bigapplesauce | when the city goes silent, the ringing in my ears gets violent [open]

Current Location: Bethesda Fountain
Current Music: September 25th, 2013

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when the city goes silent, the ringing in my ears gets violent [open]

Post-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.

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"'ey, I know you."

Johnny sincerely fucking doubts it. He looks up, bleary-eyed and automatically scowling, at the absolute stranger staring at him.

Johnny has taken to working on his sketches in the park, because it's nicer than staying inside all the time, and it's an ever-important excuse to be alone. The downside being that now the occasional vagrant or tourist feels the need to talk to him.

"I know, I know," he mutters back. "We all look the same."

"Naw, man, I know you. I seen you." The guy points an unnecessary finger, like Johnny could for a moment be in doubt about who's being addressed here. "You were with the angel."

Oh. Well okay.

Johnny lets out a small sigh and closes the sketchbook, tucking it back into his messenger bag. "He doesn't do house calls," he says coldly, getting up.

"Look man, I'm just sayin', you're one of them folks messed up in all the weird shit that goes on around here." This guy is persistent, trailing after him. He doesn't seem like a vagrant, now that Johnny thinks about it. More like a busker. Some kind of park regular.

He turns, really, really hoping this doesn't have to become an altercation. "So?"

"So this girl just appeared outta fuckin' nowhere in the fountain, so," says the guy, looking unimpressed and sounding only vaguely smug. "Thought maybe that'd be up your alley."

Oh good. Civilians know to come find him now to deal with the incoming strays. Fucking excellent.

He debates just walking away. It's not his problem. It's not. And letting this guy just talk him into it like it is will only increase the likelihood that something like this happens again.

But he was new once too, and nobody wanted to help him for a while. And there's no infrastructure left.

"How old," he grunts, already angling toward Bethesda.

"What the fuck?"

"I mean is she like old enough to take care of herself," snaps Johnny over his shoulder.

"Man I don't know, like, your age maybe." He seems to be backing off now, like oh, what, did Johnny make you uncomfortable?

"Then she's not a girl," mutters Johnny, and picks up the pace. Mercifully, the stranger does not follow. Let him deal with it. Great. Good. Better for everyone, apparently.

When he reaches the fountain there is indeed a young woman there, dripping and confused and being ogled by a smattering of New Yorkers. Amazingly, he recognizes her, and the tension goes out of his shoulders almost immediately. He actually feels himself smile, though it's faint and a little bit melancholic. "Mako," he says, raising a hand to catch her attention.

She doesn't know what to do in the face of the oppressive hush of the gathering onlookers, the shivering of wind over water. She looks at the surface, disturbingly still, not crested by white foam or the vibrant blue of sluggish alien blood. She looks away again, to the sky, to the nameless collection of watchers who seem unwilling or unable to approach her.

It takes her a moment to register why that is strange.

Mako, says Raleigh, with the fixed steadiness and the even gaze and the breeze brushing through his hair, we saved the world, Mako. They should know us.

So, she replies, her stare sharpening, why haven't any of them said anything?

The edge to her gaze seems to make some of them uncomfortable. One of them withdraws. Another breaks away entirely to walk, brisk and unidirectional and glancing back with periodic apprehension.

Another raises a phone and snaps a picture.

Mako is spared the indignation of confronting him when a voice cuts through the disorganized cluster of people and their silent thoughts and Raleigh's swelling concern and the emptiness where his mind once was, and her eyes are drawn to the one familiar face in a cluster of unknown variables.

"It's you," she says guardedly. The recollection spills back in a half-remembered fog. "Johnny."

Oh good, she remembers. That makes this easier. He steps closer, holding an arm out if she needs to brace on something climbing out. Before she does, he turns halfway around and snaps an aggressive "What?" at the gawkers, effectively scaring a bunch of them into skittering away. There's no reasoning with those remaining, stubborn city dwellers who deal with weird and aggressive every day and operate under a sense of entitlement for it all. Fuck 'em. He turns his attention back to Mako.

"I warned you this might happen," he says softly. "Sorry it did."

Aggression seems to serve them admirably, scattering the spectators like the flocks of seabirds that exist in dying droves, poisoned by radioactive toxins and the irreversible seep of pollution. For a moment she watches them. Raleigh echoes a cold sentiment - Raleigh with his set shoulders and steely glare and the kind of impulsive machismo that would carry him forward and forcibly make them leave and -

She realizes her hand has formed a fist, and she opens her fingers again.

"I remember," she says, even if under the recent clutter of sharing another one's head it is not immediately evident to her what she should be remembering.

One word sings out to her, cold and clear.

"This is - Manhattan." It must be. Must it? Is it truly, can she be sure?

"Yeah." He reaches a little further, trying to coax her out. "Come on. I can take you somewhere."

He has no idea where, but he's keeping his focus firmly on out of the fountain right now. She's going to need time to adjust to this, but she shouldn't do it in the middle of the park. He can get her food, a drink, worry about housing later. She saved his dream life with tremendous effort and almost no incentive, this is least he can do.

Manhattan, he said. 2013. She eyes the man with a wariness and confusion and something - something else. Something she can't draw out and examine. Something vaguely tied to Raleigh's sense of solidity but also -

Mako realizes she is still standing waist-deep in a water fountain. She doesn't know if she'll ever be used to water looking like this. Recycled and clear and not made viscous with the blue tinge in her nightmares.

She steps out from the fountain with sedate care, very cautiously avoiding looking at the water or the reflections of things in the water, too-dark things that might not truly exist.

Can you trust him? she thinks in Raleigh's slow, skeptical tone. She doesn't know what to do with the question she has just posed to herself, so she opts to ignore it.

"Where?" she says, the word a quiet uncertainty.

"Let's start with away from all these people," says Johnny reasonably, matching her quiet tone. He winces at the puddle forming under her. "Sorry about... that. Uh, if we walk around a bit you should dry off pretty quick, or I could get you a towel or something?" He rubs awkwardly at the back of his neck. It feels weird talking to her without Nova or her otter thing present.

"This way," he suggests, stepping away from the fountain and angling toward a slightly less trafficked path. She'll stop getting looks once they're a good distance from the fountain and she's not quite so visibly wet.

"Are, um, are you hungry?" He remembers Sunshine giving him a cookie when he first arrived, that was a little weird at the time and seems so distant now, even though it's only been what, a handful of months? But it was nice. The cookie. Not most of the rest of it.

Her gaze darts over them, the lingering observers as they refuse to disperse. There's no recognition in any of their eyes. She is not Mako Mori, the woman who saved the world, to them - she is not anyone but some nameless woman who appeared in a fountain in a world where this is apparently normal enough to people to take pictures of the event.

She envies them for a moment, their fearless, Kaiju-less, trauma-less, fixedly unapocalyptic ataraxy built into ignorance built into indifference.

She feels her hands flex to wrap around her arms at the same moment they reach for the front of her belt in the relaxed, confident grasp Raleigh unconsciously mined from his brother's motor behavior, and the rising swirl of three sets of memories freezes her in place.

And then it does not.

The drift is a strange and uncertain place, even more so when the mind with which hers has been so intimately linked vanishes and leaves an aching void in its wake.

Unless she is the one who vanished, snatched from one world to the next. Is that what happened? She thinks she might remember.

She starts to shake her head but twists the action into a nod.

"I think so," she says. "We didn't eat before." Before they slept for hours upon hours and Mako woke in a place she didn't belong.

Edited 2015-07-15 21:24 (UTC)

"Okay." Johnny nods and keeps walking, leading her further into the park. "I'll take you somewhere. And we can figure out the rest. It's okay. I mean it'll be okay. We, um, we take care of each other these days, make sure we all have a place to sleep and stuff." He shrugs and stuffs his hands into his pockets. "I know this is kind of a lot to process but you're not alone. There's a lot of us, really."

Laughable, how he tries to comfort people now. Shouldn't this be Daine, or Greta, or that Bee girl? Or Daniel, he thinks with a bitter twist in his gut. The nice ones, the well adjusted ones. Not him.

"You okay?" he murmurs noncommittally.

Nah, says Raleigh, the shortness of the word the only indication of how truly he means it. Not really.

"Not really," she echoes. She looks at the sky again, unused to the brightness of daylight without the accompanying dark underbelly of the overhanging cloud cover, thick and deep and heavy.

The memories are pooling deeper and closer the more effort she exerts to recall them. The wet undulations of contorting alien muscle, a woman who could change her shape, wind whipping high and clear over treetops and their lush virescence. He'd said, hadn't he, that sometimes people are taken here, to this unfamiliar city with its lack of underground bunkers or cities built into the rising white bone of a kaiju's ribcage scraped clean.

"There is no way back," she says slowly, "is there?"

She thinks he would have mentioned it if there was.

He glances over, studying her after that casually, painfully honest answer. He wishes he could do more. Wishes he could do anything. He draws one of his hands out of his pockets and reaches abortively toward her, wanting to touch her arm or shoulder with a companionable pat, deciding instantly that's a terrible idea (he hasn't forgotten how she took his legs out from under him when they first met), and moves his hand instead, awkwardly, to the back of his neck.

"No," he says quietly. "Not that anyone's found."

Shitty thing to have to tell someone. And it's not like when he told Tim, he was so fucking bitter and tired that day and Tim so obviously spoke his language, it was all just blurt it the fuck out and deal and have a cigarette. Now, with Mako, who he sort of owes, and who is obviously not dealing very well, he feels terrible.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs.

She doesn't know what to say to that. It's okay. But it isn't. It won't be.

Pentecost told her. He told her. He's been lurking behind every eyeblink and hush of breath and in the edgeless blur of the drift leaking at the corners of her mind where Raleigh was. It's where he said he would be. The drift.

She has a dead father and a dead mother whose faces she loses a little more of with each passing year because no photos survived, and she has a dead brother who was never her brother to begin with Yancy, Yancy because the drift is so tangling and immediate and she never would have known and would that have changed anything.

"Okay," she says. Okay. It won't be okay, maybe it never will be again - she doesn't know. But - okay. Her life has shifted again, and she will be nameless again. It would be easier, she thinks, if she did not have quite so many people living in her head. A pilot who screams her name. A brother she doesn't have.

"Where should I go?" she asks him, her eyes roving over sidewalk, the words quiet and short.

"We can figure that out after lunch," he says, his hand now hanging useless at his side. Fuck, he feels really, really bad, like this is his fault, when it's so not. Book of his life. Story, you mean. "There's two apartment buildings on either side of the park that are for rifites. That's us. Uh. There should be plenty of space in those. There's people who can set you up with food and stuff. You aren't alone."

None of them are. All of them are.

It's so fucking great.

"I'm staying in a little building further down," he says, trying clumsily to fall into small talk. "That was sort of a special offer. There might be a spare apartment in there still, if you... wanted somewhere smaller. I dunno."

Is that a good idea? He shouldn't make those offers without asking Gabe. Fuck. Hopefully she'll think it's creepy and decline.

"What're you in the mood for," he says as lightly as he can, leading her out of the park and across a busy intersection. "Chinese? Japanese? Lots of decent stuff around here."

It will be different, she thinks, and tries to summon an emotion, any emotion at all aside from the unrelenting dullness of her own grief, to live in a space so unlike the Shatterdome with its twisting walls of exposed pipe and tarnished metal. She remembers normalcy. She remembers -

Doesn't she?

Life before being caught in the jaws of a war that defined her. What is she, beyond it. What is she without herself.

"Is there," she says, and stops and swallows and continues, "anywhere close to - the ocean?"

She does not know if she means to live or to eat. She's not sure it matters.

"Um..." He hesitates, glancing back at her before leading them toward a sandwich place. Quicker, easier. "Well, we're - sort of trapped here, I mean, on the island. There's water everywhere, but I don't know that any of it is really the ocean, not like you mean it." Standing inside, near the counter, he grabs a menu and offers it to her. "There's the Hudson, the East River, and... I guess you could see if you could get a place down on the southern end. That's in the Bay, I mean... that's technically ocean."

You know, if she can afford it. He doesn't mention this. He glances at the guy behind the counter. "Can I get, uh, number seven, no onions, and a coffee. And...?" He looks at Mako. She probably isn't prepared to choose a sandwich. What's simple? Turkey? Tuna? "Number four okay?" he asks quietly. She needs to eat something.

She shoots the menu a cursory look and nods wordlessly. No ocean. No coastline. No break and swell of white-tipped waves. No spots of radioactive blue being washed ashore, tingeing the sand and the rocks with the hateful, toxic, hideous, beautiful dye that leaked from a dying beast. No salt-scented wind whipping over headlands to cut through grass and the blue streaks of her hair and sting her nostrils with each indrawn breath.

Mako does not feel well. This place is too loud, the air too thick, the ground too solid and too close. She edges back to the nearest chair and sinks into it and wraps her arms around herself. She might be shivering, though she isn't cold. She can't be. She knows the bite of the cold, that is how it always is in the Shatterdome's sealed corridors of metal and on the Hong Kong coast, the coast -

She is so far and so thrown from everything. Her throat closes. Her chest aches.

Come on, Mako, Raleigh urges. We been through worse.

Have they? What is this but the loss of everything. Even home.

"Number four," confirms Johnny to the sandwich guy with a quick, hard glance. Just make your sandwiches, man. Nothing to see here.

"Mako," he says softly, and he crouches in front of her, reaching out to put his hands over hers, trying to offer them to be taken if she can dislodge them from their grip on her arms. "It's okay. You're gonna get through this, I promise."

God, shut the fuck up. What do you know? You didn't even want to be home. You'd have died if you'd stayed. It's a miracle you hadn't already. Everything here is a goddamn improvement. Back there, there was no one to miss you, nobody needed you, nobody wanted you. Nothing you left behind that wasn't goddamn poison. This is more home to you than anyplace you've ever lived, and you have the fucking audacity to tell someone who obviously doesn't, probably can't feel like that that she's okay? Fuck you, you presumptuous little shit.

"I'm sorry," he says, and takes a chance on moving his hand up to her cheek, trying to draw her attention out of herself. "Hey. Listen, what you did for me in that dream was a big deal, okay? Dream death, it's - it's not permanent, but it's kind of a habit of mine, and it's - I don't usually get pulled out like that. Especially not by a stranger. I owe you a lot, okay? So I'm gonna... I wanna help you."

Just casually omit the part where you have nothing, literally nothing, to offer.

"That'll be 21.50," says the guy behind the counter, droll and uninterested in whatever weird drama is happening in his shop.

Johnny gets up, pays him, takes the bagged sandwiches and his cup of coffee and steps back over to Mako.

"Let's get outta here," he says.

The hands on hers are the fleeting contact breaking through the patina of something she doesn't want to put a name to, and she draws into herself further, a necessary tightening of her grip around her own arms. When the hand shifts to her cheek she can only look at him, eyes dark with uncertainty.

He's right, says Raleigh. Well. Kinda. I owe you kind of a lot, don't I?

Mako shakes her head once in a poor effort to clear the ghosts from it. Raleigh remains firmly lodged in the hindmost parts of her brain as Yancy Becket is torn out by a kaiju's jaws in staggered repetition, but she pushes up from the chair and rises and follows Johnny and nods.

He keeps his hands to himself, on the way out, leading her back down the street, heading south. "Here," he says, offering her the sandwich. "Hope it's okay. Food will help, even if it's just a little."

Good advice. True advice. Advice he almost never takes.

He takes a bit of his sandwich as he walks. Eating makes a person feel human again, and that whole time he couldn't keep down anything but tea, he was barely human anyway. He gets this. He gets this way too well. He knows, too, where he's going to take her, if she can handle a reasonably long journey.

"Hey," he says to her. "Do you mind getting on a train? I can take you to the waterfront. It's not the ocean but... it's a nice place." He's only been to the particular spot he's thinking of once, and it was a breezy evening with the sun setting gently and the water rippling under an overlook, not too crowded, just a handful of tourists and skateboarders. It's about the best thing he can offer her right now.

She accepts the sandwich, unwrapping it with a sourcelessly delicate apprehension and regarding it hollowly. She does not know if she has ever felt less like eating anything in her life, except - except after the orphanage, when Pentecost took her to the quiet, nearly deserted place sandwiched between two alleyways and she could not eat and he did not ask her to and they merely sat in downcast silence for twenty minutes before he could gather whatever it was he wanted to say and say it.

She forces herself to bite into the thing, drawing back in alarm when it occurs to her only after the initial bright burst of flavor that it is not comprised of the synthesized meat and lettuce with which she is most familiar. She stares at it, startled at the vibrancy of the taste, the sharpness of flavors against her tongue.

See? Raleigh smiles at her in her mind's eye with his easy, sea-flecked grin saturated in his grief and his melancholia. We can make this work.

"That sounds nice," she says, unable to keep the ache of wistfulness from her voice.

He smiles faintly, relieved that she seems okay both with the plan and with the food, and eats in silence as he leads her to the desired subway entrance. He swipes her through the turnstile, stands quietly with her at the platform, sits just as quietly on the train. There isn't really anything to say, and he suspects she wants to think, so he just sips his coffee in silence.

When they reach their stop he guides her out with a minimum of explanation, leading her back above ground and toward the waterfront. The streets become more open as the buildings become shorter and more sparse, until he's leading her across the last road to an outlook next to a row of yachts, climbing over a little mound of grass to the rail so they can be as close to the water as possible.

"Here we are," he says softly, unnecessarily, mostly just the break the silence.

Her appetite returns with the walk and the trip on the train, though she is not used to a city that is quite so quiet in comparison to the compacted, chaotic disorder of Hong Kong. The rattle of the train helpfully swallows the white noise that blooms in the absence of conversation, replaced by the lap of water once they exit.

Mako braces both hands on the rail and leans, sucking in the air with its rich scent of water and its lack of salt, shutting her eyes to assist with the illusion that the pelagic scope is anywhere but where it is. She wills her lungs to flare with the sea's sharp breeze.

She opens her eyes and shatters the non-illusion. She cannot transmute a lake into an ocean on the other side of the world. She cannot imbue the water with radioactive sludge and fill the sea with monsters.

The part of her that is Raleigh finds solace in the silence. The part of her that is still Mako shifts, uncomfortable with the stretch of quiet as it deepens and she can think of nothing to say.

"Thank you," she finally says quietly. For the food and for the view.

He watches her, practically able to see her struggle to connect with something that isn't there, to grip onto something she lost. It's hard to watch, and he ends up looking down at his shoes instead. "Yeah," he says, just as quietly. "Sure."

He figures he ought to give her some time, so he turns and slides down to sit with his back against the rail, looking back over the city.

He gets out his phone after a moment and starts typing.

"So, um," he says after a moment. "There's a couple open apartments in my building. I think you'd be welcome to one of them. If you want."

"I do not have any money," she admits, hating it, hating the withdrawn downward cast to her gaze and feeling Raleigh with his underlying streak of pride and self-castigating frustration as he squares his imaginary shoulders. "I cannot pay you."

She has nothing, nothing but the storm-tossed memories fragmented into scraps by the drift and the nondescript PPDC-regulation clothes she wears. Her hand unconsciously seeks out her dogtags, wraps fingers around the thin metal of the chain and clutches it like a lifeline.

He smiles faintly. "Neither do I," he says. "It's not my building, it's - it belongs to a friend of mine." Why can't he just say 'boyfriend'? "He's kinda... uh, magic? He can make money as needed. Point is he doesn't need anything from us. He does it cause he can, not cause he has anything to gain."

Cause he's a good person. Good - entity. He's good beyond good, even if he's weirdly far from human sometimes and wholly terrifying other times, he's amazingly, gloriously good, and he's in love with Johnny.

How does Gabe not see how little sense that makes?

He excises these thoughts with a little huff of breath and a shake of the head. "That's just what we do," he says. "We look out for each other."

Magic gets her attention, a startled upward jerk of her chin as she stares at him. But then - when they met her soul scurried alongside her in the shape of an otter, and they fought a heaving tentacled beast off the shore of an island in a dream while a woman who could alter her biological structure saved them both. It occurs to her, if belatedly, that perhaps she should not be surprised.

She cannot imagine the possibilities of Hermann's reaction to such a pronouncement. She can see Newt eagerly dissecting its semantics, accompanying the flurry of explanation with air-sculpting hand gestures and the breakneck, rapid-fire enthusiasm he always excelled at. The memory of them almost makes her grin. Almost.

"That would be," she begins in a grateful rush, and stumbles and revises it to, "thank you. I have - "

Nowhere to go. But Johnny already knew it.

He nods, smiling a little more genuinely, then turns his attention back to his phone, waiting for Gabe to reply again.

"We can chill here for as long as you want," he says. "If you get hungry again we could get some dinner."

He feels nervous saying this, like he's trying too hard now, pushing to make her feel better and what if that makes her push him back? He rubs a hand over his face and through his hair. "I mean, whatever you want," he mutters, belatedly trying to play it cool.

She turns partway, uneasy about the prospect of exposing her back to an open expanse of water, even here. She manages an infinitesimal edge of a smile, and it feels like the painful and forced thing she knows it is, that they both probably know it is.

"We don't have to stay." She pauses to rake the water's surface with her gaze, the wind-ruffled swathe cast in variations of green and gray. "It's not much like home here."

She never assumed it would be. She never consciously assumed. She never meant to.

The Shatterdome is gone, or it may as well be. And everything else with it.

"Yeah." Johnny stares numbly at his phone as Gabe's cold, uncharacteristically emoji-less response comes through, then pockets it with another dismissive huff. "Well, we can do whatever. Gabe's setting up an apartment for you and then he's gonna meet us for dinner, if that's okay. He's, um... he's a good guy."

Unlike me.

"Do you, um..." He glances up at her, uncertain how to phrase this. "Do you wanna talk about... anything? Home, or...?"

He can give people food and take them to look at water and ask favors from the archangel he doesn't deserve, but small talk is way, way the fuck outside his wheelhouse. He clears his throat awkwardly. "It's okay if you don't," he grunts. Stupidly.

Presumably 'Gabe' is his friend - his magic friend, Raleigh reminds her with a disbelieving scoff - and she tries to smile more completely but is certain she does not succeed. She is reminded, briefly, blazingly, of Pentecost, who took her in and did his best to acclimate her to every staggering shift in her life without being asked or told.

She swallows, her own grief thick in her throat.

"No thank you," she says, not unkindly. "I need to - think about something else, I think."

She forces a measure of lightness into her tone that she does not feel. "Is Gabe your friend?"

It's his turn to scoff, out loud as it were, leaning his head back against he rail and looking up at the sky.

"Yes," he says. "He's... well, he's an angel. Literal angel, with the wings and the holy fuckin everything. Straight out of the actual Bible, except not like that at all." It's not exactly a secret, and if she doesn't need to talk about her, well, apparently he really needs to talk about him. Lucky Mako. "The archangel Gabriel, he really likes candy and animals and bad movies and... me."

He dips his head back down, studying the grain of the sidewalk. "I guess that's the angelic thing to do, pick up strays, take care of them. But I'm not a stray to him, I'm like... well, he... he cares about me, really, as a person, and I don't... deserve it. At all. You know what I... Does that make sense?" He glances at her, and he's already sinking in his pit of anxiety so all the abrupt oversharing doesn't really add much at this point, but looking directly at her is too much, and he looks away just as quickly.

"My point is," he says with a faint air of humor, "he wants to meet you and he's a really nice guy, but this dinner might be a little weird."

Edited 2015-07-20 17:17 (UTC)

Her eyes widen in earnest the longer he speaks. Her familiarity with the Bible is distant at best, though Gabriel rings as something she should perhaps know. She doubts, however, that her knowledge of him had anything to do with candy or animals or men who show up in dreams with rabbits.

She looks obliquely at him, returning to the rail to brace her elbows on it and cautiously grant him some measure of physical and verbal distance.

"You are helping me," she points out softly, looking out over the water, the too-gentle breeze pulling at her hair. "You do not have a reason to. I think, maybe, that you - "

She can remember Raleigh's crippling lack of self-worth, his fierce and reckless devotion to charge into everything with his brother's memories rushing through his head, digging into her like a fragment of dislodged bone.

How can she pass judgment when she has not known this man's head like she has Raleigh's?

She has to take a breath before she can continue, " - you are more deserving than you think you are."

Well that's - unexpected. No response to literal Biblical archangel, no slow awkward backing away at the unsolicited infodump, just... kindness and a level of understanding.

He doesn't know whether he wants to cling harder to this woman or push her away as fast as he can.

He manages a small nod and finally gets up, stretching. "Let's walk around," he says. "Work that appetite up."

She accepts the suggestion with a slight dip of her heads, content to allow the proliferation of silence between them as they walk, exchanging only snatches of dialogue, caught in the wistful anamnesis of the parts of themselves they may no longer bring to bear whether due to past or present or circumstance or inability or the nameless churn of instinct beyond their control.

Or, again, perhaps she is reading too deeply into things. Often silence is simply silence, unadorned by steel or selective meaning. Even before she learned to drift and speak without words, she learned the art of silence.

The day passes like this until the sun has begun to dip lower and lower to kiss the horizon.

Once the sun starts to drop, Johnny checks his phone for restaurants near then and locates an authentic sushi and robata place a couple blocks away. Seems just the thing, for some reason. He curves his trajectory to take them both there, and shoots Gabe another text.

"Okay, he should be here any minute," he says, pocketing his phone. "He can do that." He steps in and nods to the hostess, who greets them with a little bow. He holds up three fingers; she gathers menus and leads them over to a booth.

Gabriel arrives about the same time that the waitress does. Within a minute, he explains to her, in Japanese, that he'll be joining his lover and their new friend for dinner, compliments her penmanship, and orders a bottle of rice wine for the table.

"Heya," he says to both of them and nods to his new tenant. She looks a little lost, but he doesn't blame her. He knows first-hand how tough it can be to first arrive through the rift. All he can do for her now is help her settle in and make sure that this is as pleasant of a night as possible. He doubts that Johnny's told her their relationship status (though if she understands Japanese he just did) or that they'd had an argument a few days before, so there's no reason to complicate this further with their problems. He wants to make this about her, so he pretends that nothing is wrong at all.

He scoots into the booth next to Johnny, leans in to give him a peck on the cheek, then smiles at both of them. "I ordered sake, but if you want water or beer or soda or anything..." He gestures to the waitress and, additional drink orders given, she writes them down and walks back to the kitchen.

He flips open his menu and zeroes in on the desserts section. "I picked green for the bed and the curtains, now I see I should have gone with blue." He glances back up at the girl, a smile still on his lips. "Your hair. I like it." Then, setting down the menu (they've got both pudding and mochi ice cream which settles what he's going to get) he adds, "I'm sure Johnny's introduced me already, but I haven't learned your name yet."

It must be the magic thing, she surmises - perhaps a perk of being the archangel Gabriel, who enjoys candy and animals and sushi joints and can be somewhere else in a matter of seconds and can speak Japanese. She watches him with muted interest as he greets Johnny with a kiss on the cheek and a grin and an easy confidence that calls to mind Newt's graceful social charisma when navigating the mild terror of a public space.

"Mako." She tries for a smile, a self-conscious twitch of one side of her mouth, and resists the rather childish urge to duck behind her menu. "Mori."

Don't even worry about it, she counsels herself in Raleigh's voice. You, like, radiate badassery. Cause, okay, I thought you were the coolest after like thirty seconds of meeting you. You got this.

"Green is fine," she adds inanely, and has to tack on a hasty, "thank you, really. I do not - have anywhere to go."

Edited 2015-07-23 16:10 (UTC)

It shouldn't surprise him that Gabe is speaking Japanese, and it doesn't, really, of course he can speak Japanese. It's not that it's surprising, it's that it doesn't fit into the space he eked out in preparation for being around Gabe. It wasn't ever going to be big enough anyway, but hearing these foreign sounds in Gabe's voice is nothing short of disorienting, leaving him feeling like he's drifting far away. He doesn't realize how tense he's gotten until Gabe gives him that weird little peck on the cheek, and then he notices his nails digging into his palms, and forces himself to relax. That kiss was all wrong, just like his texts were all wrong, forced fake affection, or more like tolerance, really.

Of course he's like this. Gabe doesn't trust him with himself right now. Johnny has no fucking idea how to fix it.

He stares dully at the menu without reading the words before realizing he should probably be a part of the conversation somehow.

"Some guy came up to me in the park and told me she'd just appeared in the fountain," he says. "Came to me specifically, because he recognized me. From when I was with you. After, you know."

This was a mistake. Stop talking. You fucking idiot. Stop.

It's hard to miss Johnny having a contained panic attack right next to him. It's clear that Johnny is bothered by him, because it's his arrival that started it. but he's not sure if it's just his presence or the act he's putting on for Mako's sake. He hopes for the latter- He's still upset with Johnny for lying to him, but there's no way that he wants his mere presence to be enough to make Johnny panic.

He pauses for long enough to take a breath and set his hand at Johnny's back. He keeps his hand in place, and while he turns his attention back to Mako, he stokes his thumb between Johnny's shoulder blades.

"I came through at the fountain too." He also tried to commit suicide via the rift at the fountain and got thrown back broken at the fountain, which is what Johnny had been referring to. It's a tough subject and definitely one that he's going to avoid entirely right now. "Though I was lucky enough not to land in it."

He smiles at her, and this time it's a little bit softer, but still not quite genuine. "On Saturday it'll be nine months I've been here. Doesn't even seem that long. But I've settled in. I hope we can help you do the same- we look out for each other. I'll give you spending money, phone... computer if you want one. Johnny's from the nineties, he doesn't really get the internet." He turns his smile on Johnny, more to check in than look for a comment, then chuckles and runs his free hand back through his hair.

"If you decide you don't like hell's kitchen, they've just given me the deed to a high-rise downtown so, yknow...options." He's still not quite sure how to manage an entire apartment building, so maybe it's best that she's staying somewhere where he won't forget about her.

It's impossible to miss Johnny's subdued behavior, particularly given the warning he cautiously administered beforehand. Weird might be correct - there's an odd tension Mako doesn't know how to quantify, and she looks between them with varying degrees of confusion and concern. Johnny had said friend. Gabe, lover.

It's not so difficult to guess what the source of the tension might be, or at least the basis for it, but it's nothing if not evident that Mako has a severely limited perspective, courtesy of having the entirety of her recently displaced.

"You can do all that?" she says, visibly impressed, but then - magic would cover that, probably. She's not certain if that sort of thing has rules, if it is like the strictly defined studies of biology or mechanics.

It occurs to her that, despite landing in a fountain, she is - truly and completely out of her depth.

The hand on his back is a big comfort, and he relaxes a little more. Okay, so it's probably not as bad as all that. Gabe's still mad but he's here, isn't he? He still notices if Johnny's like this, and reaches out to him to help.

He forces a dry chuckle at the nineties comment and rubs his palms on his jeans. "He can do a ridiculous amount of shit," he says to Mako. "Remember when I told you about Godzilla showing up? All him."

He still feels horrendously awkward making small talk, and it's a relief when their server returns with their drinks. He reaches for the sake at once, but she stops him, reaching in to take it for him.

"In Japan it is not polite to pour your own sake," she says in tentative English, and fills the little cups for each of them. "You always serve your friends."

He nods, feeling nonsensically sheepish, and lifts his cup. "Kanpai," he says weakly.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

when the city goes silent, the ringing in my ears gets violent [open]

I thought I would do something a little different and it ended up being twice as long as the post :|

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tw for anxiety and dissociation

tw suicide mention

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