First Drifts are rough (scene)

First Drifts are rough. 
==Novelization==
Chapter 19
HE DIDN’T WANT TO EAT, BUT RALEIGH KNEW THAT a guy with his responsibilities and workout schedule needed nutrition to stay on top of his game. Plus he was still amazed at the kind of grub available in Hong Kong. So after spending the afternoon in the gym, he showered and headed down to the mess hall.
The minute he walked in, he knew that the disastrous test from that morning had changed his status with the other teams. Before, he’d been an unknown quantity. He had kaiju kills on his record, and a bit of a reputation because he’d gotten Gipsy Danger back to shore on his own after losing Yancy and taking Knifehead out. That kind of battlefield history went a long way with other Jaeger crews.
But they were also a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of crowd, and to them, Raleigh could see, his failure this morning had pretty much erased whatever standing he’d earned in the early years of the Kaiju War. Nobody greeted him. The kitchen staff put food on his plate silently. He walked along the tables and the people who didn’t turn their backs on him just stared, daring him to sit near them.
So this is how it’s going to be, he thought. Okay. I work better with a chip on my shoulder, and you guys are all carving me a nice big one.
Looking around, he saw Mako, also carrying a tray and being subjected to the collective shunning. Even Gipsy Danger’s maintenance team huddled at a table avoiding eye contact with her and Raleigh.
He walked up to her.
“Let’s get out of here.”
It was technically against the rules to take trays out of the mess hall, but at this point it didn’t seem like had much to lose. They headed for Gipsy Danger’s repair area and sat on the gantry, eating in silence. Technicians went about their business on the Jaeger, finishing the run of tests Pentecost had ordered and getting the Jaeger fully fit for battle.
And, Raleigh thought, ready for whoever was going to be Gipsy Danger’s next pilot team. Pentecost hadn’t grounded him, but Raleigh didn’t think any of the other candidates would be nearly as good as Mako in the field. Pentecost knew very well how he felt and might install a new pairing, just to avoid the problem of Raleigh corrupting the neural handshake with resentment and distraction.
“I am ashamed about today,” Mako said eventually, looking at Gipsy Danger.
“So am I,” Raleigh said. He pointed down at the technicians. “They’re trying to figure out what went wrong, but nothing did. You had one of the strongest machine-pilot handshakes I’ve ever seen.”
He was still feeling it, the post-Drift hangover. He could smell the dust of Tokyo stinging in young Mako’s nose. He could hear the sound of Onibaba’s pincers dragging across the pavement. In a non-sensory kind of way, if that was possible, he also remembered the way Gipsy Danger had responded to Mako. Like they knew each other ... which, given how long Mako had worked on the Mark III Restoration Project, wasn’t too much of a stretch. Raleigh thought again of the stories he’d heard in the Academy, of Jaegers moving in tune with their Rangers even after the neural handshake had broken. He thought of how he and Yancy had always felt the post-Drift hangover, and how he was feeling it now.
Mako must have been feeling it too. She looked emptied out, shocked by the persistence of Raleigh’s loss in her mind. Could she feel Yancy too, an echo of him, because she had Drifted with Raleigh? How far did it go?
“I didn’t anticipate it being as intense as it was,” Mako said. “I lost control.”
Raleigh wanted to bring her out of the guilt. She wouldn’t be any good as a Ranger if she didn’t have the ability to move past mistakes. So he picked up the topic and ran with it, letting her know that he understood, that he was on her side.
“Soko de wa tatte o mita. Kodomo ni. Sonna ni sabishikatta. Kaiju ga zenbu o totta,” Raleigh said. I saw you standing there as a child. So alone. The kaiju took it all from you.
She opened up a little. “It was a Sunday. We went to the park. My father bought me those shoes. My mother combed my hair. Then the attack started. We were separated by the crowd... and in a minute I lost them.”
She looked down at her tray. Raleigh saw her again reliving that day, and he relived it right with her. He’d been there with her, in the Drift. It wasn’t like any Drift he’d ever felt. Broken, yes, but also more intense. Lots of Drifts were staccato series of images at first, until the two brains figured out how to approach each other and get into the overlapping neural-handshake posture. With Mako, his Drift had been more like a movie where he was both a spectator and a character. He’d carried a red shoe with broken laces, he’d heard the cough of lungs heavy with cancer—he wondered if Mako had felt his own experiences so intensely. He didn’t think so—one of the reasons she had broken the Drift was that she had been too far inside her own past. If she’d been closely in touch with Raleigh’s past the way he was with hers, both of them could have re-centered and gone on.
“I never saw them again,” Mako said.
“When Yancy... was taken,” Raleigh said, “We were still connected. I felt his fear, his helplessness... his pain. And then he was gone.”
Mako nodded and touched her heart.
“I felt it,” she said. “I know. But now it is time for you to forgive yourself.”
“We lived in each other’s minds for so long, the hardest part to deal with was the silence,” he said. “To let someone in—to really connect—you have to trust them. And today... today the Drift was strong.”
“It was strong,” Mako agreed.
They watched a crane moving a piece of Gipsy Danger’s hull. Techs crawled into the open space and the flare of a welding torch lit up the Jaeger from within.
“Her heart,” Mako said. “Have you ever seen it?”
The old nuclear vortex turbine lifted away from the reactor housing. The reactor itself was a proprietary design, brainchild of an engineer who left Westinghouse when they wouldn’t let him use his lab to explore portable nuclear miniaturization tech. He’d landed with one of the contractors the PPDC brought in at its founding, and his small reactors powered many of the first three generations of Jaegers. They’d also killed a couple of Rangers over time. Raleigh could see where Gipsy Danger’s reactor had new shielding in three places: the inside of the reactor compartment, the outside of the reactor housing itself, and the internal cylinder of the vortex turbine.
“Not in a long time,” Raleigh said.
Mako watched him remember. He could almost feel her wishing for the Drift again so she could experience the memory too.
“You named her, right?” she asked.
Raleigh nodded.
“My father was a swordmaker,” she continued. “He made each one by hand. He said when a warrior names his weapon, they share a bond.”
“Makes sense,” Raleigh said. “I missed her. She was a part of me.”
“Before we messed up—” Mako said. She hesitated, and then asked, “Did we have a good connection?”
Raleigh too hesitated. “As strong as I’ve ever seen,” he said, and it was true, although it felt disrespectful to Yancy to say it. Maybe that was part of what Mako had meant by forgiving himself.
Gipsy Danger shifted and creaked. Raleigh had a superstitious moment of curiosity, wondering if she could hear her two pilots so close.
“I’m sorry I said you were dangerous,” Mako said.
“Unpredictable,” Raleigh said. “But I like dangerous better.” Something from their Drift floated through his mind and he smiled. “When we were Drifting, I heard a song...”
Mako smiled back at him. She untangled earphones from her pocket and handed him one.
“Shibuya Pop,” she said. “Kind of corny, kind of sweet. You want to hear?”
He nodded and put the earbud in. She played the song, and they listened together, letting the music wash over and connect them. It was bouncy synthpop with a little bit of jazz to it. Music to make you feel good. Listening to music together was maybe one of the best connections you can find outside the Drift, Raleigh thought.
But he was also thinking that if the world didn’t end in the next week or so, he and Mako would Drift together again. Whatever had happened that morning, Pentecost wasn’t fool enough to ignore the connection Raleigh and Mako had discovered.
“We gave them an excuse to dismiss us,” he said. “But we won’t do it again.”
“If we get a chance,” she said. “A lot of people here think I’m just Sensei’s favorite.”
“Sensei, huh?”
Mako looked a little embarrassed.
“It’s been my nickname for him. More of an honorific than a nickname. He... after my parents were gone, he took care of me. Guided me. I am here because of him.” She looked at him, a challenge in her eyes. “But I deserve everything I have gotten. He does not play favorites.”
“Hey, you don’t need to tell me,” Raleigh said. “If anything, it’s the other way around.”
“First we must convince him,” Mako said. “Then the rest of them will know.”
Refectory tumblr mvyrfz5RXF1qce1xzo2 1280.jpg|Mako Mori and her chocolate milk.
Refectory tumblr mvyrfz5RXF1qce1xzo3 1280.jpg|Maleigh and their chocolate milks.
Refectory tumblr mvyrfz5RXF1qce1xzo1 1280.jpg|Raleigh Becket with his chocolate milk. 
Refectory_revisited_tumblr_my0ssm4sjH1qb4ckgo2_500.jpg|Mako and her jello and her chocolate milk ().]]
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