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One of the best things about the Kaiju years, was the way that the major powers of the world had put aside their differences and come together to pool their resources to defeat the shared enemy. One of the worst things about the post-Kaiju world, is the way so many of them are so keen to get back to the old way of things to withdraw back into themselves
It’s Raleigh who raises the subject first. Of everyone in the Shatterdome, he’s the only one who’s spent concentrated time outside of the project recently. He spent several years travelling the world in the wake of the wall, surviving on whatever rations he could get in return for his labour. He knows first hand how hard the world is on the those that wash out of the Jaeger project, he might be cynical about where they all go now, but he’d rather have them all fore-warned and then be pleasantly surprised when he’s wrong.
He isn’t wrong. If anything he’s too optimistic.
The Shatterdome staff, many of whom have been with the project since the beginning, and those who haven’t, nevertheless spent their entire working lives there, are largely considered to be essentially stateless. They were commandeered from all over the place and it’s only now that there’s not an active apocalypse to justify things there’s a lot of petty politics and questions about national security and gaps in residency/work history. Some of their colleagues were turned away by their own countries years ago. Were told to come home or else, and chose to stay and fight the apocalypse. They’ve largely sloughed off what sense of belonging they once had and are applying for refuge in more welcoming countries. They don’t understand why Mako persists against the indifference of Japanese bureaucracy.
(It’s been twelve years since she last set food on Japanese soil. It’s her first language, the one in which she thinks and dreams and feels, her English is excellent, smooth and easy, a language in which she can be cool and calm and logical - the process of translation like taking a breath to centre herself and give herself distance from a problem. She doesn’t often speak to Raleigh in Japanese. But she finds it comforting knowing that she can when she needs to, that he will understand, that drifting with her has made it easier for him to speak the language himself. How a phoneme feels inside someone else’s mouth is intimate in a way she doubts she could explain to anyone else.)
In some ways it’s far worse for Mako. She’s lived in Jaeger programme facilities since she was eight years old. Since Stacker had picked her up out of the rubble as a child and carried her off with him, she’s followed him everywhere. Raleigh knows first hand what it was like to be a Jaeger pilot at the height of their success, the way they were golden and given their head in so many things. (It doesn’t surprise Raleigh to discover that Stacker had used all his favours for two things, getting his people the resources they need, and keeping Mako by his side.) She’s twenty three years old and has a masters degree, but no legal residency rights anywhere. According to the Japanese government she needed to declare citizenship by the time she was twenty two, they’re prepared to open a review case for her due to extenuating circumstances - ie the not insignificant role she’s played in cancelling the apocalypse - but while they’re happy to issue her a temporary residency visa, they’re not willing to issue her a passport until her case has been reviewed, and the backlog is understandably substantial. No amount of politely explaining that she’s never had joint nationality she’s always been Japanese - the hostility of the British authorities to Stacker’s attempts to get her residency rights sorted out in case anything happened to him, had been the main reason he hadn’t been home in over a decade before he died - seems to help the process. She can’t get out of Hong Kong officially without a passport, and the only way she can get into Japan without one is with her refugee papers which she’s not even certain exist. (Herc admits that he’d worried about Chuck having similar problems - having fully expected that if only one them survived it wouldn’t be him - and had taken advantage of the Australian government’s gratitude for their heroics in Sydney Harbour to get his paperwork straight.) Raleigh spends a lot of time asking politely persistent questions of the UN body that the Jaeger programme had originally been funded by. However much the Marshall had been exactly the kind of parent Mako had needed - despite the kaiju, she’d been safe and happy and well cared for - both he and they know that they absolutely shouldn’t have let him walk off with an eight year old orphan without appropriate checks and paperwork and now would be a good time to cough them up.
The body in question aren’t particularly forthcoming, but both Mako and Raleigh do receive mysterious padded envelopes with UN issued diplomatic papers to let them travel as necessary on commercial rather than military transport methods. Many of the other former Shatterdome staff members report their difficulties getting home mysteriously evaporating after that. As Choi wryly comments, gesturing with his own padded envelope: “Thank you for you service, now please shut up and go away.”
It doesn’t, however, solve Mako and Raleigh’s main problem. Where ever they’re going, they want to go together. And while their respective countries may now be reasonably willing to take them back, they’re probably equally hostile to them bringing the other with them.
Mako isn’t sure who or what put the idea into Rayleigh’s head, but she can narrow down to within days the when of it, as his tense unhappiness has gradually given way to guarded thoughtfulness, and now to this suppressed eagerness that she recognises from when he was trying to sell her and everyone else on their drift compatibility. She doesn’t think he’s going to be any less tenacious about convincing her that they should get married. Green card marriages are still something of a pop culture cliche, that she’s not convinced are actually as much of a thing as US movies from the 90s suggest - though she does accede to his point that they’re kind of famously bonded, people are going to want to believe its real - and she’s not actually convinced it will help either of their cause with the Japanese authorities.
“Look, there are very few things I’m certain about,” Rayleigh offers, “but the one thing I do know, is that as far as I’m concerned: where you go, I go. And I’m pretty sure that it’s the same for you.”
Mako nods into the not-really a question pause that he leaves there. With everything else going on she hasn't really had a chance to sit down and think properly through what he is to her now. Her co-pilot, her best friend, the other half of soul. She’s a woman of science, she knows exactly how fanciful that sounds, but it doesn’t change that it feels true. She knows that Gottlieb has a theory about remnant or proto hive minds that normally humans wouldn’t have access to, that the drift somehow allows us to access. She doesn’t know how she feels about that. Only knows that she remembers feeling very small and very alone, and her whole life has aimed at never being like that again - that drifting in the Jaeger was the closest she’s ever felt to certain that she never would be again. As long as she has Rayleigh is by her side, she can believe that she can have that out in the world.
“That being the case, if getting married will keep you safe, keeps anyone turning round and making one of us stateless, then sign me up. We’ve shared our brains, and a giant robot body to fight monsters, it doesn’t get much more intimate than that. What does it matter if it’s not the kind of love that they mean? You’re the most important person on the planet to me, if it takes a piece of paper and a ring to get other people to accept that then so be it.”
“What happens when you meet someone you do love romantically,” she asks, pushing away the thought of ‘not that kind of love’ and focusing on the most important person to me part.
He shrugs with studied indifference, “if one of us falls in love with someone else, we won’t exactly be able to hide it from each other, so we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. We’re both going to be a bit too busy for the immediate future to need to worry about that for a while, and let’s be honest, most strangers interested in either of us ‘like that’ at the moment aren’t really interested in us as people.”
He looks faintly conflicted, as though he’s remembering things from his first go round at jaeger piloting that he’s retrospectively embarrassed about. She half-remembers what it was like, she’d been too young and too focused on her research and her own quest to be a pilot to really pay it much attention. (And besides Stacker had been keen to shield her from that, and most of the pilots had been disinclined to face his wrath on that front.) Remembers the beautiful people who’d hung around wherever the rangers - whether pilots or potentials in training - congregated off base, the heady mixture of danger and adrenaline that hung about them and drew people to them like moths to a flame. She’d wanted to be a jaeger pilot too much to be interested in the rest of them like that. Until she’d spent time searching through the brain scans looking for a match for Rayleigh she’d never really given serious thought to what a match for herself would be like. (So many of the strongest matches Mako had worked alongside had been familial bonds, her younger self had been focused on growing up into the perfect match to fight alongside one particular person. She’d always been happy enough to shield him in turn from that kind of attention, to let her presence lie to those people about a different kind of grief.) It had never occurred to her to look for that in a stranger, she was happy to trust the brain scans and their clean logic in the absence of a familial bond.
Unspoken is the thought that not many people could live long term with knowing they’d always be second in someone’s heart. Mako’s sure it’s different with familial bonds or where the relationship pre-dates the drift bond - Gottlieb’s wife had apparently taken the news with mirthful good humour and been unsurprised by it to the point of his and Gieszler’s mutual annoyance - but she suspects that anyone getting involved with either herself or Rayleigh would have second thoughts about where they stood. And honestly, Mako isn’t certain they wouldn’t be right to have doubts, she’s not certain even now, months after they’ve last drifted, that she could stand to put anyone above him in her heart, or for him to do the same. The rings might be a lie on one level but they tell a deeper truth. Maybe not romantic or sexual, but an agreement to walk together into whatever the future holds for them.
“Where you go, I go,” she tells him and he nods like she’d said everything else out loud.
“For the rest of our lives,” he affirms. And maybe that’s all that matters in the end.
~
Raleigh is much more demonstrative than Mako, logically, she knows that their respective losses have intensified their own natural tendencies - but when they first met him, she thought she’d never get used to it. Now she finds it comforting, the way she never has to guess at what he’s thinking or feeling, because his emotions will write themselves across his face. She doesn’t think he’s rubbing off on her, though by her own standards she is definitely less self-contained than she had previously prided herself on. But there’s a level of ‘knowing’ that drifting together gives you, a bone deep familiarity with each other’s body language that you can’t help but gain. He knows her like few people ever have, ever will she suspects, she would have expected to hate that, but she doesn’t and he knows it. She likes that too. To be known, to be understood without explanation, Mako understands exactly why ‘drift compatibility’ has become the subject of so much envy and romanticisation out there in the rest of the world.
Before drift compatibility was fully understood, it seeped out into the wider cultural zeitgeist. Perhaps predictably it first found popularity in queer romance novels, brothers in arms - and a smaller sub-genre of sisters in arms - fighting monsters together and finding epic heroic love along the way. As more information bled into the public domain, mostly as part of the campaigns to recruit more Jaeger pilots from the wider population, prioritising people with pre-existing bonds, siblings, friends, lovers, the idea spread out through wider romance and science fiction. Until, by the time the Jaeger programme had passed its heyday, it had morphed and combined with the wider trope of ‘soul bonds’ into something that barely resembled the reality of the situation.
Drift compatibility isn’t fate or destiny. More like a latent ability that lurks in all humans, that the drift technology was able to tap into, the early pilots hadn’t understood it, it was just obvious that some people were able to form strong connections and that made them better at piloting the jaegers together. The stronger the pre-existing bond, the greater the trust between the people in question the more likely it was to work. But even then you could take two pilots who’d never met before throw them into a jaeger in a desperate crisis, and sheer bloody minded determination to get the job done would often get them through. It wasn’t as stable and harder to maintain longer term and things were more likely to go wrong but if the choice was that or letting a Kaiju rampage for longer then it was often worth taking. By the time they reached the Mark III Jaegers the research division had worked out brain scans that filtered down options among the solo recruits considerably and took a lot of the guesswork and trial and error out of the process.
The problem was, that it was really difficult to research. Pre-2015 and post-2020 the Jaeger pilots didn’t have particularly high survival rates. Most of the research was focused on improving the bond for piloting, there wasn’t much time or money left for the more philosophical or esoteric aspects. Also the surviving ‘retired’ jaeger pilots tended to be fairly devastated by grief and weren’t exactly queuing up to take part in the research, unless it was going to directly help their former colleagues. The process of drifting tended to bind the pilots tightly together, regardless of how close they’d been before so it was difficult to gather data on how much of that was inherent and how much was a result of drifting. So much of the bond is unspoken, everything understood in the drift, that the pilots who would happily talk about it, rarely have the words to do so.
One thing seems consistent, once a pair of pilots have drifted and built a strong connection, it’s unwise to separate them against their will.
~
It’s a paper marriage.
It changes nothing about what they are to each other.
It changes everything.
~
They’re almost always on the road. Hotel rooms, airports, conference centres, laboratories, factories, military bases. Constantly surrounded by nosy strangers it’s easy to form an united front and to disguise how out of sync they have become. As a married couple, they’re always housed together, so they never have any real alone time. Raleigh tries to give her space, understanding that she’s an only child - and a pretty self-contained one at that - and needs more alone time than he does but Mako can’t explain that her claustrophobia is less a desire to be away from him, just exhaustion with being unable to be as close as she wants to be.
(In many ways, they both wear their wedding rings like armour. A polite reminder to too-interested strangers that they are bound together and uninterested in anyone who’d come between them.)
In Shanghai they accidentally end up with a twin room instead of a double. There are two beds, they don’t need to share so they don’t. Mako expects to feel relieved, but her bed feels huge and cold and empty. She’s spent so much of her life in dorms and barracks, she’s never slept in a double bed on her own before, and it takes her forever to get to sleep. She hasn’t had a nightmare in months but that night they’re particularly bad, vivid and detailed, and much longer than they’ve been since just after their first aborted drift. She jerks awake, and discovers to her embarrassment that she’s been crying in her sleep, doubly confused by the situation she spends a long few minutes watching the steady rise and fall of Raleigh’s shoulders, turned away from her in the other bed. Normally if one of them has a nightmare, the other will wake them before it gets too bad, having learned the sound of each other’s sleeping distress. It’s the one intimacy they still have no problem sharing - they know each other’s nightmares too well for embarrassment or shame, knowing instinctively when the other needs to talk it out or just wants to be held.
It’s not until she’s standing in the bathroom, slowly drinking a glass of water and popping out one of her emergency sleeping pills that she realises what’s wrong. Puts together the other empty glass on the sink, the packet carefully tucked back in it’s place, but with two less tablets that it should have, with Raleigh’s uncharacteristically deep sleep. She’s not the only one who had a nightmare tonight. She creeps back into the main room, and confirms that he hasn’t moved, has in fact built a nest of all the rest of the hotel pillows - she only ever uses one very flat pillow, and she’s known him to happily settle for his own folded arm or jacket - and even in the half-light his lips look slightly swollen, like he’d bitten them raw.
She stands there in the twilight for a long time, watching the unhappy hunch of his shoulders and wondering where everything went wrong.
It’s a relief when normal service is resumed at the next hotel. It’s a giant king size bed, plenty of space to sleep without touching, but still close enough to hear each other breathe. Mako is asleep within minutes, and when she wakes from another nightmare, she’s already turned towards Raleigh, opening her eyes to see his hand falling away from where he’d reached to shake her awake, landing in the empty mattress between them. Nothing between them feels easy anymore, but this is easy enough, she reaches back and he catches her hand and squeezes it.
He doesn’t ask if she’s alright; she doesn’t lie about it.
They fall back asleep like that. Fingers linked, arms stretched between them.
Alone together. Lonely together.
~
“Tell me what’s wrong, Mako,” he whispers into the silence of the hotel room, “help me fix this, I thought you missed drifting as much as I do.”
“I do,” she assures him, “its just…” she trails off unable to finish the thought. She understands now what he meant about the shock of silence where there used to be someone else. She wants to drift with him so much, to have him in her head and to be in his, to have everything clear and understood between them. To be rid of this constant ache and the echoing silences between them. And yet.
When the request had come through for their help with research on the bridge, she’d shared his infectious enthusiasm to take part. She’d been glad to help with the work, Gottlieb and Geiszler have a much more complicated relationship with their bond than she and Raleigh do. She’d hoped - as she was sure that Raleigh was also hoping - that it would put them back on track, that they’d fall back into sync again. That thought had carried them all the way Berlin. How can she explain to someone who’s stood inside her worst nightmares, that she’s scared of what he might find inside her head, so scared that they hadn’t been able to get into drift together.
He kneels on the bed in front of her, and she leans up into the gesture, forehead to forehead, bringing her own right hand up to his cheek as he mirrors the gesture with his own. She understands what he’s doing, trying to pull her back to that moment of perfect understanding, the closest they’ve ever felt outside of drift. A moment when they felt unbreakable, like they could do anything as long as they were together. She misses that certainty desperately too. In the aftermath they’d done this a lot when they’d needed to centre themselves or reconnect; it’d become a small comfortable way to demonstrate affection when they needed to ‘prove’ the legitimacy of their relationship to officials that didn’t violate her sense of proprietary. She’s also certain that if he kisses her forehead, as he’s done often lately when they’ve separated, she’ll either scream or burst into tears. But without an audience of others, he also seems much closer to his own breaking point, pushing his face into hers, noses bumping, as though he can burrow into her brain. Up close she can see the strain and the sadness on his face, and she wonders when she last really looked at his face when they were alone. When she got so hung up at hiding her own feelings for him that she stopped seeing his feelings for her.
For a moment everything falls away, and she can see exactly how to fix this, lets her body take the wheel and uses the hand cupping his cheek to guide his face round so she can kiss him. The kiss is sweet, tender and chaste for a long moment and her heart sinks, but only for a moment, before she feels his hand on her cheek gently nudge her own head into a different angle and suddenly the kiss is something rather more heated. It’s as though something catches fire between them, as though they’ve both been holding back their desires thinking the other didn’t share them.
She can’t resist running her hands over his chest, drinking in his familiar scars, the visible evidence of the strength she knows he works hard to keep in his whole body. His muscles flex under her fingers, and when she glances up at his face in response, his whole face is alight with mischief and delight. He returns the gesture, trailing gentle fingers over the taut muscles of her own abdomen before sliding firmly up her sides to find the opening of her bra. It’s a practical and comfortable sports bra, she’d chosen it for utility that morning ahead of the tests, though now she wishes she’d brought something prettier and girlier for this moment. For a moment she sees his amusement as he guesses at her thoughts, his delight at the discovery of this secret tiny vanity, before his eyes dilate with desire as he imagines the alternative for the first time. Clearly he hasn’t allowed himself to think about what she was wearing under her clothes, and now months of determinedly not thinking about it are coming down on him at once. Plenty of men have looked at her with lust in their eyes over the years, but she’s alway thought it a covetous look, a desire to possess and control her, and disdained it accordingly. She knows this look, has seen it after they sparred the first time, after the first time they successfully fought a kaiju together - the delight and excitement of finding an equal, a partner that you knew you could do something wonderful with.
They fall into sync, moving and touching, kissing and caressing, exploring with care and curiosity, able to read each other’s body language and finish each others sentences.
(They show up at the lab the following morning for another attempt at drifting and while they feel different they don’t think they’re acting all that differently until Newt looks up from his notes and does an almost comic double take at them.
“Seriously, nine months you’ve been married, and it took you until now to consummate things? There’s not rushing into things, and then there’s that. That cannot be good for you…what am I talking about, that’s clearly not good for you, look how much happier you both are, how much less tense. Who gets married to the other half of their epic, heroic, save the world bond, and then doesn’t have sex with them?”
“Newton,” Gottlieb interrupts, mercifully, “I have a lower than zero desire to have sex with you. But if someone tried to deport you and forcibly separate you from me and our work, I would marry you in a heart-beat to prevent it. If we’re done gossiping, let’s get on with the tests.”
He marches off toward the experimental set-up without a backwards glance, leaving his counterpart gaping like a fish in his wake.
Newt glances about shiftily for a few moments before shrugging philosophically, “yeah, fair point, feelings mutual, Hermann. Drifting really does a number on your sense of what normal feelings are. Kinda comforting to know we’re not the only ones a bit messed up about it, you know?”)
They don’t exactly have a jaeger to work with, not even one of the original interface cradles, instead they’ve refined the bridge they’d used in Hong Kong; turned it into something more stable and less militarised. There isn’t enough space in the lab for Mako and Rayleigh to spar as they’d originally intended so instead they dance. Between them they manage something approximating formal dancing - though it owes rather more to a St Bernards Waltz than to anything found in a ballroom. Together and apart, round and round their bodies go, while inside their brains they revel in being inside each other’s minds for the first time in so long.
The two scientists are distracted, focusing on their monitors and outputs, exclaiming quietly at each other and not paying attention to Mako and Rayleigh themselves. It’s easy to forget that they have an audience, for temptation and curiosity to overwhelm them as they spin outside and in, Rayleigh twirls Mako under his arm and it’s so easy to lean in and kiss. It’s strange and intense, a feedback loop of good feelings that brings up every last positive memory either of them has of desire and sex whether first or second hand. It’s too much and not enough, they don’t get to enjoy it for very long because it evidentially sends multiple sensors into overdrive as various alarms start going off causing them to break apart and practically ricochet away from each other.
“Sorry!”
“Sorry.”
“What…oh”
There’s a long awkward silence between them all before Rayleigh shakes himself and says, “Let’s try that again, shall we?”
“Don’t think about sex,” admonishes Gottlieb, just as they’re trying to get back into dual drift.
“That’s like saying, ‘don’t think about pink elephants’,” counters Newt, “pick something less fraught to think about, music or art or sport, food even, something with strong emotional or physical response but not both.”
“I don’t know what kind of sport you watch or play,” mutters Rayleigh, “but I have pretty strong emotions about sport.”
Mako has only just recovered her composure, but she still manages to summon a smile, “maybe food, I like food, you like food, but it’s not something we’re likely to get…over excited about. I was looking forward to that Nepalese restaurant we were talking about going to after this. Let’s focus on that.”
“Right, close my eyes and think of momos, I can do that,” he replies wryly.
“You’re incorrigible,” she mutters in return.
This attempt goes substantially better, gaining the scientists most of the data they need - apparently focusing on the best technique for eating various kinds of dumplings with chopsticks is an excellent mental agility test, a good fine motor dexterity exercise - and leaving Mako and Rayleigh merely ravenously hungry.
They really had planned to go out for dinner that evening, had even planned to ask the other two out to join them, but once they get back to the hotel to freshen up, the thought of going out again seems suddenly intolerable. It’s a nice hotel, so they take advantage of room service, ordering a mini-banquet of interesting options for themselves. They end up spending a happy couple of hours trying out various foods they thought about in the drift, comparing how they taste to themselves with how they remember them tasting to the other.
Afterwards, they settle in comfortably propped up against the headboard, in a nest of the spare pillows they never normally use, and revel in being able to be close without all the unspoken baggage hanging between them.
“We did everything in the wrong order, and much as I’m happy about where we are now, maybe we need to go back to the beginning, learn each other like normal couples do, so we don’t get over-reliant on drift knowledge and get out of sync again.”
“Rayleigh Beckett, are you proposing to court me?” Mako questions her voice full of suppressed laughter.
“Why not? It’s not as though either of us had normal teenage dating experiences, we can pick the ones we’d have liked to have and figure out which ones are fun together,” he suggests.
“Though probably with less sneaking around,” she replies with a bittersweet smile. As wonderful as drifting again had been, it’s brought their respective bereavements closer to the surface than they’ve been in quite some time. She feels his desire to show her off to Yancy, to have him like her and approve of their relationship no less than she wishes that her sensei could have been at their wedding, that she could have seen Rayleigh’s determined campaign to win his approval and it’s inevitable success.
“Oh god the Marshall, would not have let me away with anything, would he? He’d have been digging up nineteenth century Japanese courtship rituals and rules of etiquette and holding me to them to see how serious I really was.”
“And you’d have done them all, wouldn’t you,” she says wonderingly, “even though you’d know they were absolutely ridiculously old-fashioned and nothing I’d grown up expecting.”
“Absolutely. I mean, I’d have also been checking in with you all the time to make sure you were alright with it,” he muses, “and we’d probably have also been sneaking around trying not to get caught making out in store cupboards because that’s also a time-honoured tradition of military base romances.”
“And I’d have to tell anyone who caught us,” Mako giggles, the ghost of tears almost but not entirely banished, “that I was respecting your cultural tradition of sneaking around behind your girlfriend's strict father’s back!”
“See, we’d have had so much fun. Now I’m definitely taking you out for some old school dates, cinema, ten pin bowling, I bet there’s an ‘ironic’ old school arcade somewhere in Kreuzberg. Next time we’re in Tokyo we can go goldfish scooping! We should make a list!”
“Everything we’ve ever seen in ridiculous teen movies?”
“Exactly, anything we’ve seen and wished we could do ourselves, though,” he adds thoughtfully, “you’re going to have to keep me right on propriety. It was easy to not touch you in public before when I thought you didn’t want to be touched but knowing that you do makes it easier to forget not to touch you. Especially when we’ll be doing date things.”
“And half the point of a lot of those activities is to give couples a plausible excuse to touch each other in public,” Mako acknowledges.
“Right so, I want us to have the fun of them, but also not to make you uncomfortable or unhappy by accident in the process, I don’t know if it would be easier to do them in Japan where I’d be surrounded by those same cultural norms and absorb it that way, or to do it in the states where it’d be less pressure for you if we slip up?”
“Well, you brought up Kreuzberg, why don’t we try it here where we’re both…”
“A bit weird and foreign?”
“I was going to say fish out of water, but that works too, we can be strangers in a strange place until we figure out what we can and can’t do comfortably and respectably,” she suggests, “I’m sure our scientist friends will be happy for us to stick around for a while longer and give them more data.”
“And then if people look at us strangely in other places we can blame courting in Berlin, picking up odd European habits, we’ll be the same kind of weirdo wherever we go.”
~
They’re the last surviving jaeger pilot pair, so they can claim whatever they like about behaviours that other people find odd. What do those people know? They haven’t seen or done the things that the two of them have seen and done. Rayleigh can explain in bald words what it was like to fall through the portal, but he can’t really convey how truly strange, how alien in every way that other dimension was, to anyone. He doesn’t really like to talk about it, feels that other people are almost willfully misunderstanding him. But he can talk to Mako about it for hours, she’s seen it through his eyes, felt how it made him feel, she wasn’t there - he wishes he could have shared it with her, he was unspeakably glad to know she was safe elsewhere - but she understands as know one else can. The drift bond itself is like that, hard to explain fully to anyone who hasn’t drifted and even among those who have, it’s widely accepted that every drift combination and bond will be different. Raleigh has looked at the world through Mako’s eyes, and Mako has looked at the world through his, they know each other’s deepest fears, greatest joys and worst nightmares. And they have chosen over and again to talk them through out loud, to not leave the difficult things unspoken in the drift. Is that love? And if so what kind? Are they kin, siblings in arms, friends, lovers, all of the above? Those infamous three words are both true and insufficient to explain it.
“Where I go, they go,” they politely insist whenever anyone wants to bring only one of them in on a new project or to a new city. They’ve perfected casual hand gestures, that incidentally show off the simple gold bands they both wear, to politely but pointedly remind people that they are bound together by law as well as the drift.
Drifting together has changed them both in irreversible ways, and yet it has made them more intensely themselves than either of them could ever have imagined.