wнen тнe мoυnтaιn тoυcнeѕ тнe valley. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
midvalley) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
pullmeoutalive2012-10-01 09:30 pm
midvalley) wrote in pullmeoutalive2012-10-01 09:30 pm
Entry tags:
RO > call me out; a forever open RP post
| CALL ME OUT a forever open rp post full muselist here. comment with the name of the character you want in the subject line. create a scenario or not. whatevs. let the tagging commence! |
OMFG
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. ]
<333
Doesn't look like nothing to me.
[ He has a sister. He knows what a super-special-secret scrapbook looks like. ]
:3
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!
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She considers making him hand it over, but that would involve enacting some kind of violence and an embarrassing book of pictures isn't worth it, she thinks — so she huffs and goes to the other corner of her room, snatching up her turtleneck sweater and pulling it almost irritably over her head in the process. ]
...I guess there's no stopping you from doing so, is there.
[ She folds her arms stubbornly across her chest; she should have said it was technical blueprints, and he probably would have left it alone, then. ]
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[ He remarks absently as he begins flipping through the scrapbook. Lots of things on Gipsy, which doesn't surprise him considering Mako helped rebuild her.
As he gets farther in, however... ]
Mako, were you-? [ He flips through a few more pages. There sure are a lot of embarrassing picture of him in here. His understanding of Japanese as a written language is rough at best, but "he loves me, he loves me not" is helpfully scrawled in English a few times ] Were you a Danger Girl?
[ And yes, he is quite aware of the name of he and Yancy's female fanbase. He may or may not have Googled himself a few times out of pure vanity. ]
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She turns back to face him where he's sitting on her bunk, browsing the scrapbook, and tries to cover her face with her hands. ]
...I never called myself one specifically, no.
[ ...that's a yes. ]
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... those teen magazine photo shoots were the worst.
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What do you mean, 'worst'? [ She tips her chin at a picture of him lying in a field of grass, smirking at the camera, his shirt open to bare his smooth, unblemished stomach as his hand toys teasingly at his belt line. ] ...That one was my favorite.
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[ He shoots her a glance ] ...That one? Really?
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Mako edges even closer until she's perching on the edge of the bunk next to him, leaning a bit on his shoulder as she looks again at the pictures she hasn't glanced at in years. ]
Everyone feels as though they're a little invincible, when they're young. [ herself included, even if she's the same age now as he was back then, and even though she's much more cautious and calculating than he is.
she nods again at the picture in question. ] That one was, yes, because of the look you're giving the camera and where your hand is. It's playful, like you're teasing the viewer. Seducing them.
[ ...still smirking. ]
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He's not upset by her remark, it's just a truth of his reality- of their reality. ]
Yeah? [ he glances at her, a grin creeping its way onto his face ] And did I seduce you?
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As evidenced by the way she reacts to his question — the corners of her mouth turn upwards, a gleam in her eye somewhere between shy and happy and predatory shining through, before she schools her features neutrally and mock-frowns at him. ]
...No. Of course not. I'm immune to your charms.
[ ...for maybe all of five minutes. ]
Besides, I'm pretty sure I'm the one who seduced you.
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You know, I think you did.
[ Because really, he was pretty taken with her from the moment they met. ]
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Maybe she did seduce him, after they'd met, but it had all started as a spark from her admiration for him, back when she was young; she glances back down at the scrapbook again, a bit sheepishly. ]
...You must think I was so silly, though, writing those kind of things back then. I didn't even know you, and I imagined meeting you when I became a pilot, impressing you with my skills.
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I can't believe I agreed to some of this stuff.
[ a pause, and he considers her for a moment ] And for the record, you did impress me with your skills.
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You shouldn't be embarrassed. You were a celebrity, then and now; someone to be looked up to and admired.
[ They both are, although Mako is nowhere near as used to it and isn't very fond of the public's attention. ]
— By everyone, not just teenaged girls who had crushes on you. [ And then the smirk makes its reappearance. ]
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...That would be terrible, wouldn't it. You'd be so demanding — you'd probably start calling up some of your old Danger Girl followers, to relive your glory days.
[ ...He'd better not get any real ideas of doing that though, because she's just teasing him and if any of those former Jaeger flies even dared to set foot near him...
...well, let's just say they might be short a foot, then. ]
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[ he smirks, clearly joking, and he leans over to bump their foreheads together ] You're right. It does sound terrible.
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It would be fun, but you'd feel it the next day. You'd probably need someone to take care of you.
[ the phrase "no longer a spring chicken" hangs in the air, unsaid. ]
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[ he does is best to look so offended, but it's really hard when he's grinning like that ]
..I may have too many nuzzling icons :3
[ she might be trying her best to hold back a giggle. ]
you can nevr have too many nuzzling icons
yess i am enabled!!!
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