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

[driftseeker]

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.

Comments

[driftseeker]

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?"

[johnny_truant]

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."

[driftseeker]

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."

[johnny_truant]

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."

[driftseeker]

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.

[johnny_truant]

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.

[has_a_horn]

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."

[driftseeker]

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."

tw for anxiety and dissociation

[johnny_truant]

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.

tw suicide mention

[has_a_horn]

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.

[driftseeker]

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.

[johnny_truant]

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.