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driftseekerPost-drift and post-canceled-apocalypse, it’s a disarray of decontamination protocol and harried celebration and administrative detailing that’s lost on a head that’s too full of sentiments opposed. There’s grief, sick and heavy, laid flat against the fluttering escape of relief, the confused realization that somewhere outside of this lies an actual future, not simply in the context of a motivation or incentive to fight ever-onwards, but as something conceivable and attainable and imaginable.
She can hear Raleigh for days after, as they undergo endless directives to ensure that they are free from the heretofore unconsidered threats of radiation poisoning or infection by alien pathogens, but nearly all of it slides past in an incomprehensible, exhausted blur of prolonged lassitude. They're ghosting constantly, instinctive and unthinking, awake and dreaming, and there’s a familiarity to the the brush of his mind against hers; they’re each others' anchors in the nightmares that follow, one dragging the other out of those plunging tangents of things many-eyed and blue-dyed and split-jawed and glistening, and between the horrors buried in their heads and the steel ache of loss, sometimes Mako wonders how it is she is still sane.
They’re released from the labs and medical procedures after a week. Herc circumvents the wall of paperwork for them, dismantles the red tape to scrape one last favor out from the Shatterdome’s shattered shelves, and tells them to give themselves a brief cushion of space before the press hits, because it will. They saved the world. They’re heroes. They're cultural icons. Their faces are plastered on every magazine and news report, and everyone will want to know what it was like and were they scared and how did it feel to save the world. Privacy will be a privilege they'll soon miss.
Mako just wants to sleep. Raleigh does too. They sequester themselves in an anonymous hotel and barricade out the real world and hunt for rest without dreams of things with too many teeth. The only clothes they have are PPDC-regulation. Personal effects have been left abandoned in their old rooms. They crash fully clothed and sleep with boots still on.
It’s with a roaring in her ears that Mako wakes and finds that everything is bright and wrong. The hotel is gone; the world, everything, and when she claws out in search of Raleigh’s mind she only finds screaming silence. It takes her a moment for her scrambling mind to string together causality and consequence, form a concatenation of deductions to be drawn from the seeping chill that soaks her from the waist up, the wet cling of her clothing, and conclude that she is standing waist-deep in water in a fountain in a city she doesn't recognize. Wind hisses over the water's surface, distressingly non-littoral.
Mako raises a hand and squints against the glare of the sun, bereft.
She can hear Raleigh for days after, as they undergo endless directives to ensure that they are free from the heretofore unconsidered threats of radiation poisoning or infection by alien pathogens, but nearly all of it slides past in an incomprehensible, exhausted blur of prolonged lassitude. They're ghosting constantly, instinctive and unthinking, awake and dreaming, and there’s a familiarity to the the brush of his mind against hers; they’re each others' anchors in the nightmares that follow, one dragging the other out of those plunging tangents of things many-eyed and blue-dyed and split-jawed and glistening, and between the horrors buried in their heads and the steel ache of loss, sometimes Mako wonders how it is she is still sane.
They’re released from the labs and medical procedures after a week. Herc circumvents the wall of paperwork for them, dismantles the red tape to scrape one last favor out from the Shatterdome’s shattered shelves, and tells them to give themselves a brief cushion of space before the press hits, because it will. They saved the world. They’re heroes. They're cultural icons. Their faces are plastered on every magazine and news report, and everyone will want to know what it was like and were they scared and how did it feel to save the world. Privacy will be a privilege they'll soon miss.
Mako just wants to sleep. Raleigh does too. They sequester themselves in an anonymous hotel and barricade out the real world and hunt for rest without dreams of things with too many teeth. The only clothes they have are PPDC-regulation. Personal effects have been left abandoned in their old rooms. They crash fully clothed and sleep with boots still on.
It’s with a roaring in her ears that Mako wakes and finds that everything is bright and wrong. The hotel is gone; the world, everything, and when she claws out in search of Raleigh’s mind she only finds screaming silence. It takes her a moment for her scrambling mind to string together causality and consequence, form a concatenation of deductions to be drawn from the seeping chill that soaks her from the waist up, the wet cling of her clothing, and conclude that she is standing waist-deep in water in a fountain in a city she doesn't recognize. Wind hisses over the water's surface, distressingly non-littoral.
Mako raises a hand and squints against the glare of the sun, bereft.
