Open Post.

[sheathedsteel]

ｅｔｅｒｎａｌｌｙ ｏｐｅｎ ｐｏｓｔ

hit me with anything; picture, prompt, you name it! or let me set the scene.

Comments

[gotcocky]

[gotcocky]

[gotcocky]

/finally touching these!!!

[sheathedsteel]

[ Mako doesn't want to go to Japan. He wants to stay in Hong Kong, in the Shatterdome where the other half of him resides. Japan isn't home for him any longer, anyway; it hasn't been since he was eleven years old.

But the pressure has been put upon Marshall Hansen to send Tokyo's Son back to his homeland for PR purposes during reconstruction, and while Herc saw how world leaders turned their backs on Stacker Pentecost pre-Pitfall, he's out for vengeance now and hell-bent on bleeding every one of the bureaucrats dry of their offered funding after the successful Breach closure. So he tells Mako it'll only be a three-month tour, not that bad, and would he please take one for the team, this time.

It's a bitter pill to swallow. Raleigh tells him to hurry up and go, that the sooner he leaves the sooner the three months will be up, but he can see how upset she is as the date looms. Mako spares her a tearful goodbye and doesn't tell her the moment he's to get picked up on the helipad, even though he's sure she resents it when she finds him gone.

And when his three months are finally up and he's made every prefecture circuit talk show in the entire country, he finally steps back into the Shatterdome and the first thing he's greeted with is Raleigh seated on his desk, clad only in one of his long work shirts.

There aren't very many words for this kind of greeting. ]

ahhh i love it :3

[gotcocky]

[Only three months. She's only got two kidneys but they're both pretty important. She's very attached to both of them. This metaphor is pretty ridiculous but that's how Raleigh would liken to being separated from Mako for that long. Like losing her kidneys. Especially after he kind of stole a proper goodbye from her and she has no idea what she would've done or said or if there would've been tears (there would've been and she might've kissed him too and he would have liked it) and then he's just gone.

And the closest she gets to her co-pilot for weeks is watching him on the talk shows and calling him whenever she gets a chance and stealing his shirts to sleep in, wear, smell, she's kind of a stalker and she kind of doesn't care.

She misses him and it's not like she's a teenaged girl pining for a crush, it's that he is a part of her very being now and co-pilots aren't meant to be separated. That's it. The end. And she tries to be mad at him for going but it never sticks longer than five minutes because she's a sucker and he's her sunshine or some other clearly stupid metaphor.

Dumb metaphors are Raleigh Becket's forte.]

... hey. [She knows how this looks, and it's kinda sorta that too but the practical application is that she just took a shower (with his soap in his bathroom, see stalker, she's a stalker) and the shirt's the only thing she grabbed to put on. It covers everything. Mostly.

Raleigh jumps down off the desk and bounces over to wrap her arms around his neck. Yes, good. He's finally home. He's back and please, please don't leave again, Mako, please.]

I missed you.

obligatory sexting prompt

[jockeying]

let's frolic in the night and avoid captcha

[sheathedsteel]

[ from {x} ]

yes you're a good person

[jockeying]

[ askhfkds mako. ]

Something like that.

Are you going to do something about it?

just say you love her, man

[jockeying]

you're not the boss of him, raleigh

[sheathedsteel]

[ she's said it to him more than once, now — four times, to be exact, even if he'd deny he was keeping count — and mako has yet to return the words back to her.

and it's not even as if he doesn't love her — he does, he's convinced of it now, wholeheartedly, but he comes from a stoic culture and an even more stoic foster parent, and he firmly subscribes to the school of thought that saying the words too often makes them lose some of their weight, some of their meaning.

(even though he can't deny it to himself that he thrills every time he hears it from her mouth, that his heart skips and he feels a rush hundreds of times more powerful than any drift connection when she says it.)

it's most likely a viewpoint that raleigh doesn't understand, and might never understand, he realizes, so he doesn't argue it with her — he doesn't even broach the subject of it with her.

until she says it again in a moment where he's completely vulnerable, totally lost in her as they're hurriedly undressing one another in bed (sometimes they're successful at it, and sometimes they end up fucking while half-clothed), their mouths meeting passionately over and over again, and she whispers it between his lips. i love you, so much.

he breaks from their kiss and nuzzles his face into her neck, breathing almost desperately into her hair. ]

...I know you do.

kinda is :3

[jockeying]

[ raleigh doesn't keep track of the number of times she's said those three little words. raleigh's an american, raised in a warm, comfortable house where i love you's were thrown around like halloween candy, and where kisses occured as often as were requested. she's not a kid anymore, of course — has long outgrown boo-boo kisses and bedtime kisses, and has the self restraint to keep her gushing to a minimum. but once she starts telling it, it's really hard to stop.

i love you, she tells him while they're fucking.

i love you, she lets slip while falling asleep, curled against his side with her hair in her face.

i love you, she attaches to the end of a conversation they're having over the phone.

( i lov — she almost gets out before coming around his fingers for the third time in a single evening, but that one doesn't count.)

and then there's the earnest, desperate i love you — i love you so much that she breathes into his mouth before... he ruins it. ]

Woah, wait — wait a second. [ her hands had been around his waist, palms digging into his back to pull him closer, pull him to her. but then she's patting his shoulder, and pulling her arms in to gently shove at his chest. not shove away, but just so he's looking her in the face. ]

Did you just Han Solo me?

[jockeying]

Do you want to come to Alaska with me?

i feel like somehow this prompt got away from me or something, jfc

[sheathedsteel]

[ it's surprisingly quiet, for the first couple of weeks after the breach is closed.

the world at large is still in a state of combined shock and disbelief that it's actually over, that the kaiju's link to the pacific ocean has been demolished for good, and as a result most of the world's population holds its collective breath and...waits for the following attacks that never come. in the meantime, the PPDC is in an ever-fluxing state of simultaneous mourning, repair, and relief.

mako and raleigh spend their first four days following their harrowing experience in challenger's deep in the medical wing. there is decompression that has to be done to combat oxygen and nitrogen sickness, physical and psychological and neurological examinations to be taken, and extensive debriefing to be done regarding raleigh's experience in the anteverse. mako refuses to be separated from her for the majority of it, curling himself around her protectively as they lie together on the cold hard bench of the decompression chamber, holding her hand during the neurological exams, sitting beside her and offering quiet assurance with his presence through the debriefing.

he's grieving for his adoptive father, as well as all the rest of the pilots who'd sacrificed themselves bravely, but he'd known stacker was dying long before pitfall...and raleigh had nearly slipped right through his fingers.

the way they stay tangled up in one another doesn't relent, even after they're discharged from the med wing with (relatively) clean bills of health — they begin to share a bed, and then kisses, and then their entire bodies, trying desperately in any form to climb into one another's heads and stay connected as closely as they were in the drift.

for those first two weeks, it's blissfully quiet.

...and then, the world catches on that it's really over, and the media hype begins.

reporters and journalists and media hounds crowd the PPDC. world leaders demand press conferences with all members of operation pitfall in attendance, and their pictures are plastered over every newspaper and every web posting and television monitor across the globe. the jaeger program was a success, after all, the sideline blurbs read. meet your new heroes!

and just as suddenly, neither mako nor raleigh can go anywhere. they're nearly mobbed by passerby on the streets of hong kong. a chauffeur-driven car driving them through downtown — in full incognito disguise, no less — gets broadsided by an over-eager news van, trying to get a good camera angle of them.

the final straw, though, is when a member of the cult of kaiju brings a semiautomatic pistol (that somehow escapes the security checkpoint) to a city press conference featuring PPDC personnel, including the former jaeger pilots. the gun goes off and no one is hurt, but security is tripled back at the shatterdome and both mako and raleigh are shaken up by it.

it's apparent they can't stay in hong kong, any longer.

and right around this time is when they both get offers out of the country; mako is offered a prestigious position overseeing the production of mark VI jaeger prototypes at a privately-owned corporate manufacturing facility in japan, while raleigh is recruited back to anchorage to head up instruction of the next wave of cadets at the academy on kodiak island, with the added bonus title of lieutenant. they receive the offers within 48 hours of one another, and suddenly it's not clear for either of them what avenue to take because where one goes, the other will invariably follow, and they cannot take both positions.

hypothetically, of course. mako hasn't asked her to go to japan with him, and she hasn't officially invited him to anchorage — but it's only been two days since the news broke, and neither of them have really broached the subject of moving with one another.

until mako noses into her hair as their bodies are pressed and wound up in each other in their warm, sleepy post-coital haze, and his question rumbles up from somewhere inside his chest. ]

What's the rest of Alaska like, besides Kodiak Island?

it did, i am not returning this novel — you did all the exposition we need :3

[jockeying]

Cold.

[ raleigh still doesn't sleep well or easily, but she's pretty close to dropping off wrapped in his arms with sweat cooling on her chest and back. but his question rouses her from dozing, and she half stretches and half turns to curl her arms around him securely. ]

And dark.

[ she has memories of alaska that predate k-day and the kaiju war and the anchorage shatterdome. she was born in anchorage before she nearly died there, vacationed on the beaches (bundled up in layers and long underwear, unable to hear herself think because of the cold wind howling) where she'd washed up in gipsy. she'd driven past her elementary school whenever she and yancy went for drinks at the dive bar their mother had gone into labor with jaz after eating the spicy buffalo wings at.

she has fond memories of running around with her brother, building snow men and making snow angles and — one time, the swing set had been frozen, but raleigh had insisted it still worked and the cheap carbon steel had snapped when she'd started swinging and for a second raleigh thought she'd died, but no, there was yancy and he was laughing at her, and breathing hurt because of how hard she'd landed on her back, but raleigh was laughing too. there were many evenings of fires in the fire place and endless cups of hot chocolate and so many snow days. there was ice fishing and running through the woods with the neighbors dogs, pretending she was some sort of wild child.

...alaska is home. was home. now home is wherever mako is, but that doesn't change the fact nostalgia is rising in her throat like bile.

still — if she were to describe her lovely state to someone who's never been there, might as well be honest. raleigh swallows and sighs. ]

And really bi — [ oh, speaking of big, big yawn. ] — really big. It's boring sometimes. But quiet. It's —

[ home. ]

— nice.

[ and then, quietly and after several heartbeats. ]

I'd like to go back. Even if I don't take the lieutenant position, I'd like to go back and visit.

still in alaska

[jockeying]

"It's freezing around here."
"It's not so bad."

everything is alaska and nothing hurts~ (except mako's toe)

[sheathedsteel]

[ the hardest thing about alaskan winters isn't necessarily the cold, he thinks — it's the darkness.

(but mako will be the first to attest, even so, that it is really fucking cold, -10 to -20F most nights, and he's learned how to dress in ten million layers for when they go outside with long underwear made of synthetic fabric instead of cotton, a wind-proof and insulated coat, good boots and gloves and scarf and all the rest.)

in the area where they live, there are only five hours of daylight in the dead of winter. the darkness isn't a complete pitch black, but with a low-level light — the aurora, maybe, as they've caught the blueish-greenish bands streaking across the sky once or twice — and it gives everything a dark haze like the land is bathed in perpetual twilight. as much as having so little daylight is inconvenient, it's actually kind of beautiful as well.

and maybe as a direct result of it, they spend an insanely inappropriate amount of time in bed, alternating between lounging and sex and post-coital snuggling and eventually sleeping. they light every room in the house with candles (as if they needed the ambiance), but perhaps not enough of them to actually light the rooms. as a direct result of that, traipsing through the house can be kind of...hazardous.

as mako finds out when he gets out of bed, naked, to turn up the heater — they keep it set lower because they generate their own heat like this, for the most part — and subsequently trips over something in the room, cursing first in japanese and then in english. ]

— fuck —

obligatory ptsd prompt

[jockeying]

obligatory baby prompt

[jockeying]

motorcycle divebar au? yes

[jockeying]

i'mma own this post

[jockeying]

rope bondage? rope bondage >:3

[jockeying]

prompt for a prompt mothafuckaaaa

[jockeying]

[gotcocky]

[There's nothing she could've done differently, sometimes these things just happen, her doctor explains. Just nature taking its course and what does that even mean. Does that mean there's something wrong with her or there was something wrong with the baby and well, Raleigh can accept the former much easier than she can accept the latter but she's the one that's still here and her baby isn't.

Their baby, hers and Mako's and she actually-- hadn't told Mako about it yet. To be fair, she didn't really know herself until she went to the doctor and was told that yeah, she was pregnant but isn't anymore. That explains why she'd been feeling so sick lately, nauseous at the weirdest times and sore and so tired all the time and she kind of wondered if that could be it but dismissed it because she's spent years in and out of Jaegers and she's lucky to not have cancer much less be able to have kids of her own.

The doctor confirmed it-- and took it away and Raleigh's been in a bit of a daze ever since. She makes her way back home and doesn't remember how she got there, and is just waiting for Mako to come home, she guesses. She really doesn't know. She wasn't really sure she even wanted kids, didn't know she was pregnant, but she still feels like she's lost something major. A little piece of her and Raleigh's been shedding pieces of her since she was eighteen and her mom passed away but this is different.

This was a baby. A little piece of Mako that she lost too and how is she going to tell him about this when she doesn't really accept it as real herself.]

whoop boy raleigh sneaking in here too

[raleighs]

i traded rolly for lottie

[bombers]

( academy years or the reasons they don't talk anymore )