pullmeoutalive | RO > call me out; a forever open RP post

I dunno. Where's a good spot to play hooky?

... .Definitely not the barracks. [ They'll check there. ]

The kwoon...or the swimming pool?

Interesting choices. Dunno if I'm feeling up for a swim at the moment.

[ — right. maybe the pool isn't such a good choice, given where they've just come from.

(but it's a heated indoor pool, nice and warm, and not likely to be occupied at this time of night ~~and Raleigh shirtless and in swim trunks~~ — ) ]

We could stay in the shallow end, [ she suggests teasingly, but then her smirk fades and her hand seeks his out where it rests on the mattress of her cot, winding her fingers around and between his.

Ultimately, she doesn't really care where they go...just as long as he stays with her. ]

Or, we could find some place with less water and more pillows.

[ Her hand on his draws his gaze down from contemplating the ceiling. He smiles- that smile that he only ever seems to smile for Mako- and gives her hand a little squeeze.

He gets where she's coming from. Even the distance between their two beds feels like too much right now. ]

Wouldn't have to escape if these cots were bigger.

[ A slow smile blooms on her face again; she winds her fingers in his more tightly at that squeeze and pulls at his hand, just slightly, just enough to mimic the pull she's been feeling toward him since they'd been plucked from the ocean. ]

You don't think we'll both fit? [ She tugs a little more. ] Maybe we should find out.

So forward, Miss Mori. [ he's nothing short of amused when he says it, releasing her hand and motioning for her to scoot.

Time to see if a pair of Rangers can squeeze onto one cot. ]

[ archly: ] It was your suggestion. [ even though she'd been thinking it before he'd mentioned it.

— and she's already scooted over, but she does so more to make more room for him. If one Ranger is smaller than the other, does that help them fit in the cot?

Maybe it does, because as he reclines she slots their legs together, intertwining hers with his, and it seems to give them a bit more balance so that neither falls off. ]

Edited 2014-02-22 00:28 (UTC)

[ He loops his arms around her as well- surely now neither of them will fall off the bed. ]

Looks like we both fit.

[ She's not sure where to put her head, now — face to face is a bit too close and their noses almost brush together, and she's not sure how much more forehead nuzzling he can take — so Mako ducks her head underneath his chin, pressing her face into his neck, letting wisps of her hair tickle his nose. She can breathe him in better this way, too. ]

You're warm, [ she whispers, feeling herself relaxing against him in slow increments. ] I didn't know you were this warm.

[ It works out just fine- even if her hair is tickling his nose. He rests his chin on the top of her head, letting out a sigh that seems to relax his whole body.

This was better. He couldn't take anymore of that damned distance, even if she had just been only one bed over.

He chuckles, a low, soft sound. ] Living in Alaska all that time must've raised my core temperature.

...I thought maybe you just hibernated, when it got really cold there. Like a bear.

[ She's teasing, smiling as her arms wind around his waist, fingers clinging a bit in his clothes. ]

If that was the case, then I'd never get out of bed. [ Come on Mako, it's Alaska ]

[ nuzzling him, and brushing her lips just slightly against the skin of his neck as she speaks. ]

That doesn't sound so unappealing, at the moment, does it.

Edited 2014-02-24 19:24 (UTC)

It really doesn't.

[ especially if she keeps doing that. He brings a hand up and runs his fingers through her hair. ]

[ The way his fingers are threading through her hair makes her momentarily freeze, in his arms — she'd felt how he'd shifted when her lips had brushed against his neck, but she hadn't been able to help herself (and besides it hadn't exactly been a kiss, only a ghost of one) and she'd wondered whether or not he'd noticed.

Well, that question is answered.

But as much as she's not sure what boundaries are allowed to be crossed and which ones aren't — and what boundaries there even are between them, now, because when you share your mind wholly with someone it's hard to say where limits are — Mako finds herself wanting to find out, wanting to know what he'll do if she repeats the action, and so she does, brushing her lips a bit more firmly this time against the hollow of his throat where it tastes like salt. ]

[ OH GOD i am sorry how huge that is, please forgive me also if you want me to write a starter i am more than happy to do so!! ]

[ I AM DEAD. I AM DYING I AM DEAD THIS IS PERFECT. If you don't mind starting, go right ahead!! ]

[ They're both testing, both seeing what, if any boundaries exist.

She seems to be a bit braver than him, or at least more forward about it, which he actually finds he's grateful for. Were it anyone else, they might be dancing around this for a while. ]

You gonna keep doing that?

[ She hides her smile in his collarbone — a smile, not a smirk, because she's so giddy with the feeling of just touching him like this that she almost can't contain it. She's fairly sure he can feel her shivering. ]

...Maybe. [ One of her hands, still clinging to his clothes, steals up to stroke slowly and soothingly along the length of his back. ] Maybe I'll decide to do this, instead.

[ His first thought is that she's shivering because she's cold, until he feels her smiles against his skin. A smile of his own appears on his face- he understands. Every time she moves, every touch of skin on skin sends electricity shooting through his veins. ]

Mako, at this point I'm inclined to let you do whatever you want. [ as long as it means staying tangled up just like this. ]

...Whatever I want?

[ She nuzzles him again just because she can, brushing her nose and lips against his neck once more, and then presses an open-mouthed kiss to that soft skin, hot and wet and with the barest scrape of teeth.

This is why he shouldn't let her have free rein. ]

[ Sensei gives her the scrapbook when she's twelve. It's for memories that you wish to keep, he encourages her, gently. Write in it, put pictures into it, whatever you like. It will be yours alone to look at; a place for your private thoughts.

But Mako puts the book away, underneath her bed, and it stays there for an entire year. She doesn't wish to put anything in it. Memories are all she has of her parents, of her home, and she doesn't want to put them to paper yet, because the grief from Onibaba's attack is still too near; she doesn't know when she will make newer ones, happier ones, if ever. Her private thoughts are filled with sorrow and regret and an underlying, unyielding and ruthless determination.

Vengeance is like an open wound, Sensei tells her one day out of the blue, and when she inquires about his meaning further he is silent before he changes the subject and pours her some tea.

And then when she's thirteen, Yancy and Raleigh Becket defeat Yamarashi off of the coast of Los Angeles in their Jaeger, Gipsy Danger. The very next day Mako takes the book out from under her bed, dusts it off, and begins to write in it.

The Becket brothers are an instant media sensation. They are the youngest pilots on record, particularly Raleigh; he's only nineteen (almost twenty) and devastatingly handsome, and he and Yancy are suddenly plastered on every website and magazine cover and featured in every televised coverage of the war imaginable. At first, her interest is solely in the magnificent Jaeger that is Gipsy Danger — her design, her strengths and weapon capabilities, and Mako replays Gipsy Danger's battles against the kaiju over and over. This leads to her finding video clips of interviews of the Becket brothers, listening to them talk and joke and discuss their successes on air. She learns that they are both orphans, that their parents are deceased — no mention of circumstances, but Mako doesn't need to know specifics to identify with them, to feel an instant understanding. She and Chuck Hansen swap posters and trading cards and Gipsy Danger figurines.

She reads up on Raleigh Becket, in particular: he loves ice cream, even though he's from Alaska (which she finds endlessly amusing); he likes the color blue; he can speak French, as it was his mother's nationality, and he broke his leg once when he was young, skiing in the Alps. She follows fansites for the female contingent of his fans that religiously document his dating escapades and whom he's seen with, and she's inordinately pleased that he doesn't seem to pursue serious relationships despite being surrounded constantly by Jaeger flies. She finds herself cutting out clippings of him, first in his PPDC fatigues, and then other photoshoots — casual clothes with his hair wet, his shirt open to reveal washboard abdominals, and then later pictures of him shirtless entirely — in Tiger Beat magazines.

Mako entertains fantasies of meeting him, when she's older — of driving her own Jaeger with some yet-unknown copilot, and participating in a multiple Jaeger drop as the Beckets did in Manila, with Horizon Brave and Lucky Seven — and impressing him with her piloting skills and her ability to take down a kaiju in record time. He'll be impressed with her strength despite her youth, she thinks, as she's planning on entering the academy at age sixteen and piloting by the time she's eighteen. Perhaps he'll train with her; perhaps he'll think she's pretty. He'll eventually confess his love for her, she's decided, in a spontaneous sort of declaration, as she's pinning him mercilessly on his back in the kwoon.

And then, in 2020, Knifehead appears off the coast of Anchorage. Gipsy is literally torn in half. Yancy is dead.

Raleigh survives — even manages to pilot his Jaeger alone, back to shore — but he quits immediately afterward, and Mako is numb again with grief. She can't understand how he can just quit, after how talented and strong he and his brother were, but at the same time she begins to realize that Yancy was his beacon, his center, his fixed point to which Raleigh oriented himself. Without him Raleigh is aimless, as evidenced when he resigns and literally drops off of the face of the earth.

Chuck, in anger, rips the posters of the Becket brothers from his wall in the Shatterdome barracks, crushes his Gipsy Danger figurines under his boots. Washout, he spits venemously. Quitter. What a fuckin' loser.

Mako holes herself up in her room, looking over her years' worth of scrapbook clippings and writings and photographs, and when Sensei comes to check on her in her quarters he finds her with her eyes swollen and red; she blames the allergies she gets from Lima's dry climate.

These memories are now too painful as well and she puts the book away, hiding it underneath stacks of clothing in her dresser. It stays there for years, even through her moves to Kodiak Island and then Hong Kong, still buried underneath everything she owns. For a time she puts Raleigh Becket out of her mind, even forgetting about him briefly — his abs and his sandy blond hair and blue eyes and the way his lips curve into a smile for the camera, his sorrow, his tragedy — and focuses on her own goals. She aces her way through the academy and through Jaeger simulations (fifty-one drops, fifty-one kills). She dyes the tips of her hair blue. Vengeance is at hand.

The scrapbook is forgotten.

...Until the day that Raleigh Becket is rooting around in her drawer at her request, post-Operation Pitfall, looking for her turtleneck sweater so that they can dress and go to the mess hall for dinner, and he pulls it out and looks at it quizzically, quirking his eyebrows at her. ]

...That's... [ oh, god ] ...nothing. Just some pictures.

[ and she makes a halfhearted grab, at it. ]

[ He takes a step back, using his height advantage for once and keeping the book out of her reach. ]

Doesn't look like nothing to me.

[ He has a sister. He knows what a super-special-secret scrapbook looks like. ]

[ ...Don't make her take you down over a scrapbook, Raleigh. He may have height on his side, at least half a foot on her, but he should never underestimate Mako's need to preserve her pride.

She leaps for it, bracing herself with a hand on his shoulder to jump higher. ]

— No, I told you, it's nothing! — don't — Raleigh — give it!

RO > call me out; a forever open RP post

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raleigh. (okay you saw this coming, right, say you did)

OMFG

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with pleasure! also so many apologies for how long this took...

<333

:3