Work Text:
Mako stumbles into the lab for the first time when she is fourteen and doesn't speak much English, seven months after Tokyo is destroyed and three months after she is adopted by the Marshall.
The lab is in the basement, and it is dark and cool, and she is fascinated.
There is technology that she has never seen before, but she's more interested in the chalkboards, covered with numbers.
She likes the chalkboards, the look of the white on black.
She's certain that the equations on the boards must be important, but she doesn't understand what they mean, though she's good at math.
They must be very complicated.
She moves closer, fascinated as she always has been at things that she doesn't understand, and for a moment the heavy fear that is always enveloping her like a blanket is pushed into the back of her mind as numbers scrawl their way across her brain.
"What are you doing here?"
Mako jumps but doesn't scream at the sudden sound, and she twists around, hands up, awkwardly trying to shield herself against an invisible enemy.
She puts her hands to her sides but is still wary when she sees the person in front of her.
He is thin, wearing ugly brown pants and a white shirt and a brown woolen vest over that shirt and a gray jacket that looks warm but also a bit too big, and he is leaning heavily on a cane.
His face is thin, too, and his eyes are narrowed and they look old even though the man is not old. Mako understands this.
They look at each other for a while, and then Mako sees that the man's long fingers are stained white with chalk, and so are his pants.
Tentatively, she asks, "These are...your numbers?"
The man looks confused, briefly, and then nods quickly. "Yes. They're calculations I'm developing to predict the amount of time between Kaiju attacks."
She doesn't understand all of the words, and she knows that his accent is a bit like Sensei's but not quite, but after a few seconds she realizes that the man is fighting Kaiju too.
"Can they stop them? The numbers, what the numbers...make, can they stop the Kaiju?"
"No," the man says. "But they are meant to make it easier for the Jaeger pilots to stop the Kaiju. They are still a work in progress, but they're coming along nicely."
Mako nods as though she understands what he's said, even though he talks too fast and all she was really able to catch was that the numbers help the Jaeger kill the Kaiju.
She looks at the board again, moving a little closer. She likes the way the man's steps and cane thunk against the ground, he's easy to hear and the deep sounds are soothing, not as thunderous as the steps of the Kaiju.
She doesn't want to think about that.
The man doesn't touch her, but his hand hovers over her shoulder. It doesn't bother her.
"Don't touch that."
Mako shakes her head. "They look..." she searches for the right English word, and it's hard to find, but she thinks that she has it, as she looks at the gentle curves of the numbers. "Simple." She likes that.
The man lets out a kind of offended sigh. "This is actually very complicated."
She shakes her head again. "No, I mean they look simple, not are simple. But they are easier than the real world, no?" She doesn't mean that the numbers aren't real, she means that they make everything neat, they turn so many frightening things into just white on black.
He is silent for a long time, and she thinks he doesn't understand, but then he says, "Yes. I suppose so."
She nods solemnly. "I am Mako," she offers, still looking at the chalkboard like there's answers there, because she knows there are, though she can't decipher them.
"Hermann," the man says.
"Hermann," she repeats. She wants to tell him that she's pleased to meet him, but she doesn't have those words.
"Well, I should get back to work," his voice is slower now, his words more pronounced, and Mako appreciates this.
She nods and moves to the side, clambering onto a silver stool, sitting with her legs swinging.
Hermann looks at her like she has shocked him, and the expression is so comically puzzled that it makes her smile. "What?"
"You're...going to stay?"
Mako nods decisively. She doesn't want to be alone, and for some reason she feels much more alone among all of the noise around her quarters or in the mess hall among strangers than here, in this small laboratory with a man who isn't talking to her at all, with the click of chalk against board.
She sits quietly and watches the numbers change under Hermann's hand, be scrawled onto the board or scrubbed away and replaced by something that she supposes must be better.
She understands the beauty in his work, that's why she watches.
That's why she is disappointed when, hours later, Hermann puts his chalk down, but she smiles when he turns to her and starts, as though he forgot she was there.
Maybe he did. She likes that. She wants that someday, to be so immersed in her work that she forgets everything but what she is doing.
He frowns at her, but then smiles back a little, tentatively, a brief twitch of his lips.
He walks over to a table that has a kettle on it, and Mako follows his movements, watching the rise and fall of his cane curiously.
"Would you like some tea? It's cold by now, unfortunately, and rather atrocious, but it does have caffeine, at the very least, and you don't seem especially interested in sleeping."
Many of the words he says simply wash over Mako and she doesn't try to catch them, because she caught enough.
She likes tea and hates sleeping and is glad somebody understands, so she nods happily.
He pours her a mug of tea, and sits across the same table as her.
She sips the tea and doesn't spit it out even though it's disgusting. She doesn't mind that, because she thinks that this means that she might have made a friend, and Mako hasn't had a friend in a long time.
They look at each other for a while, drinking tea in silence that doesn't feel nearly as oppressive as so many other silences do to Mako. She finally asks, "Have you ever...did you ever drive a Jaeger?"
Hermann looks almost taken aback at the question, and she sees his eyes flicker downwards, briefly. "No."
She nods.
She itches to one day connect her mind to another's, to operate one of the glorious machines that her Sensei used to fight in so beautifully, so brutally.
She wants to slay monsters.
"I am going to drive a Jaeger one day," Mako tells him.
Hermann nods seriously, as though he is not surprised by this at all. He doesn't smile, or laugh, or look confused, doesn't immediately assume that she's just a little girl who will change her mind soon. No.
Hermann nods, and he says, "I believe you."