WHERE Vallo City then Jake’s apartment. WHEN Today! Sept 16th WHAT Sibling reunion. STATUS Complete! WARNINGS Spoilers for Uprising, some talks of grief and death, they keep it pretty vague though.
Mako had heard the stories of abrupt drift disconnections, but those had always ended because of death and felt worlds away. Her arrival wasn’t that, but the ghost-drifting she normally felt with Raleigh was subdued and cut off, enough that it set her in motion with this white noise just listlessly following her in the background.
It hadn’t stopped her from punching one of her would-be rescuers, however. Or from asking her own series of questions when she’d been sat down in the quiet office. It didn’t feel like an interrogation room, and she was given reasonably sounding answers to whatever this was. And a video.
That, if she was being honest, had a higher production value than she would have expected. And a nice explosion.
She’d been given an apartment and some money, which made her even more suspicious rather than the other way around, but they seemed used to that, somehow. The apartment was nice - it reminded her of the one she’d been put in during the heroic press circut her and Ral had been shoved on following the closing of the breach. Clean, white, modern. Like nothing else in her life had ever been since being with the PPDC.
Mako was sure she hated it.
She ended up back outside, and after wandering for a little while, she sat on a park bench facing the road with a cup of froyo that apparently tasted like “the softness of a puppy’s tiny ears”. Because if something was going to go completely off-kilter in her life, why not go all the way?
And she had to admit it tasted weirdly comforting. She was only halfway done when a familiar face ended up in her peripheral vision and Mako stood quickly. “Jake?”
Mako.
His sister's voice was unmistakable, and Jake immediately sought out its source, spotting Mako ahead of him and very much alive at that. Thoughts of the last time he'd seen her immediately surfaced, but he pushed those down.
Hadn't he hoped for this? Vallo could pull people in from different points in time, allowing him to reunite with Mako? He was almost afraid he was hallucinating which also seemed like something Vallo could do, but he stepped quickly to his sister, pulling her into a hug and ignoring the fact that she had a half eaten cup of ice cream in her hands. She was real, and she was there, and he hesitated for a moment before letting go.
"Mako," he finally said, his entire face lighting up as he took a good look at her. "You're really here."
Mako let out a surprised squeak as she was pulled into a hug she hadn’t been expecting. They weren’t really a hugging family, but that had been more due to the fact that there were very few quiet happy times during a war. And then after-- well, Stacker was gone, and Mako was shuttled off from location to location like a show pony. Things had only really started to settle for her in the last year.
“Jake,” she repeated the name, muffled against his shoulder. Was he taller? No, that was just a question she’d asked herself a lot during his teenage years when he’d shot up ahead of her.
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously as she leaned away to look him over. He was definitely older and Mako started putting pieces together in her head-- they’d told her people had been arriving here for a while, but years? “Just how long have you been here? I just saw you-- a few months ago?”
If Jake could read Mako's thoughts he'd point out that they weren't really a hugging family because their father had pitted him against her and used her as the standard that he would never be able to obtain. But there was no time for such negativity now, and as he looked at her she did look different. Less stressed. More relaxed which was surprising, given current circumstances.
And having just seen him a few months ago was a clear sign she was from an earlier point in time, because as blunt as his sister could be? She'd point out that she knew she was dead.
"Right, so Vallo. You just got here?"
He rubbed at the back of his neck, thinking about how best to go about this. "I got here at the end of April. Wow. Almost half a year now. But… how old are you? What's happening when you're from?"
“One hour and forty seven minutes ago,” Mako confirmed with the kind of precise numbers she kept rattled around in her brain. They were currently muddled with the knowledge that Jake had been here for half of a year, along with the guilt that came with not being here with him. “It was 2028 at home - we’d just started plans for the Mark-6 Jaegers.”
Because Mako weighed her time in J-Tech increments. “You’ve really been here that long? You look--” Older. She didn’t say it. “How many times have you been arrested? Don’t lie to me. How much trouble have you gotten into? No, nevermind. I don’t want to know the answer.”
She did, if her furrowed brow and telltale I’ll fix this expression was any indicator.
2028.
Jake let out a low whistle, not at all surprised that Mako had the time since her arrival down to the minute, but instead that she'd arrived from seven years in the past? No wonder she looked like she was under less stress.
Everything was starting to make sense.
"So I've not been arrested, but you really don't want to know other than I am an upstanding member of the defense squad and I stopped a very tall and very creepy magic lady from causing the world to unravel. With a bit of help, of course."
A pause.
"And it was 2035 back at home… Does this make me older than you?"
“No!” Yes, it did. She did the math quickly in her head, despite her objection, and her frown only grew. Upstanding member of the defense squad made her feel an immediate sense of pride that helped dampen that frown, however.
But also it made her worry for the future. She was glad, very glad, given how worried she was for Jake’s path, especially after their father’s death, so to have him talking proudly of his accomplishments that weren’t on the thievery scale was amazing and worrying all at once.
She took another bite of soft-puppy-ears froyo before it became a completely melted mess and looked him over. “Upstanding member of the defense squad and saving the world from creepy magic lady. Something happened. When did you get your head out of your ass?” It was blunt, but Mako had never been one to skirt around things when she wanted answers.
"You just got here," Jake pointed out, head cocked toward his sister. "Are you sure you're ready for this?"
They had both lived through so much that Mako was sure she could handle whatever he had to say. She had always been the type to need information that was available. “You know I’m going to want to know.”
Did she want to know in the middle of a sidewalk in a strange world less than two hours after arriving without her partner? Not particularly. Mako blew out a long breath. “Is there a place to get alcohol and ramen? Maybe by each other?”
"Carry out," Jake said. "I have plenty of alcohol at my place."
When they were situated back in his apartment, food gone but not the drinks, Jake finally set to telling Mako just how he'd pulled his head out of his ass, as she'd so aptly phrased it. He recounted how he was facing prison and she'd given him an out as Ranger Pentecost.
"Always saving my ass," he muttered, knowing that he'd failed to do the same. And as he got to that part, he warned her with his tone first, swallowing hard because he could still picture it, the weight of that day returning to his shoulders as he filled her in.
Where his sister usually kept her emotions hidden, Jake rarely managed to disguise his own outside of a Conn-Podd . He paused a moment from telling her the future, regaining his composure. "You, of course, made sure your last act was getting us the info we'd need to track down what was happening. And we did." He glossed over the rest. They'd won, Newt was the bad guy, he was on his way back to the base when he'd arrived here.
"It's a really shitty story, Mako. I'm sorry."
Where the food had been a comfort, the alcohol in Mako’s glass remained untouched. It was tempting to down it, to dull things a little. But she didn’t want to put that responsibility on Jake in addition to everything else - he was already going above and beyond, he didn’t need to babysit her as well.
“Jake-- I’m sorry too.” Because even with everything, with the shock and the information, that was another person Jake had lost in his life. Another person pulled away from him because of the Kaiju, another casualty that could have been prevented if she’d paid closer attention to Newt and seen this coming.
She squeezed his arm, leaning towards reassuring him instead of processing her own internal emotions. “I knew it was a possibility, from even before I joined the PPDC, because not many people make it out alive being a Ranger. But I wouldn’t have wanted to leave you alone.”
That was so typical of her, focusing on him rather than herself even when he'd just told her that she was dead, that Jake almost rolled his eyes. Instead, he tried to bring some levity back to the conversation.
"Thanks, little sis, but I'm okay. Especially since you're here now. And now that I am both older and wiser, I'm going to ask. Are you alright?"
He was still the Jake Pentecost who didn't have to be convinced to join Margo Hanson's crime club, and who kept the Shatterdome kitchen stocked with Oreos, ice cream, and pizza, and who tore around Vallo on a motorcycle, but he had grown up. That much was undeniable, and he wasn't going to let Mako shift the focus away from herself until he knew she really was handing that onslaught of information as well as could be expected.
“I do not know yet,” she answered honestly, but with a reserved quiet that still didn’t put too much focus on herself. She wasn’t ready to approach honesty hour with her feelings, but it was nothing new to keep them bottled up. Ral was usually the one that forced her to confront things, even when she objected heavily.
She wasn’t ready to unpack that either.
Mako did give good in terms of little sis, though, and turned that arm squeeze into an arm punch. “But I do know that no matter how much older you are than me, I will always be older and wiser. Age is only a number until we are old enough to know it doesn’t count.”
Jake nodded. That's about what he expected from Mako but it was reassuring in a way, that even in the midst of complete upheaval and information overload she was as he remembered. Reserved and introspective where he'd be reactive and loud. For all the two siblings had in common, they were completely different as well.
He accepted the punch with a grin. "Right, well I'm here if you ever need your older brother. And if I'm not here, I'm on my motorcycle or on patrol, or doing some renovation work. Orrrrr," he added, drawing out the word deliberately, "I'm at the Shatterdome. Where my genius friend Zeke assembled a team to build me a solo-piloted jaeger."
That was more information thrown at her, but with far less emotional heft to it.
Any other time and she might’ve accused him of pulling her leg, but now, after that recent bout of emotional vulnerability, she knew he wasn’t lying. She shoved herself up and off of the couch and set the alcohol on the table, still untouched.
J-tech had been a replacement for alcohol for her on more than one occasion, and diving into work instead of facing one’s feelings was infinitely preferable. Mako steadied herself and poked his leg with her foot, “You should have lead with that. I want to go see the jaeger, take me to it.”
Now that was the sister he knew and loved, and Jake followed Mako's lead with a grin. He eyed her drink, not needing it himself. (The high of having her there did not need to be subdued.) But he also wasn't going to leave it out for Hot Sauce to get at, even if the squirrel hadn't shown himself yet.
That was going to be another conversation, but he could probably lead into it when she saw the interior decorating Zeke had gifted him. For now, he gleefully anticipated her reaction to that as he placed her untouched glass in the fridge.
"My bad, sis. Guess this is also the time to add that mine and Nate's jaeger is also here… So you can see how those Mark-6 plans turned out."
He was going to hear about that, definitely. But hey, at least he hadn't waited days to tell her.