Fic: Three Memories of Max Vandenburg That Exist in the Drift [The Book Thief/Pacific Rim]
Title: Three Memories of Max Vandenburg That Exist in the Drift
Fandom: The Book Thief/Pacific Rim
Characters/Pairings: Max Vandenburg, Hercules Hansen, Chuck Hansen, Mako Mori
Summary: "You take a lot of your own physicality and mannerisms into the jaeger, sure," Hercules Hansen tells an interviewer. "Me? My granddad was a fist-fighter. He taught me."
Word Count: 5,500
Notes: So instead of doing anything I needed to do today, I sat down and wrote this, because sometimes you just have those days. A gift for romanitas, based on this conversation, in which we decided that the Hansens had to be descended from a Jewish fist-fighter. Because reasons.
Heavy spoilers for both canons, and I did my best with the Pacific Rim stuff, because sometimes it's all you can do to look at conflicting dates on the wiki and go "what," so some things might be off.
[read @ AO3]
one.
It is summer, the January of 1993, and although the day itself had actually been the uniform grey of oft-washed linen, almost drowning in itself, memory chooses it and makes it bluer than any summer sky has ever been before.
The windows on the white house gape open. Uncle Rudy's bellowing a fight song as he unravels the garden hose down the drive with the jaunty determination of a parade, his vowels soaring and sustained, and in the backyard, thirteen-year-old Hercules Hansen pushes himself off the ground, skinny boy arms trembling with the effort.
Blood coats his teeth. He licks and swallows.
Across from him, his grandfather stands in the grass with matching blood on his knuckles and says, "Schmeckt gut, ja?"
Tastes good, doesn't it?
Herc doesn't answer. His chest feels molten, cratered, his fury a meteorite sitting and smoking in the middle of it, and he couldn't even really tell you what he was angry at. Inside the house, Liesel's voice rises, yelling at somebody, calling them an ass-licking ass-scratcher of an asshole (whoever said the Australians had the world's most creative curses had clearly never gotten a German truly inspired on the subject of one's backside) and they better move before she beat them a new one, in that loving way she has.
"Come on, child," his grandfather coaxes, and gently, the bastard. Herc wants to rearrange his face with his fingernails. "Learning to fight what you're afraid of takes effort."
"I'm not afraid of you," Herc returns, baffled. Max is in his seventies, white-haired and crooked and --
Moving.
A punch jabs towards Herc's face, shockingly fast for a fist pocked with age marks and raised bones, aimed there at the same place, the divot of skin right underneath his nose.
He jerks out of the way, the punch pulls back, and Max's eyebrows tick up, a clear ah, see?
"And now you are," he points out, quite patiently. "Now, show me again how you were holding yourself, because I assure you, it was wrong."
Well, that sure doesn't make me want to do it, Herc thinks back acidly.
The fact that Hercules Hansen doesn't want to punch his grandfather doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. His mother felt a war in her womb when she carried him, and named him appropriately. He was playing exclusively with toy guns and little plastic infantrymen by the time he was five, organizing and giving orders on the playground by seven -- a career soldier from birth, others will say, but not until later.
When Hercules lengthened into adolescence with the wail of a falling bomb, his mother packed them up and took them to her dad in Sydney.
He's like you, she told Max, Herc at her elbow, sleepy from the eight-hour drive, the M31 still coasting phantom-like in his skin and an itch starting in his heart that he doesn't dare scratch. Can you help?
He carried a war in him that had no name, no direction, and it will be twenty years yet before the monsters come out of the sea, so no one knew what Hercules Hansen had been born for, not yet. Max Vandenburg lived a war -- everyone knows that, he and Liesel give talks about it still, in big auditoriums with hard chairs -- and so he's the one who teaches Herc how to fight, because it will gore him, otherwise, that feeling in his chest.
When Herc remembers this summer, later, he thinks of his grandfather, both teacher and opponent. He thinks of the grit on his palms from the push-ups. He thinks of a question:
Wie bekampft man einen jaeger?
"Jaeger?" Herc echoes, massaging the cramped muscles in his arms. His German isn't so fluent as all that, and it takes him a moment to place the word.
Max nods. "Jaeger."
How do you fight that which hunts you?
"How?" asks the thirteen-year-old Herc.
Easy, the grown-up version answers for him, there in the silence of the drift. His body falls automatically into position, the way Max taught him, and his awareness of his small, human self fades out. He is metal, circuitry, and jaeger. You fight it with your fists.
two.
After they took his father (this is how he remembers it, the taking, the great facelessness that came down and smeared his father out of existence, and Chuck had never paid much attention to his father's presence until that presence became an absence, became a wound,) there was talk of sending Chuck and his cousins to some relative named Rudy who lived out in the bush. But talking never became sending, and that's how Chuck remembers Sydney:
An impermanence.
Sydney wasn't staying -- he would either join Dad at the Jaeger Academy, or he'd be sent to Uncle Rudy, or something.
That's the background color to Chuck's most prominent memory about Sydney in the early years of the Kaiju War:
Reading in the shelters.
This was before the jaeger program was truly, steadily on its feet, back when nuclear strike was still the only brilliant idea anybody had for how to seriously damage a kaiju. When the sirens sounded, you took shelter, because who knew which city a kaiju would target fresh out of the breach. Shelters, it seemed, materialized faster than a Macca's in a busy neighborhood, because better to surface after an attack, alive, and find your city a crater, than be out in your city when it becomes a crater.
The closest shelter was fifteen minutes from Chuck's grandmother's house, a place he'd somehow landed at after Mum's service by sheer virtue of the fact that's where everybody else was.
After Melbourne, they were all homeless.
It was Chuck, his aunts and an uncle he didn't much care for and all of his cousins, Grandma Hansen and her sister and their dad, Max, who was apparently Chuck's great-grandfather even though Chuck swears he's never met the man before (he has; old people are pretty forgettable, is all.) All in all, there were fourteen people suddenly crammed into Grandma Hansen's tiny house, sleeping under the stairs and kitted in sleeping bags in rows on the floor, cousins who beat and battered and loved him. Nobody complained. They were lucky.
It was Max who first started reading to them, while the sirens wailed distantly, high above the bunker.
He wasn't afraid of the dark, or the cold, or the underground.
"Why would I be?" he said with a big gummy laugh, slapping his knee, and it was so infectious all the kids laughed back at him, even though they didn't get it.
They were often down there for four, seven, eight hours at a time. Somebody usually brought a pot or a bucket they could use as a dunny, and somebody else had blankets, and there was almost always something to munch on, even if sometimes it was just stale wheat sticks from someone's ration card that you had to suck on to soften them up. You shared in the shelters, that's just how it was.
Abraham, the youngest of his cousins, a boy with apple cheeks and pigeon toes who would never remember a world without kaiju in it, started crying entirely against his will about an hour into the first attack and was pulled into Max's lap before a sibling could wallop him.
He said, "How about I read to you, hm?"
And Abbo rubbed his nose with the back of his sleeve, snuffled bravely, and nodded, because anything was better than sitting.
Max looked around. Great-Aunt Susan produced the first Harry Potter book seemingly out of nowhere, and that settled it. This is the memory that burns bright in the drift, a bluelit landmark in Chuck's consciousness, the flip of a rabbit's tail begging to be chased -- the cold shelter floor, little Abbo in Max's lap, Chuck sitting by his knees and all the other children gathered close, watching the book in Max's hand like it was a living thing, its pages the ash-colored beating of wings. When the power quit and the death of the lights plunged them into darkness, as it often did, Max's voice rose above the burbling of fear (had the city been hit? Surely they would have felt it, oh why has no one installed Wifi down here, didn't they know that not knowing was worse?) finishing the sentence he was on and making up the next one, until somebody leaned over his shoulder, lighting the pages with the glow from their mobile. When that phone died, somebody always took its place with another.
They got half-way through The Philosopher's Stone that first day, and when the all clear finally sounded, one of the soldiers came over and helped Max stand. He'd stiffened up, his whole face white with pain. Forced into movement, his joints cracked audibly. He was almost a hundred years old.
"That was a good idea you had," the soldier said gruffly, conscious of the curious hoard of Max's grandchildren and great-grandchildren crowded around. "Thanks."
"I learned from the best," Max answered. "If they're scared, tell them stories."
Another memory:
The flatness on Newt's face after Chuck absent-mindedly interjects something into his conversation with one of the analysts currently attached to Chuck at the spine of his suit, the way, "I didn't know you read" fell from his mouth and landed at their feet, a shapeless lump of surprise, and Chuck shrugged. He doesn't. Not, like, recreationally.
But he knows Harry Potter because they got through all seven books in the shelter, and a few of the spin-offs, before Herc came back for him.
It won't be until later, after he forms a neural handshake with his father and those memories become his own with the force of a fist flying at his face, that it even occurs to him that Max had been somebody, that he hadn't just appeared, fully-formed and already a hundred years old, there in the sunniest room of Grandma Hansen's house.
They lose Max in the attack on Sydney, the day before Striker Eureka is supposed to be decommissioned; they find him crushed beneath the rubble of a city that was supposed to be safe behind that bloody stupid wall. That shelter, the one some part of Chuck's ass still feels molded to, had been deemed unnecessary and closed the year before, and Max didn't make it to the next closest one in time. How could he? He was the seventh oldest person alive in Australia at the time -- whoever was eighth has that title now, Chuck supposes.
He lasts a scant forty-eight hours before he punches Raleigh Beckett in the face.
It's a stunning throw, perfect in every extension, splitting Raleigh's lip and sending him crashing to the grating.
The muscle memory isn't Chuck's.
It isn't his, but he'll take it, the phantom pressure of hands centering his shoulders, a dead man's voice chuckling and saying, Mr and Mrs Dursley of Number Four Privet Drive were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much...
three.
The house behind the fence is white, a visible candle flame of light in the drift, and from a child's perspective, everything seems so much taller than it really is; the yard is a fathomless expanse of sharp green blades, winking and twisting in the sun.
Mako only visited that house once in her entire life -- the summer (in this hemisphere) that she turned twelve, and the Marshall bent to the window and told her to wait in the car. She doesn't remember anything about what's inside of it besides the painting, so memory blankets it with a mismatched quilt of the other places she's been instead: the waving cat wall clock from the Marshall's sister's kitchen is there, as are the bookshelves from her aunt's house in Yokohama, always placed too high, out of reach in a way that felt deliberate to her as a child. There's an armchair she's pretty sure is identical to the one from Up, and something about the tread of the floor is universal to every Shatterdome she's ever been in -- although it couldn't be, since most of those had still been in construction at the time.
But in the drift, it makes sense in that way reconstructed memories do.
She is twelve years old, and the painting on the wall catches at her like it's sunk barbs into her eyes. It's a bright day, and the wide windows cut at the summer sunlight as it comes through, so that it falls to her feet in sharp, rectangular shapes. She walks along the edge of one, high up on her tiptoes with her arms out for balance, and then she sees the painting and comes back down again.
It's half-obscured by a stack of black storage bins, marked with Roman characters scrawled in heavy silver marker (memory makes them say something innocuous, like "Clothes", although honestly they could have been anything, the whole house was that cluttered because there were too many people living in it,) and as she draws closer, the colors of it suddenly materialize into a scene.
She stops.
Horror opens its maw inside her.
In front of her, a street lay demolished, buildings dashed against the ground in eggshell chunks, like someone had carelessly dropped them from a great height and then stepped on the pieces. Broken signs peek out here and there, tombstones claiming particular patches of rubble, marked with script she can't read. The horizon burns dully red. The whole scene is flecked with bits of falling ash that look like snowfall -- catch a bit on your tongue and it will burn.
Mako knows it will. She still has the scar; a small patch on her tongue that can't taste anything.
A girl stands in the middle of it all. Her coat is red and her hair is blonde, done up in two pigtails that trail scraggily over her shoulders. She leans into her next step, off-balance on a street that isn't the same beneath her feet anymore. Mako can't see her face, but she knows it'll be cracked, she knows it will be leaking. She knows exactly what kind of sounds will be coming out of it.
Okaa-san! Otou-san!
An echo, inside her head, and the way these things do, it sounds kaiju blue.
Mama! Papa!
Then, a voice.
"Oh!" it says from right behind her. "Hello there?"
Mako jumps, unpleasant surprise frosting over her insides. She spins around, and there, lumped into the armchair she'd completely ignored --
He's the oldest man she's ever seen, he has to be. Age spots form deep pocks in his skin, pitting the bald-apple surface of his scalp like worm marks. His eyes, which protrude out of his wrinkles, are dark, but green; a swampy kind of green like getting lost in the woods, she thinks. On the little table at his elbow, a book rests like a moth, pages open and spine up, a magnifying glass resting across it. There's a glass of water on a coaster, and the sunlight clearly shows the individual marks of fingers and lips, pressed over and over into the same places.
He's curved towards her crookedly, and in her panic, she thinks bizarrely that he's bowing, so she quickly bows back, stammering, "I'm so sorry, I didn't think --"
Remembering herself, she switches to English.
"-- did not think anybody was here, I'd not have -- I'm very sorry!"
Why didn't she stay in the car like the Marshall told her to? You shouldn't walk into houses you've never been to just because they belong to Ranger Hansen and you were curious to see what happened to the families where not everybody dies!
The wrinkles squint at her some, and she realizes it's not a bow, it's just the way he's shaped, curled in on himself the way blades of grass do as they wilt. She straightens and he asks, "I don't think I've seen you before, are you one of my great-grandchildren?"
He's very hard to understand, between his accent and the gummy way he talks. Mako blinks at him for several long seconds before his words arrange into something she can understand.
She darts a look sideways, but of course there's no rescue. "No?"
A pause follows. It stretches long enough to make them both uncomfortable with the need to find something to say to fix it. Mako scuffs at the rectangular light on the floor, thinking about just darting into the hallway and not stopping until she's back in the car.
He speaks first. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid my jokes have never been very funny --"
"How old are you?" blurts out of her, almost simultaneous.
His mouth breaks open sunnily, like that's a great thing to ask.
"Why," he says. "I was born in 1916."
She nods to show she's registered that, and waits. She can't think of anything really important that happened in 1916, although she's sure there's something. Television, maybe? That seems long ago enough to be television.
Amusement crinkles through his face, and she'll take it over angry and yelling, which would certainly summon the Marshall and then he'd have to yell at Mako and Ranger Hansen, and that's the last thing she wants. His nose bleeds when he has to yell that much.
"Are you very good at arithmetic?" he wants to know.
She doesn't know that word.
"If I was born in 1916, and it's now 2016 …"
He trails off, and understanding flashes through Mako so quickly that in the strangeness of the memory, blinking exclamation marks flare up around her head. He means maths! Oh, why did he just say that? Mako is very, very good at maths!
"You're a hundred years old," she goes, amazed.
All the wrinkles crinkle up again. "Ja, I am."
She's about to ask another question, already confident about the way the English words line up in her head, when raised voices from another room catch their attention, hers a beat before his. She recognizes Ranger Hansen's timbre just as the Marshall's goes soaring commandingly over it -- "I have to track you down to your mother's house" and "you are a pilot" are the only audible parts -- and then they drop again.
"Ah," says the elderly man. "That answers my next question." He looks at her. "What's your name?"
"My name? It's Mako Mori, please."
"I thought it might be. The Pan-Pacific channel is the only one we still get with any regularity. I thought your face looked familiar." They broadcasted the footage from Coyote Tango's victory in Tokyo repeatedly; Mako had featured once or twice, being one of very few people to date to get that physically close to a kaiju and survive. The Marshall adopting her officially had been of interest to people, too. "It's nice to meet you. My name is Max. I'm --" he gestures towards where the yelling had come from. "His granddad."
She scrunches up her nose. Ranger Hansen's grandfather? But isn't he a grandfather, too? Maybe he isn't, but he looks old enough.
He crooks his head. "Tell me, Fraulein Mori, do you like my painting?"
Mako Mori does not, in fact, like that painting. She feels it at her back like it's still burning. She does not like it at all, but she knows it and it knows her. They recognize each other, and that might be more important.
"You painted it?" she asks.
"Yes. I painted most everything in this house. In fact," his voice lowers, so he's speaking more to himself than to her. "If I am not mistaken, I painted the house. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that was before Tess was born. Has anyone painted it since then?"
He continues mumbling, dropping out of an English she can decipher (or, as far as she knows, out of English entirely,) and Mako gives in to the scratchy pressure at her back and glances over her shoulder at the painting; the obliterated street and the little girl, Mako's age, lost in the unrecognizable skeleton of everything she knew. She shivers and tastes ash.
"It's not very good, is it?" she asks.
The wrinkles in Max's face all leap upward in a very spirited way. If he had any eyebrows left, they'd be lifted clear up to the top of his forehead.
For a second, she thinks she's offended him, but then he laughs; a rustling, dusty sound.
"No, you're right. I never had a talent for art, let's be honest, but if you do something for long enough -- and I've been alive for a hundred years, remember --" He says it in the manner of someone who isn't going to let anyone forget that any time soon. It is pretty impressive, Mako admits. You have to survive a lot to be a hundred years old, and still be alive on the Pacific rim. "-- You become acceptable at it."
He scratches at his chin, and shrugs. He has a tattoo on the inside of his forearm: a progression of small, black, squarish numbers like a code. It seems like an odd tattoo to have.
(But she'll meet someone named Newt later and if there's anything she'll learn from him that doesn't have to do with nuclear physics, it'll be to not judge people on what other people ink into their skin.)
(And even later than that, she'll drift with someone named Raleigh and from his head, which has been more centered in European education than her own, she will finally gain the context of what it means for an old Jewish man to have a tattoo of numbers on his arm.)
"What is it?"
"A street named after heaven," he answers immediately, and he suddenly sounds like he's in another room, without moving from the armchair in front of her. She blinks, and in that momentary darkness on the back of her eyelids, she swears she sees a corona, an outline of the red-coated girl with her hand on Max's shoulder. "Himmel Street. It was a poor neighborhood in a town called Malching. It had houses, shops, apartment blocks -- 179 people had an address of some sort there." He points. "She was the only one who survived."
Mako nods, turning this over in her head. "Was it a kaiju?"
The wrinkles crease again.
"No," Max says gently. "No. It was the Americans."
She nods again, but can't get her head around it. Academically, she knew wars used to be fought by humans against humans, but it still seems unfathomable and backwards. Why would people fight anything but kaiju? What would be the point?
"Her name was Liesel," Max continues, sounding much more present. "You would have liked her, I think. I know she would have liked you. You have … quite a lot in common."
Suddenly, out of nowhere, she recognizes the expression on his face: it's the same way the Marshall talks about Luna Pentecost. It's the way Ranger Hansen talks about his wife. It's the way Mako herself talks about her parents. Everyone she knows, in fact, has someone they talk about like the talking will make them appear, will cut them out of the air with precision and sit them down beside them.
"She's dead, isn't she?"
Max closes his eyes. He nods.
She steals another glance at the painting and the red-coated girl.
"Tell me about her," she says, and she knows by the way it lights through every crooked, bent part of Max's body that that was the right thing to ask. They pull over a stack of storage bins for Mako to sit on, and he folds his spindly hands, smiles with all his teeth, and launches into a story that begins with, "Before I get into it, I'm telling you right now that Liesel and I knew nothing about crocodiles at the time, okay? How could we? We were German immigrants, poorer than churchmice, and scarcely educated. If anything, that book-thieving girl of mine should have known, but she didn't, and I'll never hear the end of it …"
Some of it's lost on her, whole sentences that just fail to arrange properly inside her head, lost somewhere between Max's gummy accent and her own inexpert English, but then she'll catch the thread of it again with a word or a gesture that suddenly falls back into context, and missing pieces don't stop her from enjoying it.
There are people, she thinks, who are born with a talent for something -- Mako's father made swords that looked like art, like someone had taken starlight and attached it to a hilt, with blades so smooth that you could see Death's reflection in them with every swing. The Marshall can make a whole crowd of people pay attention with a few words, hooking his fingers into their spines and drawing them upright as if he's got them on strings. Max Vandenburg, there in the drift with the rest of them, tells stories unlike anybody she's ever known, like he's cracked his ribs apart and drawn out something soft, leaking, and completely edible.
A year later, when they're stationed in Hawaii for a summit that will determine whether the second American Shatterdome will be built here in Honolulu or in Los Angeles (the Marshall argues for Honolulu, due to its strategical proximity to the breach, but it's decided that LA is the better option, more accessible for supplies and easier to defend, and after Ceramander's attack, there isn't really much left of Honolulu anyway, but perhaps the PPDC would like an observational hub here?), their mail catches up with them.
In it is a package, addressed to her. It comes from Sydney.
It's been opened and inspected, of course, and she can see it in the Marshall's hands as she walks up. At his side, Miyax -- a jaeger pilot from the Alaska Shatterdome with very dark eyes and a heavy amount of flesh on her bones, who'd testified at the summit that it took them the same amount of time to scramble, deploy from Anchorage, and cross thousands of miles as it took a kaiju to reach Honolulu from the breach -- is saying, low, "-- think that's appropriate? What if it triggers her?"
The Marshall looks up, spotting Mako in the corridor.
"Only one way to find out," he says, and extends the package. "This came for you, Mako."
She comes over, taking it from him. For a moment, all she feels is canvas fabric and a hard frame, and then she pulls away the packaging. She sees red and ash. She gasps.
It's the painting, the one that hung in the Hansen's house!
No, she thinks, eyes darting over it, heart pulping hard in her chest like something keeps squeezing it. No, not quite.
It's smaller, for one, a much more portable size. The lines aren't quite as neat, and she pictures Max's crooked, skeletal hands trying to paint the details in miniature and her own knuckles immediately ache in the phantom -- the rubble's the same, as is that horrible death-colored sky, the ashfall, but if she's not mistaken, the script on the broken signs that mark each of Himmel Street's makeshift mass graves is now in Japanese: not characters that say anything in particular, just familiar, like they should.
And the girl.
Liesel's coat is now blue. She's not staggering down the street: she's stationary now, turned to look back at Mako with a hand lifted up, like she's watching something approach from the sky. There's no fear on her face.
No longer lost, but found.
Mako turns it over. On the back it says, To Mako Mori. From Max Vandenburg, age 101.
She squeaks, and hugs the painting tightly to her chest.
"Well," says Miyax amusedly. "That answers that."
And, in the end, in the summer (in this hemisphere) that she turns twenty, it's the Marshall who tells her, pulling her aside with a hand on her arm. She shakes the rain off their umbrellas, careful not to splatter their boots, and tilts her head obligingly as he leans down to her ear and tells her, "Just so you are aware, Striker Eureka might be more volatile than usual. They lost family in Sydney yesterday."
Mako nods acknowledgement, swallowing back an old, impotent fury: does the Pan-Pacific Alliance really think that the kaiju will just … see the wall and go away? No, and now her pilots are suffering for it.
She runs through a mental checklist of what she knows about Hercules and Chuck Hansen, trying to remember what family they had left in Sydney. Who --
Dismay boxes her around the ears, leaving her stunned. She thinks of a white house, an armchair, and the painting she keeps in her quarters.
"No!" she gasps out. "Oh, no, not Max!"
The Marshall blinks at her, perplexed.
"What?" he says. "The dog is fine, you'll see him yourself later --"
She shakes her head impatiently. "Not the dog," she says, and promises herself that she'll rub that dog's ears extra hard the next time she sees him. "The old man. Please, tell me it wasn't him."
His face creases, folding in a sorrowful way, and Mako sways, the ground turning as crumbly as grief beneath her feet, washing away into the drift.
(Many years from now, while she's cutting out giant cards for an alphabet primer by the light of a reading lamp in the study, English letters on one side and Japanese on the other, the monitor turned down low at her elbow, Raleigh will ghost up beside her, depositing a stack of books down on her other side. I saw them in your head, is what he will tell her by way of explanation. I thought you might want these.
He's brought her a whole set of children's books. They have thin spines and hard backs. The one on top is called Waldeinsamkeit, and on the cover, a girl stands in a dark forest, alone except for a snowman. Her coat is red.
With the tip of her finger, Mako traces to where it says, right under the title, by M. Vandenburg and L. Meminger.
She will want to laugh, and then she will, and Raleigh ducks his head, pleased.)
a conversation.
the rooftops of Sydney, January 2, 2025.
"Guten tag."
"Hello, Max. Are you comfortable?"
"I am, thank you. The view is … I haven't seen this much sky since they built that damn wall."
"It's an amazing sky today, wouldn't you say?"
"It usually is. The blue of eggshells, with clouds stretched thin like tightropes across it. Footpaths that your mind can walk on, I always thought."
"Yes, exactly." Today there is also smoke, the hazy white of steam and thick geysers of black gushing as petrol burns, and the blue of the sky is crisscrossed with jagged papercuts from the jetplanes that follow those colossal jaegers like an indicator species, like buzzing mayflies, but neither of them mention that. In the distance, the hole in the wall gapes open like a laughing mouth, the curl of blue Pacific sea beyond it, like a tongue against its teeth. Fewer than seven hundred people died today, Max included. It's not a bad day. "So, Max. I hear you are 108 years old."
"I am, yes."
"If I didn't know better, I would say you've been avoiding me."
"My apologies. I think you'll find I am not very fond of men standing over me."
"It's a good thing, then, that I am no man."
"No." A pause. "You wear her face."
"I do, yes. I seem to have … I seem to have gotten stuck like this. I loved her very much, you know. But I don't have to tell you what that's like."
"No."
Another pause.
Then Death says, "If you do not mind, my friend, perhaps you could accompany me. For a few days, at least, and then your great-grandson the jaeger pilot --"
"Chuck?"
"-- yes, shall meet us. We will be very busy between now and then, but I thought you would like to collect him together."
For a long time, Max says nothing. He watches the gradients of color shift in the sky; how many types of blue can there be? Perhaps he doesn't want to look out across his city, where the silhouette of Striker Eureka is still visible in the street, celebrating its victory. (He does the math. Chuck is younger than he was when he fled home on Kristalnacht, 1938. To Max, it seems unfathomable that Chuck is anything but that little boy in the shelter. How can Death come for him?) Perhaps he does not want to look at the figure beside him. Perhaps he knows, perhaps he can sense what Death is truly asking: I cannot do this on my own. I am haunted and half of myself. Please will you help me carry this burden?
He thinks of his mother, of the father he never knew until he met him in Hans Hubermann. He thinks of his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, of Herc and Chuck especially. He thinks of Mako Mori.
Then, lastly, like a papercut in the sky, he thinks of Liesel.
He turns and he says, "Thank you, Frau Death. I would like that a lot."
-
fin
A/N: And that's how Max Vandenburg became the grim reaper, picking up the dead and dying and telling them a story. I mean what.
Fandom: The Book Thief/Pacific Rim
Characters/Pairings: Max Vandenburg, Hercules Hansen, Chuck Hansen, Mako Mori
Summary: "You take a lot of your own physicality and mannerisms into the jaeger, sure," Hercules Hansen tells an interviewer. "Me? My granddad was a fist-fighter. He taught me."
Word Count: 5,500
Notes: So instead of doing anything I needed to do today, I sat down and wrote this, because sometimes you just have those days. A gift for romanitas, based on this conversation, in which we decided that the Hansens had to be descended from a Jewish fist-fighter. Because reasons.
Heavy spoilers for both canons, and I did my best with the Pacific Rim stuff, because sometimes it's all you can do to look at conflicting dates on the wiki and go "what," so some things might be off.
[read @ AO3]
one.
It is summer, the January of 1993, and although the day itself had actually been the uniform grey of oft-washed linen, almost drowning in itself, memory chooses it and makes it bluer than any summer sky has ever been before.
The windows on the white house gape open. Uncle Rudy's bellowing a fight song as he unravels the garden hose down the drive with the jaunty determination of a parade, his vowels soaring and sustained, and in the backyard, thirteen-year-old Hercules Hansen pushes himself off the ground, skinny boy arms trembling with the effort.
Blood coats his teeth. He licks and swallows.
Across from him, his grandfather stands in the grass with matching blood on his knuckles and says, "Schmeckt gut, ja?"
Tastes good, doesn't it?
Herc doesn't answer. His chest feels molten, cratered, his fury a meteorite sitting and smoking in the middle of it, and he couldn't even really tell you what he was angry at. Inside the house, Liesel's voice rises, yelling at somebody, calling them an ass-licking ass-scratcher of an asshole (whoever said the Australians had the world's most creative curses had clearly never gotten a German truly inspired on the subject of one's backside) and they better move before she beat them a new one, in that loving way she has.
"Come on, child," his grandfather coaxes, and gently, the bastard. Herc wants to rearrange his face with his fingernails. "Learning to fight what you're afraid of takes effort."
"I'm not afraid of you," Herc returns, baffled. Max is in his seventies, white-haired and crooked and --
Moving.
A punch jabs towards Herc's face, shockingly fast for a fist pocked with age marks and raised bones, aimed there at the same place, the divot of skin right underneath his nose.
He jerks out of the way, the punch pulls back, and Max's eyebrows tick up, a clear ah, see?
"And now you are," he points out, quite patiently. "Now, show me again how you were holding yourself, because I assure you, it was wrong."
Well, that sure doesn't make me want to do it, Herc thinks back acidly.
The fact that Hercules Hansen doesn't want to punch his grandfather doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. His mother felt a war in her womb when she carried him, and named him appropriately. He was playing exclusively with toy guns and little plastic infantrymen by the time he was five, organizing and giving orders on the playground by seven -- a career soldier from birth, others will say, but not until later.
When Hercules lengthened into adolescence with the wail of a falling bomb, his mother packed them up and took them to her dad in Sydney.
He's like you, she told Max, Herc at her elbow, sleepy from the eight-hour drive, the M31 still coasting phantom-like in his skin and an itch starting in his heart that he doesn't dare scratch. Can you help?
He carried a war in him that had no name, no direction, and it will be twenty years yet before the monsters come out of the sea, so no one knew what Hercules Hansen had been born for, not yet. Max Vandenburg lived a war -- everyone knows that, he and Liesel give talks about it still, in big auditoriums with hard chairs -- and so he's the one who teaches Herc how to fight, because it will gore him, otherwise, that feeling in his chest.
When Herc remembers this summer, later, he thinks of his grandfather, both teacher and opponent. He thinks of the grit on his palms from the push-ups. He thinks of a question:
Wie bekampft man einen jaeger?
"Jaeger?" Herc echoes, massaging the cramped muscles in his arms. His German isn't so fluent as all that, and it takes him a moment to place the word.
Max nods. "Jaeger."
How do you fight that which hunts you?
"How?" asks the thirteen-year-old Herc.
Easy, the grown-up version answers for him, there in the silence of the drift. His body falls automatically into position, the way Max taught him, and his awareness of his small, human self fades out. He is metal, circuitry, and jaeger. You fight it with your fists.
two.
After they took his father (this is how he remembers it, the taking, the great facelessness that came down and smeared his father out of existence, and Chuck had never paid much attention to his father's presence until that presence became an absence, became a wound,) there was talk of sending Chuck and his cousins to some relative named Rudy who lived out in the bush. But talking never became sending, and that's how Chuck remembers Sydney:
An impermanence.
Sydney wasn't staying -- he would either join Dad at the Jaeger Academy, or he'd be sent to Uncle Rudy, or something.
That's the background color to Chuck's most prominent memory about Sydney in the early years of the Kaiju War:
Reading in the shelters.
This was before the jaeger program was truly, steadily on its feet, back when nuclear strike was still the only brilliant idea anybody had for how to seriously damage a kaiju. When the sirens sounded, you took shelter, because who knew which city a kaiju would target fresh out of the breach. Shelters, it seemed, materialized faster than a Macca's in a busy neighborhood, because better to surface after an attack, alive, and find your city a crater, than be out in your city when it becomes a crater.
The closest shelter was fifteen minutes from Chuck's grandmother's house, a place he'd somehow landed at after Mum's service by sheer virtue of the fact that's where everybody else was.
After Melbourne, they were all homeless.
It was Chuck, his aunts and an uncle he didn't much care for and all of his cousins, Grandma Hansen and her sister and their dad, Max, who was apparently Chuck's great-grandfather even though Chuck swears he's never met the man before (he has; old people are pretty forgettable, is all.) All in all, there were fourteen people suddenly crammed into Grandma Hansen's tiny house, sleeping under the stairs and kitted in sleeping bags in rows on the floor, cousins who beat and battered and loved him. Nobody complained. They were lucky.
It was Max who first started reading to them, while the sirens wailed distantly, high above the bunker.
He wasn't afraid of the dark, or the cold, or the underground.
"Why would I be?" he said with a big gummy laugh, slapping his knee, and it was so infectious all the kids laughed back at him, even though they didn't get it.
They were often down there for four, seven, eight hours at a time. Somebody usually brought a pot or a bucket they could use as a dunny, and somebody else had blankets, and there was almost always something to munch on, even if sometimes it was just stale wheat sticks from someone's ration card that you had to suck on to soften them up. You shared in the shelters, that's just how it was.
Abraham, the youngest of his cousins, a boy with apple cheeks and pigeon toes who would never remember a world without kaiju in it, started crying entirely against his will about an hour into the first attack and was pulled into Max's lap before a sibling could wallop him.
He said, "How about I read to you, hm?"
And Abbo rubbed his nose with the back of his sleeve, snuffled bravely, and nodded, because anything was better than sitting.
Max looked around. Great-Aunt Susan produced the first Harry Potter book seemingly out of nowhere, and that settled it. This is the memory that burns bright in the drift, a bluelit landmark in Chuck's consciousness, the flip of a rabbit's tail begging to be chased -- the cold shelter floor, little Abbo in Max's lap, Chuck sitting by his knees and all the other children gathered close, watching the book in Max's hand like it was a living thing, its pages the ash-colored beating of wings. When the power quit and the death of the lights plunged them into darkness, as it often did, Max's voice rose above the burbling of fear (had the city been hit? Surely they would have felt it, oh why has no one installed Wifi down here, didn't they know that not knowing was worse?) finishing the sentence he was on and making up the next one, until somebody leaned over his shoulder, lighting the pages with the glow from their mobile. When that phone died, somebody always took its place with another.
They got half-way through The Philosopher's Stone that first day, and when the all clear finally sounded, one of the soldiers came over and helped Max stand. He'd stiffened up, his whole face white with pain. Forced into movement, his joints cracked audibly. He was almost a hundred years old.
"That was a good idea you had," the soldier said gruffly, conscious of the curious hoard of Max's grandchildren and great-grandchildren crowded around. "Thanks."
"I learned from the best," Max answered. "If they're scared, tell them stories."
Another memory:
The flatness on Newt's face after Chuck absent-mindedly interjects something into his conversation with one of the analysts currently attached to Chuck at the spine of his suit, the way, "I didn't know you read" fell from his mouth and landed at their feet, a shapeless lump of surprise, and Chuck shrugged. He doesn't. Not, like, recreationally.
But he knows Harry Potter because they got through all seven books in the shelter, and a few of the spin-offs, before Herc came back for him.
It won't be until later, after he forms a neural handshake with his father and those memories become his own with the force of a fist flying at his face, that it even occurs to him that Max had been somebody, that he hadn't just appeared, fully-formed and already a hundred years old, there in the sunniest room of Grandma Hansen's house.
They lose Max in the attack on Sydney, the day before Striker Eureka is supposed to be decommissioned; they find him crushed beneath the rubble of a city that was supposed to be safe behind that bloody stupid wall. That shelter, the one some part of Chuck's ass still feels molded to, had been deemed unnecessary and closed the year before, and Max didn't make it to the next closest one in time. How could he? He was the seventh oldest person alive in Australia at the time -- whoever was eighth has that title now, Chuck supposes.
He lasts a scant forty-eight hours before he punches Raleigh Beckett in the face.
It's a stunning throw, perfect in every extension, splitting Raleigh's lip and sending him crashing to the grating.
The muscle memory isn't Chuck's.
It isn't his, but he'll take it, the phantom pressure of hands centering his shoulders, a dead man's voice chuckling and saying, Mr and Mrs Dursley of Number Four Privet Drive were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much...
three.
The house behind the fence is white, a visible candle flame of light in the drift, and from a child's perspective, everything seems so much taller than it really is; the yard is a fathomless expanse of sharp green blades, winking and twisting in the sun.
Mako only visited that house once in her entire life -- the summer (in this hemisphere) that she turned twelve, and the Marshall bent to the window and told her to wait in the car. She doesn't remember anything about what's inside of it besides the painting, so memory blankets it with a mismatched quilt of the other places she's been instead: the waving cat wall clock from the Marshall's sister's kitchen is there, as are the bookshelves from her aunt's house in Yokohama, always placed too high, out of reach in a way that felt deliberate to her as a child. There's an armchair she's pretty sure is identical to the one from Up, and something about the tread of the floor is universal to every Shatterdome she's ever been in -- although it couldn't be, since most of those had still been in construction at the time.
But in the drift, it makes sense in that way reconstructed memories do.
She is twelve years old, and the painting on the wall catches at her like it's sunk barbs into her eyes. It's a bright day, and the wide windows cut at the summer sunlight as it comes through, so that it falls to her feet in sharp, rectangular shapes. She walks along the edge of one, high up on her tiptoes with her arms out for balance, and then she sees the painting and comes back down again.
It's half-obscured by a stack of black storage bins, marked with Roman characters scrawled in heavy silver marker (memory makes them say something innocuous, like "Clothes", although honestly they could have been anything, the whole house was that cluttered because there were too many people living in it,) and as she draws closer, the colors of it suddenly materialize into a scene.
She stops.
Horror opens its maw inside her.
In front of her, a street lay demolished, buildings dashed against the ground in eggshell chunks, like someone had carelessly dropped them from a great height and then stepped on the pieces. Broken signs peek out here and there, tombstones claiming particular patches of rubble, marked with script she can't read. The horizon burns dully red. The whole scene is flecked with bits of falling ash that look like snowfall -- catch a bit on your tongue and it will burn.
Mako knows it will. She still has the scar; a small patch on her tongue that can't taste anything.
A girl stands in the middle of it all. Her coat is red and her hair is blonde, done up in two pigtails that trail scraggily over her shoulders. She leans into her next step, off-balance on a street that isn't the same beneath her feet anymore. Mako can't see her face, but she knows it'll be cracked, she knows it will be leaking. She knows exactly what kind of sounds will be coming out of it.
Okaa-san! Otou-san!
An echo, inside her head, and the way these things do, it sounds kaiju blue.
Mama! Papa!
Then, a voice.
"Oh!" it says from right behind her. "Hello there?"
Mako jumps, unpleasant surprise frosting over her insides. She spins around, and there, lumped into the armchair she'd completely ignored --
He's the oldest man she's ever seen, he has to be. Age spots form deep pocks in his skin, pitting the bald-apple surface of his scalp like worm marks. His eyes, which protrude out of his wrinkles, are dark, but green; a swampy kind of green like getting lost in the woods, she thinks. On the little table at his elbow, a book rests like a moth, pages open and spine up, a magnifying glass resting across it. There's a glass of water on a coaster, and the sunlight clearly shows the individual marks of fingers and lips, pressed over and over into the same places.
He's curved towards her crookedly, and in her panic, she thinks bizarrely that he's bowing, so she quickly bows back, stammering, "I'm so sorry, I didn't think --"
Remembering herself, she switches to English.
"-- did not think anybody was here, I'd not have -- I'm very sorry!"
Why didn't she stay in the car like the Marshall told her to? You shouldn't walk into houses you've never been to just because they belong to Ranger Hansen and you were curious to see what happened to the families where not everybody dies!
The wrinkles squint at her some, and she realizes it's not a bow, it's just the way he's shaped, curled in on himself the way blades of grass do as they wilt. She straightens and he asks, "I don't think I've seen you before, are you one of my great-grandchildren?"
He's very hard to understand, between his accent and the gummy way he talks. Mako blinks at him for several long seconds before his words arrange into something she can understand.
She darts a look sideways, but of course there's no rescue. "No?"
A pause follows. It stretches long enough to make them both uncomfortable with the need to find something to say to fix it. Mako scuffs at the rectangular light on the floor, thinking about just darting into the hallway and not stopping until she's back in the car.
He speaks first. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid my jokes have never been very funny --"
"How old are you?" blurts out of her, almost simultaneous.
His mouth breaks open sunnily, like that's a great thing to ask.
"Why," he says. "I was born in 1916."
She nods to show she's registered that, and waits. She can't think of anything really important that happened in 1916, although she's sure there's something. Television, maybe? That seems long ago enough to be television.
Amusement crinkles through his face, and she'll take it over angry and yelling, which would certainly summon the Marshall and then he'd have to yell at Mako and Ranger Hansen, and that's the last thing she wants. His nose bleeds when he has to yell that much.
"Are you very good at arithmetic?" he wants to know.
She doesn't know that word.
"If I was born in 1916, and it's now 2016 …"
He trails off, and understanding flashes through Mako so quickly that in the strangeness of the memory, blinking exclamation marks flare up around her head. He means maths! Oh, why did he just say that? Mako is very, very good at maths!
"You're a hundred years old," she goes, amazed.
All the wrinkles crinkle up again. "Ja, I am."
She's about to ask another question, already confident about the way the English words line up in her head, when raised voices from another room catch their attention, hers a beat before his. She recognizes Ranger Hansen's timbre just as the Marshall's goes soaring commandingly over it -- "I have to track you down to your mother's house" and "you are a pilot" are the only audible parts -- and then they drop again.
"Ah," says the elderly man. "That answers my next question." He looks at her. "What's your name?"
"My name? It's Mako Mori, please."
"I thought it might be. The Pan-Pacific channel is the only one we still get with any regularity. I thought your face looked familiar." They broadcasted the footage from Coyote Tango's victory in Tokyo repeatedly; Mako had featured once or twice, being one of very few people to date to get that physically close to a kaiju and survive. The Marshall adopting her officially had been of interest to people, too. "It's nice to meet you. My name is Max. I'm --" he gestures towards where the yelling had come from. "His granddad."
She scrunches up her nose. Ranger Hansen's grandfather? But isn't he a grandfather, too? Maybe he isn't, but he looks old enough.
He crooks his head. "Tell me, Fraulein Mori, do you like my painting?"
Mako Mori does not, in fact, like that painting. She feels it at her back like it's still burning. She does not like it at all, but she knows it and it knows her. They recognize each other, and that might be more important.
"You painted it?" she asks.
"Yes. I painted most everything in this house. In fact," his voice lowers, so he's speaking more to himself than to her. "If I am not mistaken, I painted the house. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that was before Tess was born. Has anyone painted it since then?"
He continues mumbling, dropping out of an English she can decipher (or, as far as she knows, out of English entirely,) and Mako gives in to the scratchy pressure at her back and glances over her shoulder at the painting; the obliterated street and the little girl, Mako's age, lost in the unrecognizable skeleton of everything she knew. She shivers and tastes ash.
"It's not very good, is it?" she asks.
The wrinkles in Max's face all leap upward in a very spirited way. If he had any eyebrows left, they'd be lifted clear up to the top of his forehead.
For a second, she thinks she's offended him, but then he laughs; a rustling, dusty sound.
"No, you're right. I never had a talent for art, let's be honest, but if you do something for long enough -- and I've been alive for a hundred years, remember --" He says it in the manner of someone who isn't going to let anyone forget that any time soon. It is pretty impressive, Mako admits. You have to survive a lot to be a hundred years old, and still be alive on the Pacific rim. "-- You become acceptable at it."
He scratches at his chin, and shrugs. He has a tattoo on the inside of his forearm: a progression of small, black, squarish numbers like a code. It seems like an odd tattoo to have.
(But she'll meet someone named Newt later and if there's anything she'll learn from him that doesn't have to do with nuclear physics, it'll be to not judge people on what other people ink into their skin.)
(And even later than that, she'll drift with someone named Raleigh and from his head, which has been more centered in European education than her own, she will finally gain the context of what it means for an old Jewish man to have a tattoo of numbers on his arm.)
"What is it?"
"A street named after heaven," he answers immediately, and he suddenly sounds like he's in another room, without moving from the armchair in front of her. She blinks, and in that momentary darkness on the back of her eyelids, she swears she sees a corona, an outline of the red-coated girl with her hand on Max's shoulder. "Himmel Street. It was a poor neighborhood in a town called Malching. It had houses, shops, apartment blocks -- 179 people had an address of some sort there." He points. "She was the only one who survived."
Mako nods, turning this over in her head. "Was it a kaiju?"
The wrinkles crease again.
"No," Max says gently. "No. It was the Americans."
She nods again, but can't get her head around it. Academically, she knew wars used to be fought by humans against humans, but it still seems unfathomable and backwards. Why would people fight anything but kaiju? What would be the point?
"Her name was Liesel," Max continues, sounding much more present. "You would have liked her, I think. I know she would have liked you. You have … quite a lot in common."
Suddenly, out of nowhere, she recognizes the expression on his face: it's the same way the Marshall talks about Luna Pentecost. It's the way Ranger Hansen talks about his wife. It's the way Mako herself talks about her parents. Everyone she knows, in fact, has someone they talk about like the talking will make them appear, will cut them out of the air with precision and sit them down beside them.
"She's dead, isn't she?"
Max closes his eyes. He nods.
She steals another glance at the painting and the red-coated girl.
"Tell me about her," she says, and she knows by the way it lights through every crooked, bent part of Max's body that that was the right thing to ask. They pull over a stack of storage bins for Mako to sit on, and he folds his spindly hands, smiles with all his teeth, and launches into a story that begins with, "Before I get into it, I'm telling you right now that Liesel and I knew nothing about crocodiles at the time, okay? How could we? We were German immigrants, poorer than churchmice, and scarcely educated. If anything, that book-thieving girl of mine should have known, but she didn't, and I'll never hear the end of it …"
Some of it's lost on her, whole sentences that just fail to arrange properly inside her head, lost somewhere between Max's gummy accent and her own inexpert English, but then she'll catch the thread of it again with a word or a gesture that suddenly falls back into context, and missing pieces don't stop her from enjoying it.
There are people, she thinks, who are born with a talent for something -- Mako's father made swords that looked like art, like someone had taken starlight and attached it to a hilt, with blades so smooth that you could see Death's reflection in them with every swing. The Marshall can make a whole crowd of people pay attention with a few words, hooking his fingers into their spines and drawing them upright as if he's got them on strings. Max Vandenburg, there in the drift with the rest of them, tells stories unlike anybody she's ever known, like he's cracked his ribs apart and drawn out something soft, leaking, and completely edible.
A year later, when they're stationed in Hawaii for a summit that will determine whether the second American Shatterdome will be built here in Honolulu or in Los Angeles (the Marshall argues for Honolulu, due to its strategical proximity to the breach, but it's decided that LA is the better option, more accessible for supplies and easier to defend, and after Ceramander's attack, there isn't really much left of Honolulu anyway, but perhaps the PPDC would like an observational hub here?), their mail catches up with them.
In it is a package, addressed to her. It comes from Sydney.
It's been opened and inspected, of course, and she can see it in the Marshall's hands as she walks up. At his side, Miyax -- a jaeger pilot from the Alaska Shatterdome with very dark eyes and a heavy amount of flesh on her bones, who'd testified at the summit that it took them the same amount of time to scramble, deploy from Anchorage, and cross thousands of miles as it took a kaiju to reach Honolulu from the breach -- is saying, low, "-- think that's appropriate? What if it triggers her?"
The Marshall looks up, spotting Mako in the corridor.
"Only one way to find out," he says, and extends the package. "This came for you, Mako."
She comes over, taking it from him. For a moment, all she feels is canvas fabric and a hard frame, and then she pulls away the packaging. She sees red and ash. She gasps.
It's the painting, the one that hung in the Hansen's house!
No, she thinks, eyes darting over it, heart pulping hard in her chest like something keeps squeezing it. No, not quite.
It's smaller, for one, a much more portable size. The lines aren't quite as neat, and she pictures Max's crooked, skeletal hands trying to paint the details in miniature and her own knuckles immediately ache in the phantom -- the rubble's the same, as is that horrible death-colored sky, the ashfall, but if she's not mistaken, the script on the broken signs that mark each of Himmel Street's makeshift mass graves is now in Japanese: not characters that say anything in particular, just familiar, like they should.
And the girl.
Liesel's coat is now blue. She's not staggering down the street: she's stationary now, turned to look back at Mako with a hand lifted up, like she's watching something approach from the sky. There's no fear on her face.
No longer lost, but found.
Mako turns it over. On the back it says, To Mako Mori. From Max Vandenburg, age 101.
She squeaks, and hugs the painting tightly to her chest.
"Well," says Miyax amusedly. "That answers that."
And, in the end, in the summer (in this hemisphere) that she turns twenty, it's the Marshall who tells her, pulling her aside with a hand on her arm. She shakes the rain off their umbrellas, careful not to splatter their boots, and tilts her head obligingly as he leans down to her ear and tells her, "Just so you are aware, Striker Eureka might be more volatile than usual. They lost family in Sydney yesterday."
Mako nods acknowledgement, swallowing back an old, impotent fury: does the Pan-Pacific Alliance really think that the kaiju will just … see the wall and go away? No, and now her pilots are suffering for it.
She runs through a mental checklist of what she knows about Hercules and Chuck Hansen, trying to remember what family they had left in Sydney. Who --
Dismay boxes her around the ears, leaving her stunned. She thinks of a white house, an armchair, and the painting she keeps in her quarters.
"No!" she gasps out. "Oh, no, not Max!"
The Marshall blinks at her, perplexed.
"What?" he says. "The dog is fine, you'll see him yourself later --"
She shakes her head impatiently. "Not the dog," she says, and promises herself that she'll rub that dog's ears extra hard the next time she sees him. "The old man. Please, tell me it wasn't him."
His face creases, folding in a sorrowful way, and Mako sways, the ground turning as crumbly as grief beneath her feet, washing away into the drift.
(Many years from now, while she's cutting out giant cards for an alphabet primer by the light of a reading lamp in the study, English letters on one side and Japanese on the other, the monitor turned down low at her elbow, Raleigh will ghost up beside her, depositing a stack of books down on her other side. I saw them in your head, is what he will tell her by way of explanation. I thought you might want these.
He's brought her a whole set of children's books. They have thin spines and hard backs. The one on top is called Waldeinsamkeit, and on the cover, a girl stands in a dark forest, alone except for a snowman. Her coat is red.
With the tip of her finger, Mako traces to where it says, right under the title, by M. Vandenburg and L. Meminger.
She will want to laugh, and then she will, and Raleigh ducks his head, pleased.)
a conversation.
the rooftops of Sydney, January 2, 2025.
"Guten tag."
"Hello, Max. Are you comfortable?"
"I am, thank you. The view is … I haven't seen this much sky since they built that damn wall."
"It's an amazing sky today, wouldn't you say?"
"It usually is. The blue of eggshells, with clouds stretched thin like tightropes across it. Footpaths that your mind can walk on, I always thought."
"Yes, exactly." Today there is also smoke, the hazy white of steam and thick geysers of black gushing as petrol burns, and the blue of the sky is crisscrossed with jagged papercuts from the jetplanes that follow those colossal jaegers like an indicator species, like buzzing mayflies, but neither of them mention that. In the distance, the hole in the wall gapes open like a laughing mouth, the curl of blue Pacific sea beyond it, like a tongue against its teeth. Fewer than seven hundred people died today, Max included. It's not a bad day. "So, Max. I hear you are 108 years old."
"I am, yes."
"If I didn't know better, I would say you've been avoiding me."
"My apologies. I think you'll find I am not very fond of men standing over me."
"It's a good thing, then, that I am no man."
"No." A pause. "You wear her face."
"I do, yes. I seem to have … I seem to have gotten stuck like this. I loved her very much, you know. But I don't have to tell you what that's like."
"No."
Another pause.
Then Death says, "If you do not mind, my friend, perhaps you could accompany me. For a few days, at least, and then your great-grandson the jaeger pilot --"
"Chuck?"
"-- yes, shall meet us. We will be very busy between now and then, but I thought you would like to collect him together."
For a long time, Max says nothing. He watches the gradients of color shift in the sky; how many types of blue can there be? Perhaps he doesn't want to look out across his city, where the silhouette of Striker Eureka is still visible in the street, celebrating its victory. (He does the math. Chuck is younger than he was when he fled home on Kristalnacht, 1938. To Max, it seems unfathomable that Chuck is anything but that little boy in the shelter. How can Death come for him?) Perhaps he does not want to look at the figure beside him. Perhaps he knows, perhaps he can sense what Death is truly asking: I cannot do this on my own. I am haunted and half of myself. Please will you help me carry this burden?
He thinks of his mother, of the father he never knew until he met him in Hans Hubermann. He thinks of his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, of Herc and Chuck especially. He thinks of Mako Mori.
Then, lastly, like a papercut in the sky, he thinks of Liesel.
He turns and he says, "Thank you, Frau Death. I would like that a lot."
-
fin
A/N: And that's how Max Vandenburg became the grim reaper, picking up the dead and dying and telling them a story. I mean what.