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