Archive of Our Own ^beta

Yancy’s first memory is of his brother.  Of Raleigh, sitting in lap at three years old, saying, “Yancy Yancy Yancy Yancy Yancy.”  He’s just learned how to say it right—had been having a bit of trouble with the “n”—and he’s evidently very proud of himself.

Yancy, at six already taking his responsibilities as older brother very seriously, kisses his tuft of soft, blonde hair and says back to him, “Raleigh Raleigh Raleigh Raleigh Raleigh.”

“Yancy,” Raleigh whines, tagging along by the sleeve of his sweater as he quick-steps down a street in Thailand.  “Yancy, wait up.”

“How about you hurry up?”  Yancy replies, turning around to flash a grin at him.  But he slows down anyway, to let his brother on his shorter legs keep pace more easily.

Jazmine looks nothing like Yancy and Raleigh, who in turn look nothing like their parents, neither of whom are blonde.

It’s kind of a weird trick of genetics, actually—the two of them look out of place in family pictures unless the more extended family steps in. Yancy is told he looks like his Uncle Charles did at his age, but Raleigh just looks like himself. He’s got Dominique’s eyes, but so does Jaz—bright blue.  Yancy’s are greyer.

Richard takes better to his little girl than his two sons. Yancy, who is seven when she’s born, asks Dominique about it, because he’s pretty sure he would remember Richard cooing over Raleigh that way, and she laughs and tells him that’s just how fathers are about their daughters.

Richard’s work takes them to Japan when Yancy is ten, for six months.

He and Raleigh soak up the language the same way they picked up Portuguese, playing in the streets, and take to speaking it when they don’t want their parents to understand them. Dominique retaliates with rapid-fire, complicated French, but Yancy knows enough of it to get the gist and the only thing that happens is that both of them learn new words.

It makes Dominique laugh the first time Yancy uses her words back at her, and she can barely stop long enough to translate for her husband, whose French is simple at best.

He reads Romeo and Juliet when he’s twelve, and his room from that point on is an eclectic mix of comic books and classical literature. And sci fi.  And fantasy.  His reading tastes expand about as fast as his comic collection.

Raleigh, nine, and Jazmine, four, find him every night at around seven and pile onto his bed so he can read to them.  He doesn’t bother with Shakespeare then—Jaz wouldn’t understand much of anything either way, but Raleigh grasps the words “alien invaders” much better than “scullion” and “rampallian”.

Half the time they all fall asleep like that, and their parents have to carry the two younger ones to bed.

Dominique puts her cigarette out every night before she starts cooking.  Yancy likes to sit in the kitchen while she’s at it, watching. It’s warm, and usually smells good, and she talks all the way through it, in quiet French, a constant stream of kitchen and cooking advice that she says, “Even boys ought to know.”

The way she switches to English for this last and raises her voice so that Richard can hear her in the living room is not lost on Yancy, who laughs at it.

When he’s fourteen, they stop traveling as a family, ostensibly because Dominique doesn’t want him to have a fragmented high school experience.  Richard calls every night at first, lets Raleigh excitedly tell him about school even though even Yancy is hard-pressed to act interested in fifth-grade math.

He also lets Jazmine tell him about kindergarten, and even though, honestly, usually her stories are more boring than long division—excluding the one about Casey What’s-His-Name and the Teddy Bear From Hell—Yancy can hear him faking interest over the line, asking questions about whatever six-year-old thing she’s telling him about today.

He always tries to keep his own conversations with his father short, mostly because he’s perceptive enough to know that the girl he asked out last week and his score on the PSAT aren’t that important when you’re a hydraulics engineer.  He always asks how it’s going in whatever country Richard is in now, though, and listens to him talk about it.

Then he hands the phone to Dominique and puts the kids to bed so she can talk to her husband. And she does, usually late into the night.

Jazmine is Daddy’s Girl, that’s just how it is.  Yancy has always gravitated more towards their mother—they have a lot in common, even if they barely look related.  Raleigh, on the other hand, always goes straight for his older brother with everything he needs. Even though he’s eleven now, he still asks Yancy to read to him—usually just whatever he’s reading when Raleigh comes to find him. They read The Great Gatsby together, because Yancy’s English class assigned it, but the summer before Yancy turns fifteen they read Lord of the Rings, and Yancy puts on voices to make him laugh and Raleigh gets him the movies for his birthday.

Yancy struggles through math and science, but easily aces English class.  He tests out of French with no effort and ends up learning sign language at a community college instead of taking it in school. And every day after school, he always swings by the elementary school to pick up his younger siblings and then wait at the library with them until Dominique can come pick them up.  The house is too far to reasonably expect them to walk to every day.

He knows, because Raleigh tells him everything, that there are some kids picking on Jaz, so he jogs over instead of walking one day and watches the seven-year-olds all tumble out of the classroom, milling around at the cubbies, picking up their stuff. Jazmine doesn’t see him at first, because she doesn’t look up from the floor, shoulders hunched like she’s trying to protect herself.  A couple of little boys crowd up behind her, one pulling on one of her corkscrew curls, another interfering with her hands when she tries to pick up her coat, and Yancy’s seen enough, he steps in behind her and says, “Hey, Jaz, ready to go?”

At fifteen he’s not exactly a big guy, but he’s a hell of a lot bigger than a seven-year-old, and the unimpressed look on his face he gives both of the boys makes them quail. His sister’s little face lights up, and she says, “Yancy!” like Christmas has come early, and he kneels down to get on all their levels and says, soft and dangerous and directly to the boys:

“My sister’s too nice to tell on you, but I’m not.  You got me?”

Jaz is blushing, but he shifts his backpack to the front to give her a piggyback ride to go pick up Raleigh, and she doesn’t complain.

As far as he knows, they don’t bother her again.

Dominique starts coughing when he’s sixteen.  He doesn’t think much of it at the time, but he’s got a girl up in his room—Abi, with long black hair and pretty curves—on his lap, kissing him, in the middle of the night when neither of them are supposed to be doing anything like this, and he can hear her hacking through the wall of his bedroom.

That’s the first time he remembers it, although probably not the first time it’s happened.

Yancy never really hits a growth spurt.  He pretty much grows steadily, never any aches or pains, until he hits 5’11”, and then, infuriatingly, stops, just one inch shy of the six foot it would take to put him on level with his father.  But he stays proportionate throughout, which is nice.  Never goes through a gangly stage.

It makes him a very hot commodity in high school for a little while, where most of the sixteen-year-old boys are spindly-looking or dripping with extra grease they don’t know yet that they have to shower off every day.  He does have a little facial hair problem, namely that he can’t seem to grow any and when it does grow in, it’s patchy and weird-looking, but all in all—puberty is kind to him. He spends a couple of years being idly popular with the girls.   Plays lacrosse, although he never makes it to first string. Makes friends. He gets good grades, too, works hard in the places where he doesn’t have natural talent to skate by on.

One night a week, Sundays, usually, when he doesn’t have practice and Raleigh and Jaz do homework at the dinner table, he does dinner while Dominique sits across from her younger son and daughter and directs him quietly in French, over their heads.

Yancy hugs his dad when he gets in the door, but that’s about the extent of their hello—there’s no animosity between them, no gap to bridge, no particular dislike, but they’ve never been close.  Raleigh and Jaz, however, fling their arms around his waist and leg, respectively, depending on what they can reach, and when they’re done with that, he kisses Dominique so long Yancy looks at Raleigh and mimes gagging to make him giggle.

He stays home on Friday night and watches Star Wars with the two of them so his mom and dad can go out, but he’s okay with that.  Jaz sits on his lap and Raleigh curls into his side and he’s about as hot as a furnace and kind of has to pee all through the third movie, but he doesn’t ask them to move.

He works at Starbucks, the summer before his junior year and on into the school year, and pretty much flirts outrageously with every female customer, ages fifteen to eighty, who doesn’t look totally uncomfortable when he smiles and asks if he can take their order.  His boss, who thinks he’s hilarious, swears he sells more blueberry scones than any pretty boy has a right to, and he bats his eyelashes and grins and says, “Aw, do you think I’m pretty?”

She throws a muffin at his head and tells him she’s married, and he laughs his way out of her office to go pick up Raleigh and Jaz from summer camp.  Now that he’s got his license, he’s officially in charge of driving them pretty much anywhere they want to go.

He uses his employee discount to buy them hot chocolate when winter rolls around, and his boss tells him, “You don’t have an employee discount,” but he holds a finger up to his lips and she gives him a dollar off everything anyway.

Dominique coughs more, now. After the third night of Raleigh crawling into his bed saying, “Mom’s too loud, I can’t sleep, will you read to me,” at three in the goddamn morning, he passes her her cup of coffee on the morning and says,

“Maman, maybe you should go to the doctor about that.”

She waves him off and drinks her coffee.

Raleigh ages into high school and Yancy figures it’s pretty much his job to show the kid around, so he does.

He also gives a warning out to all of his friends that if somebody lays a finger on his brother, he’s going to hear about it, and he’s not going to be happy.  He says it with a smile, but his tone isn’t fucking around.

Raleigh passes the first week of his freshman year unscathed.

Yancy knows how good he looks in leather and tight jeans, easy grace and broad shoulders, so that’s what he wears to his first date with Ayana Demarco, who wears her hair in Senegalese twists and has eyes that drive him insane.  He drops her off after dinner and leans in for a kiss and she swats his hands away and says, “Boy, I am not that easy,” but she invites him in for a movie anyway.

She still doesn’t kiss him, but she steals his jacket the next day at school—during gym, she claims she’s cold—and for almost a year and a half they put up with half the school calling them Yin and Yang.

Raleigh breezes through his math class, but he can’t write an English paper to save his life, so Yancy goes to see his teacher, who was his teacher freshman year, and asks for some spare prompts so he can help Raleigh out. The guy beams when he sees him and he ends up running out of time in his free block talking to him.

When Yancy grades the prompts he tempers a little of his criticism with the lyrics to a David Bowie song scribbled in the margin.  It makes the paper look incredibly red, which takes a little of the punch out of how much he's corrected. 

He’s always looking out for Raleigh.

New Year’s Eve, Yancy goes out with his friends instead of staying home with his family for the first time in his life.  At midnight, watching the ball in Times’ Square drop from four hours ago, most of them are so drunk they couldn’t walk straight if they tried, and Yancy kisses Ayana so hard they tip a little backwards, off-balance, and her back touches the window. She yelps at the cold and Yancy laughs until he can’t breathe.

“Happy New Year’s, baby,” he tells her when he can finally talk again, and she rolls her eyes at him and replies,

“Happy New Year’s to you too, drunk white boy.”

They laugh at that, too, and they fall asleep on the couch in the living room, with her lying on top of him and the rest of their friends arrayed on various other pieces of furniture and the floor.

The next morning, he opens his phone to realize that he missed a call from Home, three minutes after midnight.

His former English teacher comes by Starbucks and sees him, and he grins and says, “Hey, Mr. Wick!”

“Hey, Yancy,” he replies, smiling back.  “Your brother did better on his last essay, but don’t tell him yet; I haven’t graded everybody else’s yet.”

“Sure won’t, sir,” Yancy says jauntily and curtsies with his apron.  “Can I ask what ‘better’ means?”

“It was a B,” Mr. Wick says, and then pauses.  “And I’m going to be late for a meeting with the board if I don’t get going soon, so can I get the largest size espresso you can give me, whatever you’re calling that now?”

“Hot or iced?”

“Hot,” he replies, and raises his eyebrows.  “And you can put Rob on the cup if you think you can manage to not call me that during school hours.”

Yancy beams at him. “Will do, Rob.”

Mr. Wick rolls his eyes.

Raleigh doesn’t show up after school to meet him so they can go get Jazmine, so Yancy goes looking for him.  With the sort of radar for his brother he’s developed over the years, it doesn’t take long before he finds why Raleigh is held up—he’s fighting with some kid in the back hallway near his locker.  Idly, as he’s hauling the kid around to face him, Yancy wonders where the teachers are.

It’s some freshman. Yancy holds back on hitting him because it doesn’t feel like a fair fight, and anyway, he’s not swinging anymore. “Don’t touch my brother again,” he says instead, dials his voice down an octave until it’s threatening, “or I’ll break you in half.”  He flexes his hand in the fabric of the kid’s shirt, pulling upwards so he can feel his strength, not necessarily jaw-droppingly impressive, but imposing enough when you're a skinny ninth-grader. “You got me?”

“Yes,” the kid squeaks, voice cracking.  It’s hilarious.

Raleigh shoves his hands into his pockets as they’re walking to the elementary school, but Yancy still hasn’t asked.  “He called me—“

Yancy cuts him off. “It doesn’t matter. If you hit him first, I bet he deserved it.  If he hit you first, you’d be dumb not to hit back.  You’re going to have a hell of a bruise on your cheek, though.  We should put some ice on that.”

Raleigh hugs him around the waist, silently.

Yancy’s scratching a physics problem into his paper when Jazmine climbs into his lap, tucking her dark head of curls under his chin.  She’s way too big to sit in his lap like this, but it’s never stopped her before. “Yancy.”

“What’s cracking, kiddo?” he asks, absently.  The only thing about his posture that’s changed is that he’s dropped one of his arms off the edge of the table so she has space to sit against the other one.

“Raleigh says you have a girlfriend.”

He can practically hear Dominique’s ears perking up, across the room.  Even though he told her months ago.  He gets a wrong answer and crosses it out before he returns to his sister’s question.  “Yeah, I have a girlfriend.”

“What does she look like?” Jaz asks, now staring at his paper. He puts his pencil down and reaches for his phone instead, flipping through it until he finds a picture of the two of them, a shitty selfie that he’s pretty sure she took drunk. They’re both smiling, though.

“You look really pale,” his sister says, after a moment of contemplative staring.  “But she’s pretty.”

“Thanks, Jaz.”

Dominique has come up behind him and is flipping through his pictures.  Most teenage boys would object, but Yancy is pretty sure his mom knows him better than he does, at this point, so if she sees a couple of bottles of Jack or cheap beer in the backgrounds of the frames, or catches a flick of that one picture where Ayana is sitting on his lap with her tongue down his throat, he’ll probably live.  “Am I going to get to meet her?”  Jazmine says, and behind him his mother makes a noise of affirmation, like she wants to say “hear, hear” but is holding back.

“Uh—“ he kind of wants to say no, but on the other hand, if Ayana can deal with him, she can deal with his kid sister and his chain-smoking French mother.  And she’s already met Raleigh, so… “—sure, if you want, I can ask her to dinner some night?”

It’s more a question than an answer.  Dominique kisses the back of his head, then coughs after she’s straightened.  “Ask her to dinner.”

Richard comes home the day before they’re going to have dinner with Yancy’s girlfriend, four days early, unannounced.

Yancy doesn’t even think twice about it.  They keep the date. Dominique treats Ayana like Yancy’s planning on marrying her, Richard mostly just stares at her like he’s sizing her up.  Raleigh looks like he’s feeling the awkwardness more than the rest of them, Jazmine just keeps asking her questions.  It’s not that bad, but it’s not that good, either.  He can tell Ayana’s being more polite about his mother’s cooking than truly appreciative, and he can also tell she’s not quite what his parents expected. He’s okay with both of those things, but it does make for a little tension.

“Sorry about that,” he tells her as he’s dropping her off at her house, a little sheepish. She smiles at him and reaches over to ruffle his hair, something his mother had done four times at dinner, embarrassingly enough.

“It’s okay, baby. French food is weird, that’s all.”

Yancy diplomatically does not point out that that was Senegalese, probably because his mother can identify a hairstyle at fifty paces and isn’t the single most creative woman in the world. “They liked you, though.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she tells him, leaning up to kiss him at the porch.  “They thought you were going to go for someone a lot quieter.”

“You’re a smart girl, Ayana,” he tells her, laughing, and kisses her again before he lets her go into the house.

“You wouldn’t be dating me if I weren’t.”

Raleigh and Jazmine are watching some shitty cartoon show while Yancy is making breakfast when his phone starts buzzing in his back pocket.  The texts are all from Ayana.

                     baby turn on the news

                     yancy

                     yancy

He googles “news” instead, while one hand is shoving vegetables around in the pan with a spatula, and almost drops his phone.  He turns off the stove and runs to the TV, flicking through channels over his siblings’ protest until he hits CNN.

And holy shit.

Holy fucking shit, mother of god.

Jazmine has nightmares for weeks after Trespasser.  Yancy wishes he hadn’t switched it on in front of her, but—at the same time, he’s glad he got to see the footage.  It’s on every channel for weeks, too.  Dominique watches with him, every night, when they’re summing up everything new every day. All the opinions, the science, the politics, the logistics, the death tolls.

Raleigh climbs into his bed the first night it hits, and doesn’t say read to me. Just grabs onto Yancy’s shirt and buries his head in his shoulder like he’s a little kid.

Yancy lets him do it. Even though he’s just as scared.

The night before the first day of their senior year, Ayana sneaks over, and he pretty much just kisses her senseless.  He’s not dumb enough to get up to anything else while his mom is next door, coughing away, clearly awake.  Or when Raleigh’s just as likely to pick that lock as knock.

But god, she’s beautiful.  And he’s just not that good on impulse control.

She tries to sneak out the next morning, but even though they get up way earlier than Yancy would like, they still don’t manage to beat Raleigh, who raises his eyebrows at them as they try to tiptoe out.

Little shit just smiles at him and fist bumps him as he’s on his way out the door to drive her home before her dad notices she’s gone.

“Yancy.”

Yancy groans, cracking an eyelid, and turns his head to look at the clock.  “Raleigh, it’s two in the morning.  Go the fuck to sleep.”

“Yancy,” Raleigh says again, more urgently, shaking his arm this time.  “It’s mom, Yancy.”

Yancy shoots upright so fast his spine cracks painfully.  “What’s wrong with mom?”

“She told me to come get you—“

Raleigh leads him to the bathroom in their parents’ room.  There’s light under the door, but it’s locked.  “Maman?” he calls through the door.  The only response is a muffled noise that sounds like his name. “Go back to my room, okay, Raleigh? Read a book.”

Raleigh looks like he’s about to argue—at thirteen, he’s starting to do that more—but when he sees the look on Yancy’s face in the dim, he says, solemnly, “Okay,” and walks away. The second the door of the bedroom closes behind him, the door Yancy’s standing in front of clicks unlocked.

And god, Yancy almost throws up.  His mother, in her bathrobe, which is half hanging off one shoulder, is bent over the toilet, hair sticking to her forehead with sweat.  Her wrists look skeletal—he wonders how he hasn’t noticed her losing weight. The seat of the toilet is splattered with red.

It’s not a lot of blood—mostly, it’s vomit.  But it’s enough. He steels himself and walks into the room, puts an arm around her thin shoulders.  “Levez-vous, Maman.”  He hands her a plastic bag and drives her to the hospital, poking his head in on Raleigh just long enough to tell him to watch Jaz if she wakes up.

Then he sits in the waiting room while the ER doctors wheel her away.

He leaves to drive home, drop Raleigh and Jazmine off at school, and then he calls himself in sick and goes back to the hospital.  Raleigh doesn’t ask questions, probably because Jaz is there, but he looks kind of weird.

When Yancy gets back, his mom is waiting for him.  So’s the doctor. She tries to talk, but comes up short of breath and has to pause, something he hadn’t even realized she’d been doing lately, from time to time.  The doctor looks at her instead, and, with a grim look on her face, says, “Do you want me to explain the situation to your son?”

Dominique waves her hand, looking pained—a reluctant yes.  The doctor launches in.

Not much gets through to Yancy after “mass in her lungs,” but they say, “We’ll have to wait for the labs to come back to know what it is for sure,” at the end, and he doesn’t believe in god, but he starts praying.

They don’t tell Raleigh and Jazmine.  But he does call Richard, that night, and gets his voicemail.

You’ve reached Richard Becket.  I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave me a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Says, “Dad? This is Yancy. Call me back, it’s Mom.”

Hangs up.

Cries. In the bathroom, where they can’t see him.

Richard calls Dominique, instead. Yancy can hear them through his mother’s door when he knocks to bring her soup.  He doesn’t think this is the sort of thing soup can fix, but it’s all he knows how to do.

“Maman?”

She coughs. He enters anyway. Leans down to kiss her forehead. She says, “Un moment,” into the phone, puts it down, and pulls him into a hug after he puts down the bowl on her bedside table. “You’re a good boy, Yancy,” she tells him, and kisses his hair.  “I love you very much.  I’m going to be fine.”

Yancy wants to believe that his mother knows this, somehow.  “I know.  You’re a trooper. Eat your soup, huh?” He pauses.  “I love you, too.”

She combs through his hair with her hand, once, then picks the phone back up.

He comes with her again when she goes to the hospital to get her results.  The words that reach him this time are “lung cancer”, “inoperable”, “stage four”, “metastasized”, “caught it too late”, and “I wouldn’t give it more than a year”.

His mother is dying.

The car ride back is silent.

When they pull up, she’s crying against the window, and he turns off the car and walks around to her side, slowly, opens the door, and pulls her into a hug.  “Yancy,” she says after a while, “Yancy, my good boy. I’m so sorry.”

He thinks he’s crying, too.

His eighteenth birthday is a week later.

He can’t bring himself to pretend to want a party.  His mother still hasn’t told Raleigh and Jazmine.  Yancy wonders if he’s going to have to do it.

She smokes another cigarette while she’s watching the news.  In a flash of anger, he wants to bat it out of her hand.  But he keeps cooking, instead, mechanically.

Ayana calls him in a huff because he hasn’t talked to her outside of school for more than a week. He goes out on the porch so he doesn’t have to lower his voice and tells her everything.  His voice breaks near the end.

She’s silent for almost a minute when he’s done, and he struggles not to cry into the mouthpiece, bites down on one of his fingers so he won’t make an embarrassing noise, sobbing over the phone.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” she says, and that’s when he starts crying.

Jazmine has another nightmare about the giant black monster with the blue-glowing blood that poisons everything it touches.  She’s not having them like she was right after the attack, but sometimes—sometimes she crawls into his arms, into his bed, and shivers until he kisses her forehead and says, “Don’t worry, Jaz.  Everything’s fine. No more monsters.”

When Richard comes home, she stops coming to him and starts going to her dad instead.

Which is how it should be.

Richard applies for a transfer, to be with them, in Alaska.

There are a lot of things Yancy doesn’t doubt about his life, has never doubted. One of them is that Raleigh is definitely going to go on to be something ridiculously awesome. The kid just has that air around him. Jazmine probably will, too, because she’s a smart kid, but Raleigh is a rock star waiting to happen, or something stupid like that.  Another is that the sun will come up every morning.  Another is that his father loves his mother.

As much as he’s away, he’s never stopped calling every day.  He stopped calling the home line every day—Yancy guesses little kids’ school shit gets monotonous—but he still calls it at least once a week. He still calls Dominique every night, though, Yancy knows that.

She’s also the only person he ever really smiles at.  He’s a taciturn guy, doesn’t really do effusiveness.  But he lights up, around his wife.

So Yancy knew he would be here for them.

It’s nice, having him around so much.

It’s been a while.

Money gets a little tight, what with the medical bills mounting.  Painkillers, checkups, every possibility of a cure in the books. Yancy applies to colleges anyway, but he doesn’t have any illusions about going anywhere that isn’t a community college right near where they live.  And he’s okay with that.  Means he’ll get to be with Dominique.  Means he’ll get to be near the kids, and Richard.  Who, once Dominique dies, won’t be able to just waltz off without them anymore.

Yancy’s okay with that, too. He’s kind of missed having a dad.

Telling Raleigh and Jaz is basically the worst thing Yancy’s ever seen.  Richard barely manages to choke it out, and Jazmine, who’s barely ten, piles onto Dominique’s lap like that’s an okay thing to do, like her mother isn't so thin that Yancy worries about breaking her half the time, cries into her neck.  Raleigh is more careful. But he’s sobbing, anyway.

The only reason Yancy isn’t is because he’s clenching his fists so hard against the noise that the pain in his joints is distracting him.

He doesn’t have a lot of time to spend with his friends anymore, but he tries.  They’re sympathetic, but they can’t really—they can’t really get it.

Since he’s eighteen, and there’s no way Richard is leaving work to come do it, when Raleigh gets into trouble at school, Yancy gets called out of class to come get him out of the office.

And boy, does he get into trouble a lot at school.

Yancy asks him, once, a couple of weeks before winter break, what the deal is, and Raleigh looks at him like he’s insane.  It’s the first time in a long time Raleigh hasn’t just told him what he’s thinking, when he asks.

Raleigh’s growth spurt probably hit months ago, but Yancy’s been too distracted to notice. The kid is aching and gangly and has totally outgrown all his clothes, and to boot he can’t seem to get used to how long his limbs are, which is sort of hilarious to Yancy as an older brother on one level, and totally concerning on another, because he keeps hurting himself.

He takes the kid out and helps him get new clothes, because Richard isn’t going to leave Dominique’s side to do it.

Dominique’s pain gets so bad, near Christmas, that she spends the whole celebration high as a kite on morphine, strung out through dinner, which Yancy enlisted his siblings’ help on, and which is worse than usual, but better than takeout.

Raleigh trades him a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets for a CD of mostly-pirated music that he knows Raleigh is going to love.  Jazmine gives him a coupon for a hug, which is the same thing she gets all of them every year, and just like he does every year, he cashes in the second she hands it to him. He gives her a set of rainbow ribbons for her hair, because she’s in a rainbow phase and she’s been doing weird, weird things to her curls, recently.

Dominique and Richard get all three of them watches.

Yancy hates his on sight, because he doesn’t really want to be reminded of the time, but he puts it on, smiles, and says thank you anyway.  Then he gives his dad a photo album of pictures he wasn’t around to have seen taken—mostly pictures of his mother, but a couple, for show, of him and Raleigh and Jazmine—and his mother a pot of orchids.

Raleigh crawls into his bed, late that night, and says, “Yancy, will you read to me?”

He’s fifteen, but Yancy cracks the spine on The Hobbit anyway and says, “C’mere, kid.”

New Year’s, Ayana invites him out to the same party as last year.  And he turns her down, because, “It’s the last one—I can’t—“

“I’m so sorry, baby,” she says softly, and he scrambles to make up for it.

“Maybe Wednesday? I can take you out to dinner.”

“Yeah, Yancy,” she sighs. “Sure.”

Yancy brings Dominique dinner and she looks up at him, a shadow on the bed, practically, and says, hoarsely, quietly, “Yancy.  My good boy.”

Yancy cries, and she strokes his hair while he gets it out of his system, quietly accepting by this point. As he’s leaving the room, shoulders feeling  slumped even though he’s not trying to do it, he hears the click of a lighter and wants to yell at her that she’s not helping.

But he guesses she can’t really hurt, either.

Dominique goes into a coma on January 23^rd.

She doesn’t wake up.

Yancy and Raleigh and Jaz wait for hours in the library to be picked up before Yancy says, “C’mon. It’s gonna get dark if we wait around much longer,” and they start walking home.  The house is empty and the car is gone and Richard hasn’t replied to any of his phone calls for hours.

So he learns his mother is dead when his dad comes home at midnight—he’s already put the kids to bed, but he’s under no illusions about how asleep they are—and collapses onto the couch with his head in his hands, muttering, “She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone.”

Ice drops into his stomach. He’d half been expecting it, but—

“She went into a coma,” Richard says helplessly.  “She went into a coma and then she—and then she—“

Yancy puts his arms around him before he can finish, although he wants to scream more than he wants to hug him.  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

Richard is crying in his arms and he’s supposed to be the one doing that, he thinks numbly. But he doesn’t feel like crying. He doesn’t feel anything.

He feels later. Wakes up in the morning to Richard still sitting on the couch like a zombie and Raleigh crying in the bathroom and Jazmine, still blissfully asleep and unaware.

He slips into her room, because he doesn’t want her to have to hear it the same way he did—and he’s pretty sure Richard isn’t any more put together now than he was seven hours ago—and wakes her up quietly, sitting on the edge of her bed.

She looks just like Dominique. Curly dark hair and bright blue eyes. Her face is shaped the same. Same snub nose. “Mom died,” he tells her. “In the middle of the night. She was asleep when she went, it didn’t—didn’t hurt her at all.”

Jazmine is sobbing before he knows what to do with her.  So he leads her downstairs to Richard, who mutely opens his arms for her, like comforting her is his one purpose right now.  And maybe it is.  Or maybe he just can’t resist his little girl.  Yancy guesses it doesn’t matter, as long as she feels better because he can be there for her.

Raleigh only unlocks the door once he says, “C’mon, Rals, it’s me.”

Then he hugs Yancy so tight he thinks his ribs might crack and just keeps crying. Yancy’s so tired of everyone crying. But he also sort of wants to start up, himself.

He breaks up with Ayana the day before the funeral.

He thinks she’s kind of relieved, not because she doesn’t like him, but because it’s hard to know how to deal with a boy who’s just lost his mother.  He hasn’t really properly taken her out since their date at the beginning of January, doesn’t really talk much in school—she gives him back his jacket, drops it off at the house, and kisses him one last time. Says, “I’m so sorry, baby.”

Holds him when he breaks down sobbing.

“Sorry,” he says dully when he’s done.  “Didn’t mean to dump that on you.”

“Don’t you apologize to me, Yancy Becket,” she replies smartly, but her hand on his back is soft. “Don’t you dare.”

“Love you,” he tells her.

“Shh,” she says.

Raleigh holds his hand the whole funeral, like a little kid.  Jazmine holds his other, but she’s tucked into Richard’s side, stretched away from him.

It passes in a blur, closed-casket.

That night the door of Richard’s bedroom is locked, so Jazmine comes to Yancy’s instead. Raleigh’s already there. He’d asked if Yancy would read to him, but Yancy had said, for the first time in his life, “Not tonight.”

Raleigh is tucked into his side, instead, has cried himself to sleep, and for once, Yancy is the one of the two of them awake when she cracks open his door.

Softly, he smiles at her, and extends his other arm.  Whispers, “C’mere, Jaz.”

The three of them sleep like that.

In the morning, Yancy makes pancakes.  It’s Monday, but he doesn’t take them to school.

Going back to school is terrible.  It’s a small town, relatively speaking, and when he and Raleigh walk through the doors, he can feel all eyes on them, like their gazes are whispering, Those poor Becket kids. Their mother just died.

He grits his teeth and gets through class, but he’s missed a lot, the last few weeks.

He and Raleigh pick up Jazmine and walk home from school, and he keeps an arm around each of them.

On February 27^th, Yancy and Raleigh go to pick Jazmine up from school, but she isn’t there. Raleigh calls Richard and leaves a message asking whether he picked her up as Yancy is probing the front desk for answers.

Turns out, he did pick her up.

The car’s at the house when they finally get home.  But it’s locked and dark and empty.  Once they get in, Raleigh goes looking for their dad and their sister, but they’re not there.

What is there is the car keys and five twenties.

No note.

You’ve reached Richard Becket.  I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave me a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

“Dad? Dad, it’s Yancy. Where the hell are you? Call me back.”

You’ve reached Richard Becket.  I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave me a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

“Dad, it’s been a week. Where the hell are you?  Call me back, Dad, seriously.  I want to know how Jaz is.  When are you coming back?”

You’ve reached Richard Becket.  I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave me a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

“Dad, where the fuck are you? You can’t just leave us like this. Call me back, I know you’re getting these messages.”

You’ve reached Richard Becket.  I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave me a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

“Listen here, you slimy piece of shit.  Raleigh’s fifteen, you can’t just leave him in the lurch because you don’t want to deal with Mom being dead.  Where the hell are you?  Where the hell’s Jazmine?  You can’t just walk out on your kids, you can’t just pick favourites like this, it’s bullshit, what the hell is wrong with you?  Mom wouldn’t want you to do this—”

There’s a beep, which means he’s run out of time.

Raleigh is standing in the doorway, looking at him, lips pale and thin, a tight line. Yancy snarls and throws the phone at the couch, sliding down the wall.  Raleigh silently walks over to sit next to him.

“So he’s gone?” He asks quietly.

“Piece of shit,” Yancy says, and Raleigh stares at the wall across from them.  “Piece of fucking—bastard, motherfucking worthless goddamn loser—“

“Slimy no-good dickwad.”

Yancy looks sideways at him, breaks into hysterical laughter that doesn't come from any actual mirth.  “Total screaming asswipe.”

“Scruffy-looking nerf herder,” Raleigh replies, very seriously.

“Who’re you calling scruffy?” Yancy says to him, putting him in a headlock and giving him a noogie like nothing’s wrong.

You’ve reached Richard Becket.  I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave me a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

“Hey, you complete tool. Three guesses who it is, and the first two don’t count.  Fine, be a dick. It’s not like you were ever actually around anyway.  But you better bring Jaz back.  You can’t just take her away from us.”

The number you have dialed is not in service.

Yancy drops out of school the next day.  He’s eighteen, he can do that. He goes back to Starbucks. Begs for his job back, because he’d quit when Dominique had gotten sick.  His old boss gives it to him without even taking his paperwork, but he makes her give him an interview anyway.  Doesn't want anything he didn't work for.  Tells her he needs full-time.

She gives him a half hour less than full time, so he won’t have to deal with the extra riders for the full-time job and neither will she.

But it’s close enough.

It’s minimum wage either way.

Yancy has a brother to feed and, he imagines, bills to pay.

So he goes looking for another job.

Raleigh says he’s going to drop out when he’s sixteen, when he learns Yancy has.  Yancy whips around so fast he thinks his neck cracks. “No, you’re fucking not.”

“Yes, I am. I can get a job—I can work—“

“You can stay in school. If you want a job, see if you can get one after school, like I did, if you think you can handle it and your homework.”  Yancy points the fork he was just using to stir the pasta at him.  “But you are not dropping out.”

It turns out the bills run from Richard’s credit card, and they’re automated.  So Yancy hopes they’re good, until their lights get switched off, which Yancy guesses he should have expected from a man trying to run away from his kids without a trace.  Credit card’s a trace, even if Yancy doesn't intend on getting anyone to trace it because doing anything about this legally would end with his brother and sister in a state home.

He spends four hours on the line with the company getting all the details put in so that he’s paying them instead.

Then he does the same with the water.

The same with the internet and the heat.

Then he crawls into bed and Raleigh’s there, not asleep, just waiting for him. His voice is very quiet when he asks Yancy, “Will you read to me?”  Tentative. Like it’s something he really wants, but like he knows Yancy’s going to say no, because he’s tired and grumpy and he’s going to have to go to his first day of work tomorrow at the new place, early in the morning, and then work Starbucks until eleven.

Yancy switches on the lamp by the bedside and gets out Othello.

He’s not sure when, but Raleigh stops sleeping at some point.  He stays in Yancy’s room almost every night now, makes dinner before Yancy gets home—he’s learning fast, Yancy’s proud of him—and he’s always awake when Yancy flops onto his bed, exhausted, reading something. Sometimes it’s a comic book. Sometimes it’s a novel. Sometimes it’s poetry.

The Friday of Yancy’s first full week of working two jobs, he collapses onto his bed, kicking off his shoes but not bothering to change, and Raleigh’s voice pipes up. “Call me Ishmael,” he says, and Yancy looks up as he continues.  “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—“

“Is that Moby Dick?”

“Well, it’s sure not Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Yancy falls asleep as Raleigh keeps reading.  He doesn’t know when he stops, only when he wakes up to his alarm in the morning, Raleigh is awake and gone, making breakfast.

He’s a good kid, his brother.

The first month, they barely cover everything.

The hundred Richard left with what Yancy’s made in the last two weeks gets them through.

The second month, they scrape by on the skin of their teeth and Yancy sells his comic book collection and the watches his mother got them for Christmas.  Raleigh offers his up without Yancy even asking for it. Just gives it to him, before Yancy had even remembered that it existed.

The third month, Yancy sells the silverware.  They use plastic forks, and rewash them again and again.  The same theory, unfortunately, can only be applied with a twist to the plates, so Yancy sells them too and uses a little bit of the money to buy two cheap plastic ones from Target.

His college acceptance letters come rolling in the next month.

He remembers applying, writing essays about his mother dying while she was in the process of doing it, writing essays about his personal  quirks and his brother and his sister and filling out his demographics what seemed like a hundred times.

Every college he applied to has accepted him except Harvard, which he only applied to as a joke, really. He knows they wouldn’t still take him if he responded to the applications, since he’s a dropout and all, but—he takes his letters and he goes to the bathroom and he cries, has to put his head between his knees so he doesn’t pass out from hyperventilation or just pure hysteria.

He’s never going to get to fucking go to college.

He turns the letters all into painstakingly careful origami when Starbucks isn’t busy, during the four in the afternoon lull, and he and Raleigh set them on fire on the back patio at midnight that night.

Raleigh doesn’t even question why he wants to do it.

They only reason they get through April is Yancy starts picking up extra hours and skipping lunch. Raleigh’s in the middle of being a growing teenager, so he’s hungry all the time, and Yancy is determined that he not have to bite back on it because of money, at least not if he can’t help it.

They sell the TV, too, which neither of them has turned on recently, anyway.  So they miss the second attack, when it comes. Yancy learns about it at work the next morning, and Raleigh texts him from school:

                    Hundun

Raleigh hasn’t slept in his own bed since Dad left.  Yancy comes home three hours late from work, picking up overtime, and finds him sitting bolt upright on the couch, watching the door, even though it’s two in the morning. When Yancy closes it behind him and starts taking off his coat, he gets up and walks over, throws his arms around Yancy’s neck.

It’s not like he doesn’t initiate hugs ever, but this is different, and Yancy asks, “What’s up, kid?” into his shoulder.

Raleigh is the same height as him, now.  They could pass for twins. He says, “You were late,” like this explains it.  Yancy hugs him back and thinks about what might’ve brought this on.  The only answer he comes up with is something he needs to address, if it’s right, so he takes a stab at it in the dark.

“Hey. Raleigh.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not leaving. I’m never leaving. We’re gonna be good, okay? We’ll make it, I got you.”

Raleigh doesn’t say anything, just tightens his arms.

Yancy lets him.

Kaiceph hits four months later.  It’s Sunday—on Sunday, the factory closes on the assumption that people go to church, which Yancy doesn’t, so he sleeps in as long as he can and still have a couple of hours with Raleigh before he has to go in to Starbucks.

But today Raleigh wakes him up at ten, bouncing onto his bed.  “Yance. Yancy.  -–Yancy!”

“Raleigh Raleigh Raleigh,” Yancy groans into his pillow.  “Go away.”

“Yancy, look!”  His brother shoves a laptop at him.

He wants to kick Raleigh out, but instead he sighs and turns over, pulling the computer towards him and then almost dropping it.  “—fuck me,” he says after a long time, then dials up the volume on the newscam livestream.

They watch it until Yancy has to get dressed and go to work.  He kisses Raleigh’s forehead and says, “I’ll see you later. Try not to burn the house down, kiddo.”

“I miss Jaz,” Raleigh says a few nights later, and Yancy can tell without asking that he’s thinking about whether or not she’s having nightmares, wherever she is, about the kaiju. Yancy ruffles his hair and pulls his head into his shoulder, briefly.

“Me too, kid.”

But he’s kind of glad he doesn’t have another mouth to feed.  The thought makes him sick as soon as he’s had it, like Raleigh is some kind of burden or something, which he isn’t.

And if Richard had left Jaz, too, he would have found a way to take care of her as well. He imagines a third job with a feeling of some despair.  But he would have done it.

He would have done it.

He kisses Raleigh’s forehead.

Yancy is almost asleep on the counter when he hears his name.  “Yancy!”

It’s Mr. Wick, and Yancy forces a smile onto his face.  “Hey, Rob. Same’s usual?”

“Yes, please. How’ve you been?”

Yancy wants to laugh in his face.  But instead he says, “Great. And you?  You ever see Raleigh around school anymore?” as he’s writing on the cup.

“Oh, good. My wife just had twins, so, you know, I’m not sure if I’ve seen Raleigh, way I’ve been zombie-ing around recently. How’s he doing?”

“Good. He’s doing better in English this year. Has Rammstein.” There’s no line at five in the afternoon, Yancy figures he’s not going to get fired for talking as he passes off the cup to the barista.

“Don’t tell Raleigh I said this, but Rammstein is a total hardass.  If he’s doing okay I’m going to call him a personal success story.” Yancy smiles at him again, but he keeps talking.  “I thought you’d be away at college by now.  Is there a Halloween break or something?”

It’s harder to hold the grin after that.  “I didn’t graduate last year, sir.”

“What? Why?”  His tone is incredulous.  “I thought you were applying to colleges—didn’t I write your recommendation letters?”

Yancy barely manages to stop from showing his disappointment.  “Somebody had to keep Raleigh fed and the lights turned on.”

And that’s really how simple it is.

“Hey, Yance?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know what parts of the US are taxed, but don’t have representation in Congress?”

“Yeah, but you should look it up in your book anyway.  You’ll learn better that—fuck.”  He looks up from the stove, pulse speeding with panic.

“What is it?” Raleigh asks, turning around from his place at the table.  Yancy tries to breathe normally and answer his question like nothing is wrong.

“Nothing. Just—burned myself. Ow, Jesus,” he lies, turning around to flash his little brother a smile.

The fucking taxes.

Yancy asks his boss at Starbucks how taxes work, feeling like an idiot, and she gives him that familiar, annoying pity look, but gives him a rundown, too.  “You should go to Social Services,” she says, at the end, and he feels his jaw harden.

“No,” he says. “They’ll take Raleigh away from me.”

“You’re a good kid, Yancy,” she sighs, after a pause, “but you aren’t ready to be someone’s parent.”

“I’m not,” he tells her, tiredly.  “I’m just being a brother. And my brother is going into the foster care system or a state home over my cold, dead body.”

Raleigh fidgets all through lunch on Sunday.  Yancy lets him do it, mostly, figures he’ll speak up when he wants to speak up. But instead the restlessness just magnifies, until finally he looks up and raises his eyebrows. “What’s up, kid?”

“I think I’m gay,” Raleigh blurts out immediately, as if he’s been waiting for Yancy to say something, then looks like he wants to clap his hand over his mouth.  Yancy stares at him for a moment—Raleigh’s been mooning over girls for years now, he seriously doubts that he’s gay.  But what does he know, he guesses.  Raleigh is downright squirming in his seat now, so he puts him out of his obvious misery.

“Okay.” He points his fork at his brother. “But tell whoever it is who made you realize it that if he breaks your heart I’ll personally make sure no one ever finds his body.”

“Yance,”  Raleigh says, sounding whiny and embarrassed, every inch the sixteen-year-old boy he is. His voice even cracks, halfway through. Yancy grins at him, toothy.

“What? Can’t let my precious baby brother go out into the big bad dating world without some backup.”

“Yance!”

Yancy gets up and puts his plate in the sink, laughing at him.  Then he hugs Raleigh’s chair from behind, kisses the back of Raleigh’s head. “I love you, kid.”

The figure Yancy gets for the taxes once he’s done all the math out makes him want to throw up. He’s had income tax built out of his salary since he first started work years ago, but it’s a small mercy that he doesn’t have to include that, because he can’t pay this.

He goes into his mom’s room for the first time since her death and gets all her jewelry, feeling sick.

It’s still not quite enough. He cuts into the money for gas and food, starts skipping meals again, and does some dangerous shit on the road to burn as little gas as possible.

For his birthday Raleigh gives him a stack of Jazmine’s old hug coupons.

Yancy, as is his habit, cashes in on one immediately.

He cries in the shower. Sells all Dominique’s clothes. Cries about that, too, because they smell like her.  Always smiles at Raleigh when he comes out of the bathroom, comes home from work, even when he doesn’t feel like it.  He doesn’t want Raleigh to feel like Yancy isn't happy to do this for him.  He goes to work. Doesn’t eat lunch. Goes to work.  Goes to work.  Goes to work.

He’s always fucking working. He’s always exhausted.

“Why don’t we move into an apartment or something?” Raleigh asks, quietly, over dinner.

“Couldn’t afford the deposit,” Yancy says.  And then there would be the rent.  At least the house is paid for.

(Part of him, a very small part, that is still seventeen and thinks his dad might come through for him, wants to be somewhere Richard could find them, if he did come back. Part of him wants to pretend that they’re not going to be on their own forever.)

Yancy’s old friends come home from winter break at college, pour out of the cold into the coffee shop in a crowd, and he wants to sink into the floor.  He hasn’t talked to any of them since right after he dropped out. They pile up to the counter like all of that doesn’t matter, though, saying, “Yance!  What’s up?”

Ayana’s in the back, with Walter Morring’s arm wrapped around her waist, not looking at him.

“Hey,” he says, not even pretending he wants to smile at them.  “What can I get for you guys?”

For Christmas he knits Raleigh a scarf, another skill picked up from Dominique, with her old needles and the leftover yarn Shauna, the barista, buys for him so he can show her how to knit.

It’s three different colours that don’t really go well, and it’s a little too short, but Raleigh doesn’t come home shivering as often, so he counts it as a victory.

“Take the SAT, Raleigh.”

“Why? I’m not going to college.”

“Yes, you are. Take the SAT.”

“How would we pay for college, Yance?  I’m going to work.”

Yancy’s teeth tighten against each other.  He knows he hasn’t been very good about keeping the strain of not having enough off Raleigh, but he wishes Raleigh didn’t already sound so hopeless about his prospects. “Scholarships exist.”

“It’s not like it’s free even with a full ride.  There’s books, and housing, and food, and all that shit.”

“Just take it, Jesus. I’ll figure it out.”

“But—”

“I’m not arguing about this with you, Raleigh.  Just do it.”

“You’re not Mom, Yancy, you can’t make me,” Raleigh snaps at him, and storms out of the room. The house feels very silent, after that.

Yancy, in his copious free time, applies for jobs that suck less than the ones he has.

He gets one, finally, with a law firm.  A gopher job, someone’s secretary, but it pays more than his jobs now put together, so he quits the factory job and takes it, restructuring his Starbucks hours so he works a couple of hours in the morning, a couple of hours at night, and on the weekends.

It means twelve hours total every weekday, twelve total hours over the weekend, and waking up at six every day, but it also means he can drive Raleigh home from school before he has to go back to Starbucks for a couple of hours and they can eat dinner at a reasonable hour and pretend Raleigh’s going to bed at a reasonable hour, too. It cuts down his working hours every week by over a full day’s worth, and he’s making substantially more.

Raleigh makes him a cake to celebrate.  It’s a waste of eggs and flour and sugar that Yancy otherwise wouldn’t condone, but it’s pretty much so cute he can’t bring himself to reprimand him for it.

His first day of work, Raleigh grins at him over the car door as Yancy’s dropping him off at school, says, like he doesn’t know the answer, “Hey, so is this like, an actual secretary job, or are you going to be some creepy old guy’s personal stripper?”

“You watch too much porn, Raleigh,” Yancy tells him.  “And I prefer the term ‘mostly-naked masseuse’.”

Raleigh’s still laughing when he drives away.

From there, it gets easier.

It’s still a lot of work, still a hard pill to swallow that he’s not ever going to get what he wanted. Still tough that he’s nineteen and taking care of a sixteen-year-old kid.

But they don’t have to sell anything else of Dominique’s to keep the lights on and have food for Raleigh.  Yancy saves a little bit, steadily, for someday, and the fact that he can afford to put any money aside for saving is an unexpected weight off his chest.

When he gets up for work one Saturday he catches some girl who he remembers from school—vaguely thinks her name might be Monica—creeping out of Raleigh’s room down the stairs. “Hey,” he says to her, waving, and she jumps and almost drops her car keys.

“I’m not gay,” Raleigh tells him, appearing shirtless in the doorway once the door has shut behind her. Yancy looks at him for a second, then holds up his hand for a high-five, which Raleigh maturely pretends not to notice.

“I think there’s a word for liking both, kid.”

“I’m that,” Raleigh replies absently.

“Bisexual,” Raleigh says when he gets home from work, clapping him on the chest.

“Bless you,” Yancy replies, and Raleigh punches him in the arm.

Yancy does his research. When he gets home from work on Thursday, and they’re eating dinner, which consists of chicken salad made from leftovers, he clears his throat, puts down his sandwich, and says, “Now that I know you’re having sex, we need to have a talk.”

“Oh my god, Yancy,” Raleigh sputters, almost choking on half a grape that he apparently hadn’t cut well enough.  “Are you going to give me the sex talk?  I know what sex is. Please, no.”

“Yes,” Yancy tells him, “I am going to give you the sex talk.  I rehearsed it with Shauna at work, too, so you’re going to listen.”

“Can I just, like, say five Hail Marys and an Our Father or something instead?”

“When a man and a woman—or a woman and a woman, or a man and a man, or any combination of the above in numbers higher than two—love each other very much,” Yancy starts, “condoms become a necessary evil.”

“What’s a condom,” Raleigh says, voice so flat he’s clearly not serious.

“Great question, Raleigh!” Yancy reaches into his back pocket and pulls one out, at which point his brother groans and mimes putting a gun in his mouth.  “Yes,” Yancy says gravely, “Even for that,” and uses his hand and his tongue in his cheek to fake giving a blowjob.

“Ugh, Yancy.”

“How old are you, Yancy?”

“Yes, he’s free Friday at eight,” Yancy says into the phone, scribbling 19 on a pad of post-it notes and pushing it across the desk at the new law intern.  She raises an eyebrow and looks somewhat impressed as he’s pulling an agenda across the desk to scribble McCoy Divorce into the proper spot.

“Why didn’t you go to college?”

“Yes, I’ll tell him you called.”  Family, he scrawls on the next note, tapping the pen against his lip and rolling his eyes at the phone.

When he finally hangs up, she says, “Do you mean like a kid?”

He pauses and says, “Well—no. My brother.  But he’s a kid, yeah, so yeah, like a kid, just not—my kid.” He pulls out his phone and shows her a picture of the two of them.  Raleigh’s taller than he is now, which was a blow, believe him.

And wow, in the year he’s spent not really talking to women his abilities to not sound like an idiot have really deteriorated.  She asks him out for coffee anyway, though, and he turns her down because he needs this job and he can’t fuck it up.

Raleigh’s SAT score comes back dead average.  Yancy doesn’t buy all the vegetables he usually does at the store and instead gets some ice cream. They can be a little unhealthy for a week, he figures.

Near the end of Raleigh’s junior year, Yancy gets a call at work from the nurse and has to duck into his boss’s office and ask if he can have the rest of the day. “My brother, Raleigh—he got sick, I gotta go pick him up.”

He gets the time without question.  Everyone in the office knows how Yancy is about his brother.

Brawler Yukon, made not so far from where they are, is deployed and kills a kaiju.  Raleigh watches the livestream from the cams with his jaw hanging comically open, so Yancy reaches over a finger to close it and then watches over his shoulder.

“Cool,” he says.

“So cool,” Raleigh breathes.

They don’t always get along. Raleigh is prone to quiet mildness up until he hits his breaking point and snaps into fury, which usually ends in him snarling something at Yancy and walking out, and Yancy, whose patience is not, in fact, endless, doesn’t usually run hot, but often will drawl something meaner than he intended without even thinking about it.

“I’m dropping out.” It’s an argument they’ve had a hundred times at least.  “I’m going to get a job.”

“No, you’re not.”

“You did!”

“What was I supposed to do, let you starve?”’

“Let me work.”

Yancy is fucking tired of this argument.  He really is. His voice is low and quiet. “Listen, kid, I have given up everything so that you could have this.  Don’t you dare throw it away because you think you need to work. You’re seventeen.”

“You didn’t have to give it up.  I would have helped—I tried—you wouldn’t—”

Yancy laughs at him. It’s mean and he knows it, but he can’t help it.  “Yeah, Raleigh, I definitely should have just left you to go to college.  You would have been just great dropping out and working yourself to death.”

Raleigh looks like he’s been struck, face flashing with six different emotions Yancy can’t name, but knows like the back of his hand.  It settles on anger, colour rising in his cheeks.  “But it’s all fine for you.  I didn’t ask for this any more than you did, asshole.”

Then he walks out. And Yancy doesn’t chase him. Because yeah.  He’s right.

Raleigh actually hasn’t asked for much of anything since Richard took off.

Yancy knocks on Raleigh’s door when he gets home from work, after he’s made dinner.  “Fuck off, Yancy.”

“Is that any way to talk to the guy who brought you dinner?  C’mon, Raleigh, let me in.”  He waits a minute, then hears footsteps, and Raleigh unlocks his door.  The way to a teenage boy’s heart is definitely through his stomach. He wedges his foot under the door so Raleigh can’t close it again.  “I’m sorry, kid.  You’ve been really good. About all of this. Way better than I probably would have been if I were you.  And I appreciate that, I swear.  Just please, take it from me—it’s way easier to get a job if you have a high school diploma.”

Raleigh looks like he’s wavering in his anger.  Yancy can tell he’s about to tip.  He holds out the food, cocking his head slightly to the side and smiling just a little.

Raleigh hugs him instead of taking it.  “I’m sorry I keep trying to drop out,” he says into Yancy’s shoulder.  “I didn’t—I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, kiddo,” Yancy tells him, letting out a breath and relaxing, a little. “I shouldn’t’ve said some of that shit. You know I don’t mind doing any of this for you.”

Raleigh nods. Then he takes his food, retreats to his bed, and fishes around for something before he holds it up.

It’s The Great Gatsby.  “Will you read to me?”

“Yeah. Sure thing.”

For his birthday Raleigh gets him a tie.  “You look stupid wearing button-downs tucked in without one.”

“Love you too, jackass.”

“Happy birthday, old man.”

Raleigh turns eighteen. Yancy kind of wants to take a picture of him at midnight and frame the moment, but that would require him to get up at midnight, and—no.

He’s happy, though. They can’t take his brother away anymore.

Around the holidays the firm gives him a bonus, and he almost runs out the doors whooping, because he hadn’t been expecting it, which means it isn’t built into his budget, which means that Christmas can like, maybe not suck this year.  He buys food first, the makings of actual Christmas food, instead of just making food like any other night, and then he buys Raleigh a leather wallet and then just sticks two hundred in it, putting aside the rest of the money into a fund that is labeled “Raleigh” in his bank account. Raleigh doesn’t know about it, and he’s going to keep it that way.

Raleigh hasn’t had money to spend of his own for almost two years now.  Yancy wants to give him a chance to be a normal kid, go out with friends.  Have a date or something.

But Raleigh, of course, being probably the best kid Yancy’s ever met, uses the money to buy a bicycle so Yancy doesn’t have to drive him around all the time, and then uses the forty-some dollars left over to buy them dinner on New Year’s at some weird Japanese place, where he proceeds to flirt with the waitress so horribly Yancy almost laughs at him.

Instead he competes for it, turning on the smile that charmed his boss at Starbucks when he was in his teens.  He gets her number, Raleigh doesn’t, and when Raleigh complains, as they’re walking to the car, he says, “I just couldn’t let you think you were good at that, Rals. Just couldn’t. For the sake of your dick in the future, you had to know.”  It’s 11:59.

Raleigh punches him in the stomach at midnight.

Raleigh gets this weird look on his face sometimes when he’s watching the news coverage of the Jaegers fighting the kaiju, like he’s there and not sitting on their shitty couch in their house that is way too big for two kids, one of whom is barely even there anyway.

Yancy likes watching him do it.  Thinks it’s kind of cute, not that he’d ever tell his brother that.

“Yancyyy.”

“Raleigh," he slurs, "if it’s not at least noon right now, I’m going to murder your insomniac ass.”

“It’s 11:50.” Yancy raises his head to give him a baleful glare, the effect of which he knows must be ruined by his incredible bedhead giving him the affect of a man wearing a dead squirrel hat.

“It’s Saturday, you little ingrate.”

“I got my final scores back, Yance.”

Yancy turns over and sits up, yawning.  “Yeah? How’d you do?”

“Didn’t fail anything. Looks like I’m graduating next week.”

Yancy hauls him across the bed to knuckle his fist into the top of his head while he squirms to get away, a far more enthusiastic response than he’d really needed to produce. But Raleigh’s laughing, so it’s kind of worth it.

Yancy cries at Raleigh’s graduation.  Mr. Wick takes pictures for him while he’s bending over trying to hide it.  In one of them, Raleigh is clearly searching the crowd for him. Yancy just says, “You must have missed me,” and chooses not to mention that Raleigh might have seen him had he not been actively in the process of hiding his face.

“Yancy,” Raleigh says, while Yancy is reading over his resumé, scribbling things in the margins. He sounds tentative.

“Present and accounted for.” He tries to sound absent when in reality he’s focused on every word coming out of Raleigh’s mouth.

“I’vebeenthinkingaboutenlisting,” his brother says, so fast he barely catches it.  It’s weirdly reminiscent of Raleigh trying to come out to him.

“Enlisting—aw, kid—”  He’s about to say something about how he thinks it’s a bad idea, but Raleigh waves his hand like he wants silence, so Yancy gives it to him.

“No, I have been. For a while.  With the PPDC, I—I want to, you know, I think it’d be cool.”

Yancy curses those propaganda posters strung up everywhere with Bruce and Trevin Gage smeared across them.  Because his little brother wants to hop into the middle of a war because he thinks it’d be cool. He wants to say something like that, but Raleigh’s looking at him so hopefully he sighs and says, “Let me think about it, okay?”

Well, he thinks about it.

And he thinks about it.

And he thinks about it until he really can’t put off giving Raleigh an answer much longer without the kid getting mad at him.  Which is, you know, about a week.  Then he puts in his two weeks’ at both his jobs and starts trying to figure out how to sell the house.

It’s monumentally stupid and will probably land them on the streets in no time. But their savings are enough to put down money for an apartment and probably the first month’s rent, if it doesn’t work out, and selling the house will help.

“Let’s go be big damn heroes, kid,” he tells Raleigh, when Raleigh gets home from his own job search.

The way his face lights up when he gets it is probably the best thing Yancy’s ever seen. All he’s wanted, other than the bare minimum, these last few years, is to make Raleigh make that face.

They’re fucking idiots.

Showing up at the recruitment center, signing on, what the hell what the hell what the hell, Yancy is kicking himself for this.  The other people on the shuttle are all older—most of them are substantially stronger. They’re all confident and serious and Yancy is pretty sure wanting to make his brother happy is the least amazing motivation in this room right now.  Even Raleigh wants it for the glory or whatever he wants it for; Yancy is far and away the odd man out.

“We’re going to wash out in three days flat,” Raleigh says dully, sitting on the bunk next to him. Yancy ruffles his hair.

“Hey. You never know until you try.”

Yancy meets Tendo Choi near the end of the their first day, in the mess hall.  They hit it off immediately.  Within fifteen minutes, Tendo is sitting with him and Raleigh, placing bets on where each new person who enters the hall will sit. Tendo is shockingly good at the game. Raleigh is shockingly awful.

Yancy spends too much of the meal laughing to actually play.

They don’t wash out in three days flat.

Raleigh follows real close at his heels the first couple of days, and Tendo always seems to be walking backwards in front of them.  He never hits anything, at least until Yancy starts putting on concerned-looking faces and pointing over his shoulder like he’s about to hit something.

Then he trips backwards a lot, trying to avoid obstacles that are never there.  Eventually he stops trusting Yancy, for whom it never gets less funny to watch him bowl over. Yancy points behind him and grimaces and he just doesn’t sway from his course, eventually stops even looking over his shoulder to check.

Thus, they meet Marshal Pentecost when Tendo fucking trips over him.  Yancy and Raleigh are laughing too hard to help him when he scrambles up, apologizing, and when he says, wounded, as the Marshal leaves, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Raleigh wheezes out,

“Yancy tried,” before he doubles back over.

“Your brother’s an asshole,” Tendo says to one of them, it's hard to tell which, and Yancy says,

“You’re preaching to the choir, my man,” through his tears.

It feels good not to have to go to Starbucks every morning.  Yancy tells Tendo this and he says, “You were wasted on Starbucks, my good Mr. Becket. You’re going to be a natural born pilot, I can tell.”

“Yancy?”

“Raleigh, if it’s two in the fucking morning, I’m going to end you.”

“Yancy.”

“I’m so serious, kid.”

“C’mon, Yance, I—”

“Raleigh, I know you’re a natural American beauty, but some of us need to sleep to achieve peak levels of not looking and feeling like shit.”

“Aw, you always look like shit.”

“Come up here and tell me that to my face.”

Raleigh does. Yancy falls asleep halfway through letting Raleigh shove his face into the pillow.

America’s not rationed, but the Shatterdomes and Academy, in deference to the countries that are, are showing solidarity by rationing too.  They’ve still got better food than a lot of the world, because they’re training up people to save it, but the quantity is finite.

Yancy can tell that his brother’s hungry, he knows that look on his face.

So he starts pretending he’s done with his meals long before he’s actually done, saying, “Hey, kid, I’m not going to finish this.  You want it?”

He’s careful with how much food he gives Raleigh, isn’t going to wash out because he passed out from not taking in enough calories.  Wouldn’t leave his brother alone like that.

Tendo’s right, he’s a natural. Aces mechanics classes like they’re easy, picks up a pilot’s lingo like it’s another language entirely, strong-arms his way right through military discipline, takes orders like a champ. In truth, it’s not so much a natural affinity for the military as it is one for school, but he doesn’t see what the point is in revealing that.  And if he’s helping Raleigh out a little, too, he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t. If they ever make the cut, it’s going to be together.  It’s not like he’s ever not going to be there to help him.

Tendo is on the LOCCENT track, and he and Raleigh are on the Rangers’, which means two things: 1.) They don’t have many classes together, and 2.) They have a hilarious jock-nerd joke going on.  Every morning Tendo says, “Hello, Becket boys, got some heads to flush down toilets?” or something of that ilk, and Yancy rips on his fancy shoes or Raleigh mimes giving him a wedgie and that’s about as mature as they ever get.

They eat together, usually joined by a couple of other cadets or techs, who by now have stopped looking down their noses at the skinny kids from the house in the Alaskan backwoods, and they’re usually one of the loudest corners in the hall.

It feels good, being able to have friends that way again.  Raleigh lopes along next to him, smiling to himself, as they’re heading back to their quarters after dinner, and Yancy elbows him.  “Where’s the joke, kid?”

“Nothing,” Raleigh says. “Just—it’s fun eating, now. You have this way of making everybody feel like temporary family.”

Yancy claps him on the back, not hard enough to move him.  “But we all know who my permanent family is, huh?”

Raleigh grins at that, too.

He smiles more, now.

“…Yancy?”

“For fuck’s sake, Raleigh.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t sleep.”

Yancy sighs. At home, Raleigh wouldn’t bother him, because at home, Yancy was always exhausted from all of the work and Raleigh had other things to do, but he doesn’t have homework anymore and the only books that came with them are that collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets, The Hobbit, and Dominique’s copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in French, which Yancy is trying to get through, but he keeps getting distracted by her handwriting in the margins.

He knows he’s going to hate himself for this in the morning, but he drags himself out of bed to fumble around in his bag until he finds the worn edge of the book, and one of their phones, turning it on to use as a light.  Then he climbs into Raleigh’s bunk, leaning against the wall at the foot end, and starts reading from where he is.

Raleigh pretends to fall asleep somewhere around when Yancy starts slurring the French, and Yancy figures that’s about good enough, so he lets the book drop to his chest and passes out against the wall.

Yancy can sleep literally anywhere when he doesn’t have to constantly be working his ass off to keep his brother alive, they find out.  He’s all well and good and active in combat, but the moment his ass hits the mats to watch the rest of them, he’s out.  He sleeps at the breakfast table.  He sleeps against walls, standing up.  Raleigh has to wake him up during one of the Marshal’s speeches, once, which is awkward, because he says, “Ugh, Raleigh,” at normal speaking volume just as he’s coming to, in an irritated tone of voice.

“I miss Jaz,” Raleigh says, crawling into his bunk in the middle of the night.

Yancy, suddenly much more awake than he wants to be, sighs, thinking about a little girl with her mother’s hair and her mother’s eyes.  Smart as hell.  Sweetest little thing, too—crawling into his lap, curling up against his side. Crying against his shoulder, clinging to his hand.  Saying, “Read to me, Yancy,” and tagging around after Richard like the sun shone out of his worthless ass. He wonders if she’s scared of the kaiju still.  He wonders how her fourteenth birthday was, two months ago.  Wonders if Richard is taking care of her, or if he’s fucked up like he did with two thirds of the taking care of your kids thing.

“Yeah. Me too, kid.”

Raleigh doesn’t ask him for anything.  Just lets him go back to sleep.

Yancy sneaks up behind Tendo in the meal line and wraps his arms around his waist from behind, says, “Guess who, Choi,” and starts singing Dean Martin in his ear until Tendo asks,

“Julie Andrews after her throat surgery?”

“Douchebag,” Yancy says casually, “And an elderly one, no less.  Get some references that the kids can keep up with.”

“I’m pretty sure First We Take Manhattan Leonard Cohen could sing better than you while deepthroating.”

“Not better.”

“Get off my lawn.”

It takes him a while to get used to the bo staff.  He just doesn’t get the concept.  But he practices and practices and by the time they put him on the mat with another kid instead of an instructor—no use in fighting the blind against the blind, that just leads to people getting hurt—he knows enough to deal a kill blow a few hits in, even if they are pretty slow hits.

Someone whoops from the sidelines and he just knows it’s Raleigh.

Pentecost is mostly in Japan and Australia, but he makes the rounds, and he brings his daughter with him, a quiet fourteen-year-old who’s rarely seen outside of his office. He calls Yancy in for a meeting when he visits the Academy, which Yancy doesn’t expect, but he isn’t there when Yancy comes to the room he’s using as his office.

The door’s ajar, though, and inside he can see movement, so he knocks and everything stills. Then the door cracks open, and she peers around the corner, then opens it.  On the floor behind her are what look like a stack of metal parts, and a delicate tool that Yancy can only guess at the use of.  ”Mr. Becket,” she says quietly—he takes a moment to be surprised she knows his name.

“Call me Yancy,” he replies in Japanese before he even thinks about it.  That’s not really how Japanese works, culturally, though, and she looks at him puzzled and shakes her head.

“Mr. Becket.”

He’s okay with that, he guesses.  “What are you working on?” he points at the metal, and she blushes, a little, breaks into a string of Japanese that he can only follow about half of.  The words aren’t ones he bothered learning, too technical.

So he sits there and watches her work, quietly, on the floor, with his legs crossed. They’re like that when Pentecost walks in, and Yancy scrambles to his feet, unaware for a moment that the girl is doing the same thing.  He smiles at her, though, when he realizes, and that’s about when he thinks Pentecost’s face softens, slightly.

“I have a sister,” he explains, “About her age.”

“That’s not in your file, Mr. Becket.”

The thing is, the file had asked for all sorts of information on relatives, like location and contact information, and Yancy doesn’t know any of those things about Jazmine. “It’s—she got lost, sir,” he says awkwardly, like her dad taking her away from her brothers counts as lost. “After our mother died—”

“I didn’t ask for your life story, Mr. Becket,” Pentecost says, and Yancy shuts his mouth. “What’s her name? She’ll be added to your file regardless of contact information.”

“Jazmine, sir,” he says, gracelessly.  “With a z.”

Pentecost gives him a look like I didn’t ask about the z either, but Yancy figures that’s relevant, if they’re putting it in his file. “Jazmine,” he repeats, and proceeds to not write it down.  Yancy determines that this situation is only going to be awkward if he lets it be awkward and opens his mouth to ask why he’s here, but Pentecost waves him quiet and speaks instead. “I asked you to come speak to me because you’re edging the top of your class, Mr. Becket.”

Which can’t be right, because Yancy’s probably one of the better ones at combat and his scores are good, but he knows there are better.  He’s never really been top of any class.  He’s nothing special.  “I—am?” he says, and Pentecost gives him another one of those stop talking looks.

“And your reports from instructors are very good.  Your initial personality compatibility results indicate you’re highly compatible with your brother. However, his scores are significantly lower than yours, which concerns me.”

“He just needs a little—”

“Don’t speak, Mr. Becket.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“What’s left of your class after the final examinations begins compatibility trials and then drift testing in March.  I suggest your brother’s scores be higher by the end of February if the two of you hope to have a chance at becoming Rangers.”

Yancy pauses. There’s a chance. But—well.  He opens his mouth again, and this time doesn’t stop talking when Pentecost gives him the look.  “Why are you telling me this and not Raleigh?”

“Because, Mr. Becket,” Pentecost answers him drily, “I am a better judge of character than you give me credit for, and from everything I’ve seen and heard of you two, the only way to get to your brother is to go through you.”

Yancy opens his mouth.

“You’re dismissed, Mr. Becket.”

“Yes, sir.”

Yancy doesn’t tell Raleigh about it, lest he think he’s somehow not good enough for this. Instead, he takes out schematics in the mess hall before their next mechanics test and starts randomly quizzing all the cadets sitting with them.  Raleigh learns better with his hands and his ears than his eyes, and while Yancy can’t exactly stick him in the belly of a Jaeger to check things out, he can do this.

Tendo answers the first three questions before anybody else has a chance, so Yancy puts a hand over his mouth and does the next five minutes with him in a headlock, struggling.

It turns into a massive game, eventually, half the cadets in the mess hall gravitate towards their table. Everyone pairs up into teams. Tendo starts assigning arbitrary point values to answers, names to all the teams, and scribbling them down on a napkin. “Everybody name one part of a Jaeger that doesn’t vary from model to model.”

Someone in the back says, “Your mom.”

“Ten points from Gryffindor for the smartass,” Yancy says, and Tendo takes off ten points and names that team Team Gryffindor all at once.

“Hey!”

“Don’t piss off the guy making up the rules, cadet,“ Yancy says solemnly, and looks straight at Raleigh for the first answer.

“Neural bridge.”

Most of the class’ scores go up on that test.  Raleigh’s included.

Yancy’s birthday is the best he’s had in a long time.

It falls on a Saturday, so Tendo gets him so piss drunk Raleigh has to help him walk back. He hasn’t been drunk since before Mom’s diagnosis, so he’s not used to the feeling.  And he honestly has no idea what hellish mixed drink Tendo ordered after the first one.

His hangover is brutal, and he falls asleep almost in his food the next morning, but it’s a good night.

He and Raleigh speak French when they want the other cadets to think they’re talking shit about them. It works like a charm except on the one girl from Quebec who makes fun of their accents and starts translating them into things they definitely never said.

Once, translating Raleigh’s asking him whether he wants to go practice after dinner out loud, she says, “He wants to know if Yancy is taking me out on Saturday.”  Yancy raises his eyebrows and makes his reply in French.

“Well, is he?” Tendo asks Raleigh, who is rolling his eyes.

“I didn’t ask that,” Raleigh says in lieu of answering.

Yancy does take her out. The date doesn’t go amazingly, but she takes him back to her quarters and demonstrates the gone-ness off her roommate, and it goes better from there.  In retrospect, he’s pretty sure this was her endgame and not the date, and he’s okay with that.

Raleigh’s filled out, the last few months, on the exercise regime in the Academy.  He’s lost all of his too-thin-for-his-height affect and is sporting some combat muscle.  So is Yancy, but the difference isn’t as drastic, and a lot of the time when Raleigh is loping around looking like grace personified Yancy remembers when he still tripped over his feet and had acne and wore flood pants because they couldn’t keep him in jeans that fit properly.  Tendo starts calling the look on his face at these times his “Baby’s all grown up” face, and Yancy doesn’t argue.

Most people go home at Christmas, for a week, even the ones who don’t celebrate it because it’s a chance to see their families, but he and Raleigh don’t have anywhere to go, so they just hang out with the skeleton crew still working and a few of the cadets, who, like them, don’t have a home to go back to.

When they’re eating lunch with what must be every person left in the Academy, the loudspeakers click on and a grainy voice says, “Will Yancy and Raleigh Becket report to room 413A?”

Yancy and Raleigh look at each other, shrug, and get up in unison, because reporting for orders is pretty much just what they do at this point.  When they get there, there’s a blank screen in the room and nothing else. The tech who’d been standing outside the door comes in and turns on the screen, starts pressing buttons. “Call came through for you boys. We don’t normally take them, but she said she didn’t have another way to get through to you, and—it’s Christmas. So we’re putting her through.”

“Her?” Raleigh asks. Yancy is already jumping to conclusions, which he doesn’t share because he doesn’t want to get Raleigh’s hopes up if he’s wrong.

He’s not wrong, though. Jazmine’s face flickers onto the screen, smiling.  Raleigh jerks forward, says, “Jaz!” as her face lights up, and Yancy can’t breathe because his little sister has grown up while she was away.  She’s thinner, looks older.  Her curly hair is in careful plaits and he thinks she’s wearing makeup. When she speaks to Raleigh, it’s in French at first.

“Yancy!” the two of them say when he doesn’t say anything.  He chokes down a lump in his throat at the sound and smiles at them.

“Hey, kiddo. Good to see you again. Where’re you at?”

“France,” she answers. “I’m in school here.”

“Us too,” Raleigh says eagerly, and Yancy swears the smile on his face could power a small town as he plucks at the front of his uniform.

Yancy has to ask, but he tries not to sound too bitter.  “Where’s Dad?”

Her face shutters. “He committed suicide. About a year ago.”

About a year ago, Yancy was buying his brother a wallet with the hopes of letting him be a normal kid with a normal life and some pocket money instead of some weird teenage shut-in with a brother who could barely keep food on the table.  “Oh my god, Jaz, I’m so sorry,” he says, but a vicious, angry part of him that he doesn’t like is thinking good.

He sends Pentecost a letter thanking him for finding Jazmine, because he knows no one else could have or would have done it.  He doesn’t get a reply, but he isn’t really expecting one.

On New Year’s he kisses his fencing instructor because she’s standing closest, and she thoroughly destroys him on the mats his next class day, but it’s kind of worth it. He hasn’t kissed a girl on New Year’s since he was seventeen.

Jazmine sends them letters because they can’t really swing another phone call, one for each of them once a week.  Yancy always writes back the next day when he can spare the time, but Raleigh usually waits until about mid-week because Yancy keeps him busy practicing and studying.

When Yancy reads one of her letters to Raleigh, just one time—he knows he shouldn’t, but he’s curious—he knows why she sends two instead of just one to both of them. Her letters to Yancy are always full of her marks in school and her friends and Dominique’s sister, who Yancy didn’t even know existed but who is taking care of her.  Almost every letter, she asks questions, like a boy asked me out what do I do and one of my teachers kind of creeps me out and I’m not sure who to tell about it or if I should tell someone about it what do I do, both of which Yancy is tempted to reply to with “kick him in the jewels,” but which he refrains from.

Her letter to Raleigh is full of jokes and gossip and plot summaries of the last three books she’s read. Yancy thinks, with a sort of odd pang that he’s not sure is nostalgia or pride, that she’s treating Raleigh like a friend and him like an older brother.

He buys a cheap camera and starts sending her back a picture of them every week with his letter, each time doing a different stupid thing.

He and Raleigh blow through their examinations.  They get back their scores, Yancy leading in points only by a very slim margin, and they stare at the list that puts them amongst the final twenty-some students to move onto the next level for about a full minute before Raleigh says, “Holy shit.”

“’We’ll wash out in three days flat’,” Yancy mocks, like he didn’t think the exact same thing.

Raleigh punches him.

“You what?” Yancy says incredulously.

“Handed in a hundred and fifteen pages of code with my test.  The sims we’re using now are boring.”

Yancy laughs at him. “You’re such a fucking nerd, Jesus.”

“You’re looking at a graduate with a job in Anchorage lined up because of that code, pretty boy. You want to rephrase that?”

Yancy snaps one of his suspenders against his chest.  “Make me.”

“You’re way too straight to try and turn this into sexual tension,” Tendo tells him, and Raleigh, sitting down on the bench next to them, chimes in with,

“I didn’t hear what you said, but I agree with Tendo.”

“You’re supposed to be on my side, Raleigh,” Yancy says, and Raleigh raises his eyebrows. “Stop turning traitor and back me up.”

“Make me.”

Tendo explodes into laughter as Yancy puts his face in his hands.

Raleigh doesn’t wake him up in the middle of the night anymore.  But he also seems to be allergic to letting Yancy sleep past ten, even on days when they don’t have to get up.

“Do you know how much of your life you’ve wasted sleeping,” he says to Yancy one morning while Yancy tries to drown himself in his coffee mug.

“Not enough.”

Their personalities are a 93% match on the extremely long questionnaire they’re forced to retake before compatibility trials, which is apparently sort of unusual even for sibling pairs.  When they get the scores back, Yancy and Raleigh turn to each other in perfect unison and grin, like mirror images of each other.

“That’s creepy,” the tech complains, and they turn their smiles on her instead. “Ugh,” she says, but she’s smiling too.

Two pairs make it through compatibility testing.

Yancy and Raleigh are one of them.

Putting on relay gel and drivesuits for a drift test is weird, but it’s also kind of awesome. Yancy fist bumps him before they step into their places—Raleigh goes straight for the follow spot, so Yancy goes straight for the lead.  Not that they really get to choose, but they don’t need to be told who’s in charge.

“Initiating neural handshake,” says their instructor over the radio.  “Good luck, boys.”

Yancy has a lot of practice keeping his thoughts in order, but falling into the Drift is like tumbling through the world’s loudest wind tunnel.

He sees his own back, towel tied around his neck at eleven years old like a cape, the view from what must be Raleigh’s eyes as his brother struggled to keep up. Sees flashes of Jazmine, other kids Raleigh must have played with in one country or the other. Sees himself at Dominique’s funeral, straight-backed and dry-eyed and holding Jazmine’s hand. Sees himself spitting venom into a phone and sliding defeated down a wall.  Sees himself coming home from work looking like he’s about to collapse, looking miserable and stressed and exhausted.  Feels how badly Raleigh wanted to take the burden off him.

He thinks violently into the stream You were never a burden and doesn’t know if the words get through to Raleigh, doesn’t know if this constitutes chasing a RABIT, but it jolts them out of the screaming mass of memory and emotion and into silence.

He doesn’t know if he’s Yancy or Raleigh for a minute.

“Right hemisphere calibrated,” comes the voice over the radio, and Yancy looks over at his brother, who is opening his eyes as, “Left hemisphere, calibrated,” comes out of the speakers.  “How do you feel, guys?”

“Great,” the two of them say together.

“Good. Your connection is holding at about eighty percent, which is okay for your first time, but not great in general.”

“Just give us a while,” Raleigh starts.

“We’re quick learners,” Yancy finishes.

“Good. Try raising your right arm.”

Not much changes, except that Yancy pretty much graduates from the University of How to Read Raleigh Becket Like a Book and the both of them develop the increasingly unbalancing to outsiders ability to communicate nonverbally.

Their steps always fall in sync these days.

They can’t get over the ninety percent bump in their connection.  Yancy knows it’s frustrating to both of them, so they ask the chief tech for the simulators one day what they’re doing wrong and he says, “Yancy’s taking most of the neural load.”

“What?” they say together. They’ve been doing that more and more.

The guy pulls out a printout, like he’s been waiting for them to ask.  “You’re not sharing the neural load equally. Yancy’s kicking in about seventy percent of it, which is impressive, but I’ve actually been wanting to talk to you about it, because it can be dangerous.  Have you been tired, recently?  Headaches?”

“Yancy’s always tired,” Raleigh answers for him.

“No headaches,” he says.

“Huh. Well,” the chief says. “If you ask me, your connection strength would go higher if Yancy would give you back a little of the load. He’s burning himself out and you’re not performing the best you could, so you two are running a little low.”

Raleigh gives him a Look, and he sighs.

“Yes, sir,” he says. “Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t go easy on me, Yance,” Raleigh tells him fiercely right before the next time they drift. “I can take it. I’m not some kid you have to protect.”

Their handshake, when it’s initiated, flashes blue with Yancy’s memories of Raleigh, being a kid he had to protect.  Raleigh kicks in with the memories of sitting next to Yancy on the floor, hugging him on his birthday, buying that bike, taking him out to dinner.  I was there for you just as much as you were there for me, he thinks, and everything goes quiet.

“Left hemisphere, calibrated; right hemisphere, calibrated,” reads off the instructor. “Boys, you’re at 97%--only the Kaidonovskys have ever gone that high before!”

Yancy can hear whooping and hollering in the control room.  He guesses the guys were rooting for them after all.

He smiles at his brother.

Gipsy is probably the third most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, after Raleigh and Jazmine’s smiles.

Raleigh pretends to gag when he catches that thought in their first test run in her, but he hugs Yancy when they get out until he can’t breathe anymore, so Yancy thinks he’s kind of touched.

The first thing he does after they’re sent out to Anchorage is go looking for Tendo, but he’s in the middle of a test drop with Chrome Brutus, so Yancy just leans against the wall until Tendo says, “Good job, Rangers,” throws down the mic, and walks over to punch him in the arm.  “Yancy Becket!”

“That’s Ranger Becket to you,” Yancy says, grinning.

“Where’s your taller, prettier shadow?”

“Being tall and pretty around some flies who caught him when we were coming in,” Yancy says, and snaps one of his suspenders again.

“What, and you just left him to the wolves like that?”

Yancy’s smile is angelic.

“You’re a cruel man, Ranger Becket.”

Two weeks before his birthday, Raleigh comes blowing into their room at noon, going, “Yancy Yancy Yancy,” and Yancy groans into his pillow, lifts his head, long-suffering, and mutters,

“Raleigh Raleigh Raleigh,” before he notices the alarm sirens going off.  “Jesus,” he exclaims, tumbling out of bed, “Jesus Christ, fuck,” as he trips into his pants and they run to the cockpit.

L.A.’s kind of pretty, to a couple of kids who haven’t been out of Alaska for seven years. Mammoth Apostle drops in front of them at the rivermouth and they take down Yamarashi with a cargo crane wire, which gets Blue everywhere, but works way better than either of them really thought it would.

At Halloween, Tendo rigs up one of the screens in the back rooms and about fifty people retreat back there to watch Rocky Horror. He insists on the full getup, and Yancy has to help him with the eyeliner.

“How do you know how to do someone else’s eyeliner,” Tendo asks him as he steps back.

“My mom’s hands used to shake a lot before she died, but she wanted to look good anyway. So I did her makeup.”

“Oh,” Tendo says, but he’s pulling on the world’s most ridiculous corset.  “Here, put this on.”  He throws something across the bed.

Yancy looks at it. It’s a gold speedo. “No way.  I’ll get frostbite on my dick.”  He picks it up.  “—is this my size?”

“I guesstimated,” Tendo says casually, like this is a normal thing to do.

Yancy looks at him for a long thirty seconds.  “Make Raleigh dress up as Brad and find him a Janet and I’ll do it.”

“You boys are so easy,” Tendo replies.  “Now can you help me lace this?”

According to Raleigh, who indeed has a Janet—Yancy calls her that all night, because he doesn’t remember her name—Tendo gets cheers when he walks in.  About half the room is dressed up, but he’s gone all out, tearaway lab coat and all.  Yancy has no idea how he got that, but he appreciates the effort.

When he walks in, half the room goes silent and the other half starts pissing itself laughing.  “Whatever,” he says to Raleigh, who is part of the latter half: doubled over and can barely breathe.  “We all know I’m hot.”

“Aren’t you freezing?” Janet asks.

“I think my balls have retreated into my body, never to be seen again,” he says, very seriously.

“I’d still do you!” someone calls across the room as the movie starts.

“Wouldn’t we all,” Tendo calls back.

“Keep on the heels, Choi, and we’ll see,” Yancy says.

He keeps on the heels.

“Didn’t know you were bi,” Tendo tells him afterwards, hair sticking up ridiculously in the back, gel job ruined.

“I’m not,” Yancy says, shrugging the shoulder he’s not lying on.

Tendo looks back at him with an eyebrow raised.  “Pan?”

“What the fuck is that,” Yancy says, and then, “Who needs labels.”

“Pretend I’m making you an okcupid profile.”

“Let’s call me… heteroflexible,” Yancy says, and Tendo dissolves into laughter.

“I’m pretty sure I’m the only one here who just displayed any flexibility.  You just sort of laid there, lazy.”

Yancy rolls over top of him. “I’ll show you flexible.”

The okcupid profile is up two days later and the PPDC throws a fit.  The profile picture is him in that stupid speedo.

It gets taken down in a couple of hours, but everything is screenshotted and plastered all over the internet, and Raleigh prints out copies of it and posts them around the ‘dome.

“This really sounds like you,” is how his brother wakes him up, peering over the edge of his bunk. “’Heteroflexible’?”

He spends three hours being reprimanded in meetings with the Marshal and the PR people and cracks an egg over Tendo’s perfect hairdo when he gets out.  He has to go to town to get it, but it’s worth it to him.

In Puerto San Jose, Gipsy finally gets a chance to use her plasmacaster and blows a hole clean through a Cat. III. four miles off the coast.

It’s six in from the Miracle Mile, and therefore a miracle kill, and for weeks their faces are plastered all over magazines and newspapers.  Yancy discovers that talking to the press is his least favourite thing in the world, but Raleigh eats up the extra attention like he’s starving. So Yancy just sort of steps back and stands behind him for the photos, looking bored, and lets him be effusive and sunny for the cameras.

Naomi Solokov winds up being a problem.

Yancy doesn’t really register that Raleigh actually wants her, just sort of figures she’s another Jaegerfly, which she is, and finds out that she’s a problem who’s great in bed.

It ruins a test drift for the first time since they started.

Raleigh accuses him of wanting everything he has, which is the single most ridiculous thing that’s ever been said to Yancy, but Raleigh walks out while he’s saying something in retaliation, the way he always does.

Yancy swings down into his bunk a few days later when Raleigh finally comes in and goes to bed, knowing where he is even though he can’t see him in the dark.

“Fuck off, Yancy,” Raleigh says, pushing him away.

“Hold up, kid. I’m sorry about Naomi.” She didn’t really want you, she wanted a pilot, he doesn’t say, because he knows it wouldn’t help.  “I didn’t mean to fuck it up for you.”

“Well, you did,” Raleigh replies stiffly, but after they’ve been sitting silently in the dark for a minute or so the line of his body relaxes and he leans against Yancy. “Sorry about what I said.”

“It’s fine, kiddo,” Yancy tells him, reaching a hand up to mess up his hair.  “I know you didn’t mean it.”  Raleigh smiles a little, against his shoulder. He knows, even though he can only feel the very corner of the shift of his cheek muscles.  “You’re a good kid, Raleigh.”

“’m not a kid anymore.”

“You’re always going to be my kid brother.”

Yancy doesn’t need to have the lights on to know exactly what gesture Raleigh is making in the dark when his arm moves.

On Tendo’s birthday, Yancy walks right into the control room at the end of the day and picks him up, bodily, off the floor, slings him over his shoulder over his protests. “Can you guys clean up without this one?” he asks the rest of them, all of whom nod, looking equal mixes of concerned and amused.

“Yeah?”

Yancy carries him out the door.  “Oh my god,” Tendo says, “You lift, Becket, I get it,” and he snorts and tosses him in the back of a taxi, where Raleigh is already waiting, then drops into the seat next to him, the two of them bracketing him with identical grins.   “I’m not going to be able to feel my face in three hours, am I.”

“Not if we have anything to say about it,” they say together.

The pilots of Chrome Brutus play them at poker over dinner.  Yancy teams up with Illaspie, and Raleigh with Zeke, which leads to a knock-down drag-out match to see who can cheat better.

Yancy wakes up one morning of his own accord from a dream where he’d still been struggling to take care of Raleigh, stress churning in his stomach.  He feels like he’s about to have to get up and go to work at the firm, like everything from the last two years has been a very good dream, and when he opens his eyes to the ceiling of their bunk, he feels ridiculous.

Their ghost drift informs Raleigh of his momentary spike of panic, and his head, hair sticking up ridiculously from the pillow, pops up over the edge of the bunk. “Everything okay?”

He reaches out his hand to gently shove Raleigh backwards, smiling at him, and says, “Yeah, kid. Everything’s just fine.”

In San Diego, Gipsy tears through Clawhook, literally rips one of its limbs off.  It screams at them shrilly, as it turns around to come at them again, and Yancy turns to Raleigh and thinks, It just doesn’t feel sporting, does it, when it’s only got three limbs.

Raleigh laughs, and Yancy gets a ridiculous mental image from him of them doing the rest of the fight one-handed, but Tendo slams his hand into the radio and says, “I know what you Beckets are thinking, and it’s idiotic.  Don’t do it.”

The Marshal’s voice, behind them, says, “Stick to the plan, Mr. Becket.”  It’s clear he has no idea what Tendo is talking about, but he knows it can’t be good.

It’s a very messy battle, what with the kaiju bleeding everywhere, and they almost don’t make it the jump back to Anchorage before the Blue eats through the hull, but for the third time, they step out of Gipsy’s cockpit victorious.

Jazmine mails them news clippings about the kill in French.  Raleigh hangs them up on the wall with all his other pictures, mostly of him and Yancy.

The Marshal comes around again, in his rounds, and calls the two of them into his office again to tell them that they’re doing well.  It’s a form speech, Yancy can tell, but he doesn’t mention it to Raleigh, who is shining under the praise.

He forgets he’s smiling fondly at Raleigh until he looks back at the Marshal, who is studying his face very closely.

“Thank you, sir,” they say. They’ve gotten used to speaking in unison to freak people out; only now they can’t seem to stop.

Yancy hangs behind a little to thank him again for Jazmine, which doesn’t seem like a conversation to have while Raleigh is there.

Pentecost raises his eyebrows and says, “I’m familiar with how hard it is for a young girl to have lost her family.” Yancy reads into that to mean that he did it for Jazmine, not for them, and doesn’t believe it for a minute.

Yancy smiles at him. “Well, sir, if you ever need a babysitter, you know where to find me.”

For a moment he thinks Pentecost is going to crack his unamused shell to react to the joke, but his eyebrows just go higher.  “I believe I dismissed you several minutes ago, Ranger Becket.”

“Yes, sir,” Yancy says. “Thank you, sir.”

At Manila, the two of them ride high on being part of a three-Jaeger strike team, Lucky Seven and Horizon Brave at their back.  Brave goes down fifteen minutes in, hull compromised by the hooked tail of the first ever Cat. IV., and Yancy feels Raleigh’s spike of panic like it’s his own, calms it down like it’s his own, too.  He slams his hand into the second radio button, wiring him through to Scott and Hercules Hansen. “What’s the plan, guys?”

“We’ll take its tail,” One of them says back, accent thickening as he raises his voice to be heard over the sounds of Lucky’s and Gipsy’s combined internal workings. “You boys go for the head. Give it hell.”

“Yes, sir,” they chorus.

Tendo says, “Well, you heard the man.  Go fish.”

Gipsy lands the kill blow, in the end, but not before Lucky rips its tail off.

Brave’s pilots are severely injured, but they survive, and the Jaeger itself isn’t totally unsalvageable, although it’s pretty much wrecked.  Raleigh spills out of the cockpit and straight into Yancy, whooping. He’s still wearing his drivesuit and he looks like an idiot when he smacks the plastic of his helmet into the plastic of Yancy’s helmet hugging him, but the smile on his face is so ridiculously infectious Yancy has to smile too.

Manila sort of throws a party, sort of doesn’t, but there’s celebration in the streets and the bars and the lot of them have to stick around until tomorrow evening anyway, for the debrief. So the four of them go out to some shitty bar, which appears to be the scene all of them are most comfortable at. “Not a lick of class between us,” Yancy mutters into Raleigh’s ear, and Raleigh laughs.

He’s a little drunk already, Raleigh is—turned twenty-one five days ago and boy, is he taking advantage.  Not that Yancy’s ever stopped him from drinking, but when he’s buying the drinks he can cap it at two, and now he sort of can’t.

He’s kind of hanging all over Scott Hansen, though, which Yancy doesn’t like, because Scott has a hell of a reputation.  So he leans against the bar next to Scott’s brother—who he refuses to call Hercules, it’s just too stupid—and says, “Is your brother going to be my brother’s problem tonight, sir?”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me, it’s Herc,” he replies, then answers the question.  “Probably.”

“Would you mind seeing if you can make him somebody else’s problem?”  Yancy says, not even trying for delicacy.  “Raleigh’s sort of totally smashed and I can’t say Scott gets the best reputation for caring about things like that.”

Herc’s face darkens slightly at this last, although Yancy gets the sense it’s not directed at him. Then he walks over and cuts in, pulling Scott over like he wants him to meet someone.  Then shoves him in the direction of a group of pretty girls before walking back to Yancy.

Yancy’s about to say he doesn’t have to hang out with him by the bar all night, but Scott glances over and sees the two of them together and nods, like he gets it, and Herc gives him some look or the other.  And okay, Yancy can appreciate the power of nonverbal communication. “Thanks,” he says. “See, when I do it, it’s cockblocking.”

“It’s still cockblocking when I do it, he just doesn’t know where I sleep,” Herc points out.

“Sage advice. Done a lot of cockblocking?”

“I have a fifteen-year-old son and that idiot works part-time in my head, mate,” Herc says. “What do you think?”

Yancy laughs.

For Christmas Jazmine voices her intent to mail them cookies.  So Yancy mails her one of her old hug coupons and a plane ticket instead and they meet her at the airport.  She flings herself into Yancy’s arms the second she sees him, and Raleigh sidles up behind her and sandwiches her between them.

All three of them end up crying, and all three of them swear never to mention that they cried again, but some asshole takes a picture and they end up on every news site that exists as the Christmas feel-good story.

He sleeps on the floor of their room, which is freezing—there’s a reason they call the Anchorage Shatterdome “The Icebox”—so she can have a bed, but wakes up to Raleigh’s voice for the first time in a long time.  “Yancy. Yaaancy.”

Yancy doesn’t remember how to make his vocal cords work for a long time, because he is still mostly asleep.  Finally, he says, “If it’s not at least noon on Sunday, Raleigh, there had better be a fucking kaiju.”

“Will you read to us?” Jazmine says, and Yancy raises his head to glare at them. Behind Raleigh’s shape in the dark he can see the clock.  Eleven. At night. He hasn’t even been asleep for an hour.

“Can’t reliving your childhood wait until morning?”

“No,” they say, and Raleigh finishes it off with, “C’mon, grumpy.”

Jazmine hands him a book and he drags himself onto Raleigh’s bed with them and cracks it open.

.

“—and this is Tendo Choi, Yancy’s boyfriend,” Raleigh says as they walk into the control room.

Tendo just waves, the traitor, so Yancy gives both of them the finger.  “I’m pretty sure I’m the only one here who’s not into guys.”  Tendo opens his mouth.  Yancy cuts him off before he can start.  “Shut up, Tendo.” Jazmine is looking between the two of them like she’s about to start laughing.  “This is Jaz, our sister.  I know she’s cute and sounds French, but she’s sixteen, so hands off. Can we get in and show her Gipsy?”

“Sure can, Beckets. I’m running a new sim through validation, though, so you might be able to see it on the screen.”

Yancy pauses. “Can you shut it off for five minutes?”

He doesn’t know if the kaiju still give Jaz nightmares, but he doesn’t want to risk it.

Dropping Jazmine off at the airport again makes Raleigh mope, even though she promises to keep writing. Yancy kisses her on both cheeks before she gets on the plane and tells her to be careful.

He holds up another ticket once she boards and they can’t see her anymore.   “Got this same time’s the other one.  I’m arranging it with Aunt Cécile to let her come stay with us for the summer if she wants.  Running the request through the ‘dome, too, or we’ll just have to put her up in a hotel or something.”

Raleigh perks right back up.

They run a sim the day after New Year’s day, stepping into the cockpit and the new decade. “All right, Becket boys,” Tendo says over the radio.  “I’m going to toss you a nasty one today, so be careful not to play nice.  Initiating neural handshake in three… two… one…”

The neural handshake is not initiated.  Instead, Taylor Swift plays over the speakers, loud, some of her early work, the stuff every teenage boy loved to pretend to hate.  “Sorry, kids,” Tendo says blithely, shutting it off, “That must be Yancy’s playlist.”

Yancy can hear laughter in the background of the control room.  He can also hear it beside him, because Raleigh has no sense of brotherly loyalty. Yancy thinks about it for a moment, then reaches for the comm button.  “Must be,” he says.  “Raleigh’s more of a Bieber girl himself.”

Raleigh squawks indignantly, which means it’s Yancy’s turn to laugh at him.

They go in grinning.

“Yancy! Wake up.  There’s movement in the Breach.”  Yancy blinks into total non-awareness, confused and groggy, as Raleigh slaps him, which is just—beyond unnecessary.  “C’mon, we’re being deployed.”

Yancy almost says, duh.  Instead he says, “Great,” shoves his little brother’s head aside. “Good morning,” he continues, as Raleigh moves away.  He’s way too fucking cheery, what the hell.  And where is Romeo Blue? Aren’t the Gages on patrol tonight? Whatever.  He rolls out of bed as Raleigh tugs on clothes, telling him about the kaiju like he actually cares, as long as they’re going to kill it. “Code name: Knifehead.”

Tendo, so creative, Yancy thinks.  But Raleigh looks so peppy it’s hard to be mad.  “What time is it?”

“Two.”

“AM?” Of course it’s AM, he’s thinking, because that is just his fucking luck.

“Yep,” Raleigh says, and goes in for a fist bump that Yancy is definitely not awake enough for, right now. “What d’you say, fifth notch on the belt?”

Yancy is thinking, you talk too much for two in the morning, but he says, “Hey kid,” instead, “Don’t get cocky.”

He’s smiling when he says it, though.  Raleigh’s enthusiasm just sort of gets to you that way.

“Good morning, Becket boys,” Tendo says, and Yancy kind of wants to kill him for how cheery he sounds. But instead he fumbles his way through asking about his date, trying not to straight-up fall asleep in the drivesuit. “Jaeger conn pod, ready to drop,” is about the next thing he hears with any clarity.

“Ready for the big drop,” Yancy tells him.

“Ready to go,” Raleigh chimes in.  Yancy doesn’t even have to look at him to hear that he’s excited.

The next thing that comes over the radio, after the drop, is Pentecost’s voice.  Yancy wonders how he missed him coming in. Must’ve been late last night. “Gipsy Danger,” he says, voice low and steady, ”This is Marshal Stacker Pentecost ready for neural handshake.”

Tendo starts counting down. Yancy doesn’t care. He’s been in Raleigh’s head so many times it doesn’t really matter when it happens.  Hell, just drop him in now, why not.  “Ready to step into my head, kid?”

Raleigh’s grin grows until Yancy kind of wants to squint, it’s so bright.  “Please, after you.  Age before beauty, old man.”

Yancy can tell he thinks he’s real funny.

“Gentlemen, your orders are to hold the Miracle Mile off Anchorage.  Copy?”

“Copy that, sir,” Yancy says, then pauses, looking at the display.

They risk the city of two million for the lives of ten.

It’s a dumb decision, ultimately, but Yancy thinks they’ve pulled it off.  Is willing to back it enough to face up to the words you disobeyed a direct order.

But then the words “Gipsy, we’re still getting a signature; the kaiju is still alive,” come over the radio and there’s no more thinking after that.

He feels Raleigh’s pain as Gipsy’s arm is pierced through, grits his teeth around it and stays in the Drift as his brother screams, although every fibre of his being is screaming at him to do something, even though he can’t.  He keeps that thought down, just thinks I got you I got you I got you into the stream as he’s reporting back to Tendo.

Raleigh is his little brother. He’s not going to let Raleigh die.

As Knifehead rips through the hull and the cold Anchorage air comes rushing in, he realizes he’s helpless, this one last time.

“He’s broken through the hull!” Raleigh says, and Yancy thinks duh again, briefly, before his mind is racing over how to fix this, somehow, any way to get Raleigh through this safely.  He knows Raleigh can hear him thinking it, thinking that he needs to take Yancy’s controls and finish the thing, but he tries to say it anyway.

He doesn’t get to finish his instructions before the conn-pod seems very far away and Raleigh is screaming as he’s falling, trying to throw himself out of the drift so Raleigh won’t have to be in his head for what happens next.

He blacks out when he slams into the water, but not fast enough not to notice that he falls into a cloud of glowing blue.

It’s over.