all to be undone? And for her home, to play victim once again - it was unthinkable.
Raleigh holds his hand up. “Your brother stopped it. All of the contingency plans you put in place worked. Minimized casualties, despite mass infrastructure devastation. They closed it again.” She’s able to take a breath at that, to calm down even as her nerves threaten to shake her apart, and she knows what he’s gonna say next. “I don’t know the full details yet but... they think you’re dead. You died in Sydney, but you still saved the world.”
The most vindictive part of her replies, the part that’s all Danger, rising up from the broken depths of Oblivion Bay to shake the world again. Yet it’s not something Danger would say. “Let them.”
He gives her the clear look, the one he gave Stacker when he thought the Marshal was making the wrong choice, but he leaves it at that.
It’s not obedience, it’s respect.
-
Mako finds him waiting with a bottle of hair dye two weeks after, when she comes home from a run again. She’s been running every day since he told her about the Kaijus’ return, first within the property lines that Raleigh’s bought then slowly expanding til reaching the edges of the forest. He had woken up with her that morning, told her that he was going into town to fetch some things, but even with their deep connection he was still catching her off-guard.
She burns with the fire of a nuclear core, still, but contained. It’s measured out through her body like she has a solid iron hull with forty engine blocks per muscle strand again. Even now, years later, she concentrates all the power of her Jaeger into her small frame with poise. It’s ironic, she thinks, that she brought back Raleigh Becket’s girl from the dead and yet she doesn’t want the favor to be returned. Nonetheless, she still sits in the stool before him and lets him work.
She hasn’t worn her dye in years. It was frowned upon more and more in the repressive bureaucracy that the PPDC had become as she’d risen in rank to Secretary General. The luster and permissions she’d been afforded first as the adoptive daughter of one of the world’s greatest heroes, then as a hero herself, had dulled and faded just like the color by her ears.
She was more than capable of standing for herself, but she’d still wished she had had Stacker at her side, reminding her of her shine.
So she tells Raleigh to reverse it, to leave her hair Kaiju Blue with small slivers of black. He nods as understanding as ever, and when she runs again the next morning, she feels like she’s visible from orbit.
They still don’t talk much. They communicate through touches like these instead - his hands running through his handiwork, her curling up against him as she reads the stockpile of books he’d accrued (she remembers he’d never been one to sit and read before retirement, always too ready for action or too lost in his own head). She goes through the old science-fiction she’d celebrated in her youth like Asimov and Wells and Clarke, then through the great American novels that she knew he had a taste for like Twain, Steinbeck, and Ellison. They don’t turn on the TV, she doesn’t want to know about the outside world, but when he talks about his occasional trip into town he can’t help but let some details slip.
People are scared. The few locals who know who he really is think he’s in mourning. There’s calls for war against the Kaijus’ masters. They wonder if the man they think to be the last hero left will step up again. He doesn’t ever disrespect her wishes by correcting them.
She doesn’t know if he should.
At night she curls into him and knows exactly where she is. She’s Mako Mori. She’s Stacker Pentecost’s daughter. She’s Raleigh Becket’s partner. She’s Danger’s pilot. But during the day, her mind is lost, wandering. She’s a memory herself, now, a RABIT she doesn’t want anyone to chase except for him. Her dreams at night are of her times overseeing the Mark III Restoration Project, of having Jaegers towering over her protectively. Her dreams during the day see the trees morph into giant figures of their pilots, silently judging her from the grave. For not fighting when they would have.
Oddly enough, her sensei is never among them.
She keeps running anyways, because she’s not running away, never running away, never backing down from a challenge, but because she’s reconsidering, replanning her life, reforming the sword that is herself. She’s not solid yet, not shaped into the blade that slew Otachi over Hong Kong, but waving in the wind as a chain, dangling in the lower limits of the stratosphere.
One day, two months into her stay with her partner, she escapes the forest and routes through town. It’s a small, nothing of a town, just some shops lining the main street selling just enough to survive, a small diner that reeks of greasy American food and coffee even a block away, and some dusty homes on the outer edges, but it’s still so strange to be among people again. She stands out for sure when she stops in one of the shops for a bottle of water. A little girl stares at her hair and she almost worries she recognizes her, that she knows what a hero she actually is. When she runs her little hand through her hair in awe, however, and says something to her father and he looks at Mako, grimaces at the shock of blue atop her head, and turns to leave, Mako is more relieved than offended.
She has already been a hero. She has no desire to go back.
Even if she misses the father who let her dye her hair.
-
Apparently, however, that brief trip was enough to flag her on some radar somewhere and for someone to finally find her. Raleigh’s phone rang off the hook, he says, for the first hours after she’d ‘died’, but he hadn’t once picked up. Not for Tendo, not for Herc, not for Jake, not for his sister. He tells her he hadn’t wanted to hear it, because he knew she’d make her way back to him, and he says it in that drawl that almost makes her cry. He’s always been able to see her heart.
Surprisingly, it’s none of the above who finds her, another two weeks after she’d bought the water. It’s one Hermann Gottlieb that knocks on their door. She’s sitting at the table with Raleigh, just back from yet another run and deliberately ignoring the recent flickers of worry he’d been giving off about how hard she’d been pushing herself, how clearly she was needing something to live for besides this quiet little life. Just to prove her point, she stands up at the knock and answers it and almost causes Hermann’s bad leg to collapse under him.
After the “hows” and “whys” of her survival were stammered out of his mouth, she ushers him in to sit with them. She doesn’t really want to explain herself, not until she knows what he’s doing there. Raleigh’s attention is drawn to the scientist too - he says that he figured the PPDC had gone with a “don’t poke the bear” policy with him, and despite the tension that’s been lurking in their actual words (if not their body language, not ever their body language), Mako has to hide a smile because that’s such a Raleigh thing to say.
“They have,” Dr. Gottlieb replies succinctly. He seems almost as tired as Mako was when she showed up, so they let him work his way through the last of the coffee in their pot before he speaks again. He explains about Newt having his mind taken over by the Precursors. He tells them that Jake is trying to take over, garnering resources to lead the charge against them, to try and open a manmade Breach and strike back. The PPDC is expanding once again, but from Hermann’s elaborations, his attempts to both counsel and interrogate his former partner have gone nowhere. They’re gearing up for war against an enemy they don’t know how to hit.
Mako and Raleigh share a glance. They don’t need to be compatible with Hermann to know what he wants to know. If they can come back. If they can talk to Newt, or to Jake, or even to Herc or even Shao Liwen to try and stop this waste, this corruption of the program they’d saved, once upon a time.
“No,” Mako says, leaping first before he even asks. She knows now, of course, who was behind the attempt on her life, but the anger still pangs through her and she feels the drivesuit scars on her skin burning. “They never wanted what was best for the Jaegers. For humanity.” She glances back at Raleigh and can’t help but take his hand. She almost wants to say that if the Kaiju really do come back for a third round, that they’ll be there, but she looks in his eyes and sees Yancy’s last moments reflected back in their sorrow and she knows she cannot even commit to that.
She wants to hold onto her own loss, because she seems to be the only person with any memory of the honor Stacker Pentecost really stood for.
They usher Hermann out the door politely but firmly, even as he looks crestfallen with his last option out of the cards. Before she shuts the door, however, Mako tells him not to tell anyone that she is alive. “Mako Mori is dead,” she says, and she sees the shiver crawl up Hermann’s spine because her tone is very clear that if he ever leaks her secret, he will join her in the grave.
When she turns back around after the good doctor leaves, she can feel Raleigh’s disagreement with her statement, his own unique form of anger bleeding through more than a little because Mako is very much alive and she is here and she knows that if he ever found out his brother was alive and hadn’t told him, he’d probably break his nose.
She holds a hand up, then touches it to her temple. It’s an explanation in its own right. If. Yancy is dead. Raleigh felt him die and through him, so did Mako. But, even if she disagrees with his course of action, Jake is his own man, she says. She says she should’ve seen it earlier. She hopes her death inspires him to keep going, the way first the loss of her family then the loss of her sensei had inspired her. When Raleigh asks what inspires her now, however, she does not answer. The argument fades and he holds her close because she knows he only wants to help her, only wants to be her confidante, her backup plan the way he had been to Stacker in those final days.
It’s as such she still can’t help but shed a tear at the loss of her brother, at her old life and family truly being gone.
-
The next day Raleigh drives her into Anchorage. He wants to help her find something, something besides him and a lonely log cabin and the dense treeline and a sad little town where little girls aren’t allowed to dye their hair.
They walk through the city streets, bustling with an energy she doesn’t recognize. The last time she’d truly been in the city was just with her sensei around the Shatterdome as it was closing, years after that catastrophic battle with Knifehead. Back then, it had been nervous, full of either hard-hearted construction workers pulling shifts on the nascent Wall or people packing their bags with the justified fear that it wasn’t going to work, that they were better off spending all their life savings to move inland away from the threat. Now, over a decade later, the city is populated again. People walk between streets with coffee in hand, chattering away at one another or on their phones. It’s clear no one really feels safe at the moment, not with another Kaiju attack still fresh in the public mind, but they’re not ready to abandon what they’ve been rebuilding at a drop of a hat.
She remarks on this to Raleigh, and he tells her he’s always found the city rather cold. Even as a Becket Boy, as a hometown hero, as someone who lived in Shatterdomes where more than half the time someone else was breathing down your neck just for want of space, he just never felt as right in his home city as he did on the coastline or in the forest. She says that he protected these people once, and now they’ve forgotten him. He asks her if that’s what she wants.
Mako considers it. She likes the quiet. She likes being another face in the crowd. Maybe it’s because of how she’s changed, grown older, maybe it’s because the world’s had far too long to think of her as “gone”, but once again the only glances she gets are directed at her hair. She remembers the press pushing and crowding her, first in the hours after K-Day, then with each major readjustment to the PPDC, and he feels her shudder. She doesn’t need to say yes. He just tells her that he’s going to help her make it happen, and in his gaze she can see the awe they both gave their Jaeger, once upon a time.
He brings her down to the coastal edges of the city, far down the beach from the actual remnants of the Shatterdome. There, the sections of wall that had been built, that he’d helped build, are long gone. Instead, shipbuilding has resumed popularity. They come to a great chain gate blocking it off from the public and Raleigh talks for a second to the security guard. Seems they’re old pals from his days “in construction” and they’re allowed in without much fuss.
Inside, massive iron plates and other materials litter the grounds of a yard. Little dapples of the earth are stained the same color as her hair, remnants from the few times Kaiju made it past the Miracle Mile and had its blood spilled on the shore. She watches a team in the distance lift a heavy plexiglass plate, the kind cut up and used as the windows on an ocean liner’s cabin, and her newer scars burn with acidity a little. It is just at that moment that a ship floating just at the edge of a dock catches her eye.
It’s a deep, dark, properly navy blue, with red lining. It’s huge, though not quite the size of a Jaeger, and she’s almost shocked she missed it at first until she remembers how easy it was to forget the metal titans’ presence sometimes while relaxing on-base, how fixed they were in life. It’s floating on the water with a gentle lilt, almost like it’s beckoning her home.
She reaches a hand up to touch it, and she remembers when she stood in Oblivion Bay and she did the same with a certain Mark III Jaeger of the same color. She remembers the cold, familiar steel at her finger tips, traces her hand against rivets, feels the power that could thrum through the machinery. She knows that she is small enough that it could tip over and crush her beneath its weight, but she also remembers what it is like to be strong enough to catch it, to protect it with all her being.
She finds him in the drift. She hears Stacker’s calm, proud voice from behind, just as he was there back then. “Is this your final choice?” he’d asked her once about a Jaeger, about her commitment to her life. She never thought she’d hear that question again, even if it was just in her own mind, and she knows that he would be proud of her, even as she changed direction like a compass suddenly moving from north to west.
The sword that she is snaps to attention, each plate interlocking and ready to cut a Kaiju in half. Not for vengeance, but for construction.
When she turns around, it is not Stacker standing there, it is Raleigh. And he catches it in the smile on her face, the awe in her body. That she doesn’t want to fight and die, that she wants to build. They don’t need words to celebrate, they just catch each other with their hands and lips and hold on tight.
-
A year later, Mako is excelling in her field. Anchorage was willing to take anyone to work, even those whose falsified background checks lacked the black market connections to hold up to too much scrutiny, and her engineering knowledge shines like a light in the dark for the burgeoning industry.
The so-called “Uprising War” has petered out in her mind and in the public consciousness. The Kaiju are not back, and she refuses to ever try to know if they will be back. She’s overseen the construction of boats to carry Jaegers and their components, of course, boats that she’s secretly snuck Jaeger-level engineering into, but she channels Raleigh’s stubbornness and lets herself be at the ease of being prepared, not zealous.
Her partner waits for her at home, each day, keeping his beard trimmed again just the way she likes and reading and splitting firewood and making the most of retirement. He’s been thinking about expanding the house, drawing up blueprints. Mako doesn’t know why - they don’t want kids and they don’t have visitors, but it gives her partner something to do and between the two of them, their library has been overflowing so maybe they need the space.
She comes home and tells him about her day, about all the interesting designs she’s thought up and the chatter in the workplace and the humdrum aura of the city. He tells her that he saw a little girl with blue hair in the little town on the edge of the forest. Her heart swells with pride even though she says that she’s been thinking of taking her hair back to how it was when she first met him. He gives that great big grin and she can feel the memory through him of her as a younger woman, standing on a rainy tarmac and lightly criticizing him in Japanese and she thinks of how far she’s come.
One day one of the men on shift, some newly hired but clearly seasoned older man, standing out from all the fresh city faces almost the same way her shock of blue does, takes a close look at her and asks her if she used to be someone famous.
“Once,” Mako replies, and lets the subject drop.
After all, she’s realized that she’s more okay with being no one. Not a ghost, not a memory. Just another face in the crowd, trying her best day-by-day.
A sword in the sheath.