Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In what passes for star-filled space, They frown, and this is how it begins, the suns that form Their vague eyes becoming nebulae as They stare into the abyss, seeing monsters move through it.  Silently, Their fingers dip into a pool of starstuff, scooping out a handful of celestial debris and coalescing it into a sphere, which They split in half and kiss into wakefulness.

Blinking in the starlight, Their creatures grow bodies webbed with radiation, white dwarves budding silver in the places where she kissed them, limbless and heartless, children of supernovas with no capacity to smile.

The two turn their bright eyes on Them, curious in the way all children are curious. Ask, together, because their voices are not as separate as their bodies, yet, Creator?

They scoop the two of them into Their hands, holding them up to show them the cosmos, and point at a swirling sphere of blue-green, shrouded, now, in a hazy layer of Their heart.

Look, Children, They instruct.  Look at what is happening.

Their Children swivel to obey, and They can feel them shivering yet further apart as their eyes touch Earth and the sick blue liquid beginning to eat through the stratum surrounding it.

It hurts, one of them says plaintively, and They turn away from the galaxy because They love what They have made.

Truth does, They reply, and kiss the two of them again, this time to give them arms and legs. And again to give them minds of their own.  And again to make them strong.

The Children orbit each other now, deliberately, sizing each other up, and They interrupt their fascination with each other to turn them again to the scene unfolding in the universe.

There is a tear into which dark matter will crawl, They tell the Children.  And if I lay a finger on it everything will vanish.

So it will die, guesses one, referring to the planet with its many breathing inhabitants.

Would you let it die if it were your child?  They answer.

No, the two of them reply at once.

That world is my child as truly as every world of my matter is my child, They explain. And I cannot protect it from other matters forever, but you can.  In twenty-eight further revolutions of that world around its star, its death begins, and with its death, mine.

No, the Children whisper again.

There are three children who will be born who might stop the degeneration, They continue. Three children, all who will die three times over before their world ends and be unable to save it.

No! comes the reply, as ever.

No, They agree. No.  Not if you protect them, as you will.

We will, one confirms, as the other asks, we will?

Yes, They say, voice reverberating against the comets. You will.  You will.  They turn to the first.  You I send to protect one who will be born when you have travelled eighteen times around that sun. She will be your child but not of your body, and she will die three times if you are not there to give of yourself for her.

How will I know her? the Child asks.

My kiss will be on her forehead as yours, They respond, and bend to envelop the Child in darkness.  When They withdraw, its head glows with silvery light, body shuddering as skin crawls over it, concealing the pieces of space at its core. Remember that all things must be equal, They finish, every time you save a life you must give me something in return or the balance will tip.  Every deliverance requires a sacrifice.

Their Child cannot speak to Them anymore; it is beginning to gasp in the airlessness of their lack of atmosphere.

They gather it in Their arms and give its life to a child in Tottenham, who opens his eyes, gasping as the fluid is cleared from his opening lungs, and looks back at Them in their telescopic view as if he can see through the leagues of space and time that separate him from his true Mother.

His life will make him indomitable, They say to the remaining Child, who watches quietly, as if soaking up the knowledge. Yours will make you compassionate.

Not indomitable? the Child queries.

You will be strong, They soothe. I made you both to be strong. I send you to protect one who will be born when you have travelled three times around the sun. He will be your brother. They bend forwards to emblazon Their kiss into Their Child’s body, but it moves back, arms coming up as if to protect itself.

Wait, Creator, it says, as They begin to frown again at its disobedience.  What about the third child?  Who protects it?

Their smile stretches into an asteroid belt, and They scoop Their Child into one hand again as it relaxes.  The third child will not need your protection, They say.  They will arrive for their third death on time and with no worry of yours. Bring them to me then and we will seal the leak between universes together.

Creator, the Child worries when They lean towards it again, I don’t know how to be human for him.

You will learn, They reply. Remember that all things must be equal; every time you save a life you must give something in return or the balance will tip.  Every deliverance requires a sacrifice.

This time Their Child does not resist Their embrace.

In Alaska, a baby opens his eyes, and his father wonders, in a shaky tone of voice, “Are they supposed to be that colour?” as they fade from a clear, brilliant silver to grey-blue.

“No,” the nurse says, but no matter how they look at the baby’s eyes they remain mundanely bluish.

“Trick of the light,” Richard Becket concludes.  “We’re calling him Yancy.”

Chapter Text

Yancy doesn’t know he needs to sleep, at first. Doesn’t know eating is necessary.

But they feed him, and eventually, his body just can’t sustain wakefulness, and he drifts off—it’s terrifying, the first time, fading to blackness, but when he wakes up, he’s less scared. He’s still less scared the next time, and less scared the time after that, until it becomes just something he, like every other baby, does.

He learns to crawl.

Learns to walk.

Then to run.

He’s not sure why he can’t fly, but his parents think his flailing attempts are his requests to be picked up and oblige him, which is enough to appease the urge.

When he learns to speak, he tries to tell his parents why he’s there, but he doesn’t know his words well enough and his father laughs at his frustration and, although she tries, his mother can’t figure out what he’s trying to get at.  He doesn’t know any of the right words for the universe beyond theirs. Any of the right sounds to form to tell them that the baby growing in his mother’s stomach is going to save the world some day.

He knows all these things. He thinks in a very complex manner, but not in words.  Not in human concepts.

He doesn’t know what different colors are called all the time or how to spell the word CAT reliably, but he knows what his purpose is.  And, by the time he knows enough words to even begin to get at the concept of how things are and why he’s here, he knows he shouldn’t tell them.

Because when he spends the first three years of Raleigh’s life refusing to let him out of his sight, his parents look at him oddly and whisper about taking him to see someone. And he suspects that seeing someone would take him away from his duty.  He doesn’t know who someone is and he doesn’t know how to lie and he wants to tell them both that Raleigh is special, but if they can’t see the glowing gold mark of The Creator’s kiss on his forehead, they probably won’t understand.

 And when he had tried to point it out to them when he was four, his mother had put her hand on his forehead like she had the last time he got sick and asked, concern laced through her tone, “Do you feel all right, petit?”

He feels fine.

He always does.

Sometimes he gets sick, yes, but even then he feels fine.  He can detach himself from this body, in his head—it was meant for whoever Yancy Becket was supposed to be, but he’s Yancy Becket now. It’s his, but not his. He can dissociate, when it feels like this body is trying to drag him down.

Dreaming takes him home.

“You have old eyes, chèri,” Dominique tells him the year after that, petting a hand through his hair, gentle. He loves his mother. At first, it was an odd thing to him, because he isn’t hers, not the part of him that matters, anyway, but with years that awareness has vanished and now it seems only natural that he love the woman who raised him. That she is his mother, to every part of him that matters.

“I’m seven,” he tells her, because it’s true, even if most seven-year-olds don’t think like he does.

“Oui, c’est vrai,” she replies, mouth twitching, and smoothes his hair back from his forehead to kiss him right across the silver mark The Creator left there to remind him that he is here for a reason.  “Ma petite ange.”

In the mornings when he’s seven, he looks in the mirrors in the hotels across the world and sees the brand on his forehead and touches it with his hand, covers it up.  When it doesn’t shine over his face, he looks just like any other little boy, chubby-cheeked and big-eyed.

When he takes his hand off again, he can almost see the stars sparkling behind him.

It ends up feeling right to him that Raleigh should be his brother, after a while, instead of just his charge. And as they grow up, he stops thinking that Raleigh’s about to die every minute and lets loose enough to be his best friend, too.  Jazmine he is initially perplexed by, but he quickly finds himself endeared by her until he loves her, too.

At first, the realization that he loves his siblings, that he thinks of them as his siblings, hits him as a shock, the same way it came as a shock when he realized he loved his mother, but by the time he’s ten, the thing he’s best at is loving. Emotions aren’t foreign to him, they never have been, he’s been raised with them even if he wasn’t necessarily born with them, and he begins to forget, after a while, that he is made of a piece of the galaxy.  Not that he ever really forgets, he can’t with the mark on his forehead always filling his eyes full of silver light except when he’s with Raleigh, whose light overwhelms it. But he isn’t aware of it all the time. He doesn’t quite recall how the constellations looked.  Can’t quite call the face of his Creator to his mind.  That he was born from stars is not the most important part of him anymore.

The most important part of him is brother, and if guardian comes with that, then that is simply how it should be.

Brother becomes who he is, Child fading to the back of his mind, where the knowledge sticks but doesn’t matter. He can’t see the end of the world coming yet, anyway.  Maybe it will come when they’re very old.  Maybe the Creator was wrong about the blue.  Maybe it’s good for the earth.

(He grows up optimistic. Grows up happy, knowing that this is where he is supposed to be. Where he’s meant to be, by Raleigh’s side, in this family. This is where he was placed.)

In the dark of the night, Raleigh, sleeping in the bed next to his, glows brilliant gold, a lazy shifting of his aura following the pattern of his dreaming.

And Yancy smiles at him in the dark and thinks, Nothing bad is ever going to happen to you.  I won’t let it.

But when Raleigh’s nine, he almost dies.

The two of them and Jazmine are barreling through the woods in the snow, slipping and sliding every which way down the hill towards the lake.  His brother and sister are screaming, because they’re playing tag, and Yancy is It, and he’s nowhere near catching up to them.

(The only reason he hasn’t caught both of them already is that Jazmine, at four, isn’t that fast, and picking on her isn’t fair, so he’s hanging back, keeping an eye on both of them.

He still does this.)

Raleigh skitters across the surface of the pond, shrieking laughter, and Jazmine follows him, and Yancy doesn’t even think about it, because they’ve done this before and nothing bad has happened.

But then it was January and now it’s March.

And the ice isn’t still so thick. Raleigh hits a dark patch and, with a sickening crack, disappears, happy yelling cut off by the water he falls into, gasp swallowed by the quick-thinking breath Yancy sees him take before his head goes under.

Everything in Yancy freezes for a moment, and then he sprints after, passing Jaz at the pond’s edge and moving onto the ice after his brother without a thought.  “Go get Dad!” he yells at her as he’s running towards the hole where Raleigh used to be, “Hurry!”

His hat is sitting on the ice near her when she takes off, obedient to the panic in his voice, blown off by the air he’s splitting as he runs, but other than that, he’s fully clothed when he dives into the water after his brother, a clumsy plunge because the ice breaks under him as he’s jumping, meaning his momentum tries to head two directions at once.

Under the surface of the water, everything is very quiet; all he can hear is the soft crack of the ice above them and the harsh, terrified pound of his blood in his ears.  It’s dark, too; he can only see a few feet in any direction, and only near the surface.  Realizing as he starts to sink that his heavy winter clothes are dragging him down, he struggles out of his coat as he turns, letting himself go down a few feet as he does so, searching the pond for Raleigh.

Who is floundering wildly in the water a few feet to his left and down, trying to swim up but unable to make headway because of his clothing.  If he stops to pull it off, Yancy knows, he’ll sink, so he rips off his own boots and swims down, grabbing ahold of Raleigh, who doesn’t have as much air in store as he does because he’d been surprised, and shoving him up towards the surface.

In the water, the motion sends him down more than it pushes Raleigh up, but it’s something.  He swims up and does it again, this time trying to carry him to the top. His legs are burning, his lungs are burning, and his extremities are starting to bite with cold. He can feel himself being pulled down, but he pushes harder against the feeling, because Raleigh needs to live.

His brother’s movements are starting to weaken, probably with lack of oxygen, he knows, and he becomes deadweight soon enough, but Yancy keeps propelling himself upwards until he can see the surface of the water clearly, make out the clouds above it.

His oxygen, though, is running out just as surely as Raleigh’s had, with the exertion, and as spots start to pop in his vision, stars shift into place around him.

The Creator’s massive, cosmic face stares down at him, and suddenly he doesn’t need oxygen or heat, and he has no heart to beat. He’s a singularity again. A human-shaped singularity, but a singularity nonetheless.  Raleigh’s shade is hovering next to him, suspended in space as he is in water on Earth, face beginning to slacken, head turned upwards towards light that isn’t visible here, and Yancy runs to him, but his hands pass through him.

Creator! he says, voice cracking, and turns back to Them, Creator, please!

What do you give me for balance? They ask him. I made the rules; I cannot break them.

He doesn’t have anything to give. Take me, he tries, desperate.

You will need your life later, The Creator tells him gently, What will you give me now?  What are you willing to give for him?

Anything, he says.  He doesn’t have anything but his life.  He almost volunteers Jazmine’s.  His mother’s.  His father’s. But he doesn’t, because it’s wrong. It’s a human’s wrong, but he’s human, now, as much as he is this.  He doesn’t know when he began to think that way, but he has for as long now as he can remember. Take—make me sick. Take my health. Can I give you my pain for him?

The Creator considers this. Yes. But I won’t take it forever, They say.  Cold water isn’t so special.  Thin ice is a thing he might have missed if he were lucky. But you won’t be well again for half a trip around your sun.  Are you willing to give that?

Anything, he says again, and it’s true, not because this is what he was made for, but because he loves Raleigh. His life has come to matter to him in a way he thought it wouldn’t.  It’s a human word, anything.  Anything.

He thinks the constellation of Their smile widens.

All things must be equal, They remind him as cold begins to settle back over him.  Have you learned to be human, Child?

I love to be human, he replies.

And this, too, is the truth.

As the water rushes, glacial, back in around him, he sees Raleigh’s arms move, and he thinks thank god as he makes the last shove to let his brother’s face break the water, watching from below as Raleigh’s hands scrabble feebly for the edge of the ice to keep him afloat.

But he has to make the sacrifice, so he lets the final thrust push him under the ice as footsteps come echoing across it and a dark shape flattens itself out on the surface overhead; Richard, crawling towards Raleigh over the ice.

Trapped, he doesn’t try to swim for the hole, even though Raleigh’s kicking feet mark it.  Instead, he slams his hands against the ice on top of him, over and over again although he can feel himself weakening, until he’s bleeding into the water, turning the ice pink around him, and his arms feel like they’re shattering with every hit.

He stops only when Richard’s arms circle him from behind, hauling him backwards and throwing him out of the water to lie on the ice next to Raleigh, the two of them coughing and hacking up icewater.

They have to go to the hospital, all three of them—Richard, the only one who had known what to do about the situation, escapes relatively unscathed, just a few abrasions from clambering out after Yancy and exhaustion from carrying the two of them up the hill to the car, one after the other. Raleigh is simply very cold and slightly confused and dizzy from oxygen deprivation, but hypothermia hadn’t had time to set in before Richard had gotten him into the car and cranked the heat up as high as it would go.

Yancy’s wrists are severely fractured, hands torn open, and he’s inhaled water at near freezing temperature. He has to spend almost three days in the hospital getting over the effects of his journey under the ice, and one of his wrists requires surgery to recover function.  As he’d known he would, he spends the next six months after that unable to use his hands properly, with an almost perpetual case of bronchitis that leaves him with an on-and-off hacking cough for almost three years.

It’s worth it.  It’s all worth it.

This is what he’s willing to give, at the age of twelve, for the boy who has become his brother.

This is Raleigh’s first death.

When the kaiju come, Yancy only needs one look at the blue glow of Trespasser’s innards to know that this is the ooze from the other side.

Sydney is screaming.

Hercules Hansen is sitting behind the controls of his OH-58D KW keeping a track on the kaiju as it’s lured out of Sydney and towards the area they’ve designated for the second nuclear strike on it, and all he can think about is Angela and Charlie.

He doesn’t have to worry about Scott; Scott is sitting behind him, watching the thing over his shoulder, because Scott cannot nose the fuck out, he’s not capable.  He’s not even supposed to be here, but when he’d jumped in, Herc hadn’t stopped him. He can almost feel his brother’s terror rippling through his own spine and all he can think about is Angela and Charlie.

Angie works downtown, just outside the blast zone of the bomb they’re going to detonate up this thing’s ass.

Charlie’s school is almost directly in the path the kaiju is taking and there’s no evac order out yet, why is there no evac order out?  “Herc,” his brother says, “Is Chas in school today or did they cancel when—?”

“He’s there,” Herc bites out, keeping his eyes trained on the kaiju so he won’t have to think about his son’s class of ten- and eleven-year-olds running, screaming, like cockroaches out of the building as Scissure’s massive claws cut through it.  “Angie’s at work—”

“Why the fuck did she go to work?  Why did you let her go to wor—”

“Shut the fuck up, Scott,” Herc growls, brittle and imagining his wife’s broken body under the feet of the kaiju.

Crackling over the radio comes the order, “It’s not following the lead anymore!  We’re evacuating the downtown, arc-up in thirty mins whether or not he’s in the zone!”

“Angela,” Scott tells him, like he doesn’t fucking know.

Like he can even stop thinking about it.

At thirty-four, he doesn’t yet have lines cut into the sides of his eyes.  Shaves every day.  Has friends he goes out drinking with, is on good terms with his family.  Has a wife he loves and a kid who’s sharp as a knife who he’s so fucking proud of he’s got pictures of the little fucker in his wallet.

At thirty-four he shouldn’t have to choose whether to drag his son out of his schoolhouse and make sure he’s safe, hope his wife evacuates like she’s supposed to and everything’s all right or whether to pick Angie up and hope the kaiju doesn’t hit Charlie’s school. It’s not supposed to, not quite.

The civilians are supposed to evacuate the downtown.

Staying in the air, obeying orders, is suddenly not an option, but he doesn’t know which of his disobediences to pick over the other.  Angie’s face flashes through his mind, upturned nose and freckles and sweet smile, and then it twists into the face he’s only seen a few times, fury writ large all over it, and says, How dare you even think about not getting my little boy, you prick.

He has his decision.  Swerves the bird around the kaiju’s flapping ear, feeling rather than hearing Scott’s surprised cry, and ducks it below another KW, ignoring the shouts in his earpieces for him to fall back into formation.

They can do without him, he’s only a formality. They’ll pull him and everybody else soon enough.

If they can’t forgive him for this, he’ll take his discharge with fucking pride.

“Where’re we going?” Scott yells, over the roar of the beast and the cutting hum of the helicopter’s blades.

“We’re going to get my son,” Herc tells him. “And then we’re going to hope like hell Angie had the good sense to get the fuck out when we sent the order. Can you fly this thing?”

“I’m not licensed, but that never stopped me before.”

No, of course it fucking hasn’t.

“Good.  Climb up here and take the controls when I hop out, set her down on the roof of the school if you can manage it.  I’ll see you ten after.”

Switching pilots mid-flight is stupid, but in their day the two of them have done stupider things together, and Herc would do much, much stupider things for his family than play Indiana Jones.

There’s no time for a parachute, so when they’re close and Scott has clambered, holding tightly to the seats, into the front, screaming something Herc can’t really hear because his earpiece has fallen out, he gets them low enough he probably won’t die, unstraps, and passes off the controls to his brother before he opens a door as Scott gets his feel for the wheel and the KW stutters midair.  Then he jumps to hang from it, which, fuck, is idiotic and he’s probably going to die, and drops the twenty feet left from the side of the helicopter to the back of the trash truck abandoned in the streets as the shadow of the kaiju bears down, still blocks away and coming slow, but coming.

He gets covered in whatever bullshit people have thrown out this week, but that’s fine.  That’s fine.  His ankles aren’t fucking broken, he’s just a bit cut up from some of the trash he’s landed on, and that’s good enough.  He clambers out of it and runs in the front door of the school, ignoring the front desk but for shouting at them, “Get everyone the fuck out, it’s coming,” at them as he sprints the familiar path up to Charlie’s classroom on the third floor.

The kids on the third floor are lining the halls with their heads covered like it’s a fucking tornado drill, and he would laugh if he didn’t know that most of them are about to die.

Not his boy, though.  Not his boy.

“Charlie,” he says, his military command tone laced all through his voice, and three heads pop up, but only one of them is Charlie Hansen’s, so that’s the only one he cares about. “C’mon, get up, we gotta go.”

“Dad?”

“Who are you, sir?” One of the teachers asks, and he points at his son before he scoops him up into his arms and heads for the stairs.

“Herc Hansen.  Get these kids out of this fucking building, you hear me? Run away from downtown, but not towards the fucking kaiju.  Scissure’s coming.”

He disappears up the stairs with his boy in his arms, because the idea of letting him run by himself is terrifying, somehow.

“Dad?  You’re bleeding,” Charlie says, grubby little hand unfisting from his shirt to touch his face.  “Are we gonna be okay?”

“We’ll be fine,” he says gruffly, and tries to open the door from the fifth floor to the roof with his hip, but finds it locked. “Fuck.”

Charlie resists being put down and shoved away, but when he orders, “Stand back,” the boy complies easily.

Then he gets out his gun, which he’s not technically supposed to have on him right now, and shoots ten or so holes through the wood of the door around the lock, setting off the alarms, because he can’t be arsed breaking it down right now.  Then he pulls the piece of wood with the handle and the lock out of the door, tossing it down the stairwell over his shoulder, and tugs his son out the door, which, now devoid of the mechanism even to close properly, opens easily.

Scott’s sitting on the roof, just like he’s supposed to be, and when he sees them he gets out of the front seat and heads for the back, throwing the side door open as he does.

Herc could kiss him for this being the one time he comes through.

“Get in the back with your Uncle Scott,” he says to Charlie, and the boy runs to the helicopter with him.

They’re taking off thirty seconds later, and they’re almost back to base when the explosion rocks downtown Sydney, and he swears the world shudders around him, like the fabric of it wears thin for a moment and he can see stars, bursting copper-red in the cockpit around him, but that’s probably just the vibration of the blast.  “Fuck, what was that?” Scott says, “did you see that?”

“No,” he says, ignoring him as he takes the bird down.

He needs to know if Angie’s okay.

“You,” he says, when he lands it, pointing to his brother, “take him,” and now he points to Charlie, “somewhere he can’t hear me being boned in.”

“Boned in?” Charlie asks, which is the reason he had used the term.  Kid doesn’t know the ancient military slang.

“Yelled at,” Scott says, unhelpful as usual.

“Go,” Herc grits out.

Stacker Pentecost, who he hasn’t seen in years, breaks Angela’s death to him by telling him softly, At least you have your boy.

Like there’s some kind of fucking balance.

Like somehow the fact that his son is alive makes up for the fact that his wife isn’t.  Like having Charlie makes the gaping hole in his ribcage feel any less painful.  But Stacker’s always been like this, believing in some sort of fairness to life, even though the truth is, and he ought to fucking know it: Life isn’t fair.

Herc can’t tell him that, can’t bring himself to speak past the knot sitting in his throat, but they’ve had the conversation before, and Stacker had just said, thoughtfully, No, not to me. But to humanity collectively, I suppose it is. There isn’t much that doesn’t work out even eventually.

They’d been really fucking drunk.

He wants to be really fucking drunk now, he wants not to feel empty.  He wants not to hurt.

Instead he has to go tell his son his mother has died.

He wants to not believe it. But it’s probably true. Even so, he finds he can’t tell Charlie, and so he doesn’t.  Leaves it for tomorrow, even though the kid’s asking for his mom.  Just ignores his questions, because he can’t bring himself to answer them.

Scott takes them back to his shitty little apartment and tries to pick up the debris of his lifestyle before the kid can see it, the empty bottles and condoms and the fucking pipe Herc can see on the table, what the hell is his brother doing with that fucking pipe. They're going to have to talk about this.

He appreciates, though, that Scott is doing this. That he doesn’t have to think about it himself, doesn’t have to pull the brainpower away from his grief to try and be a father to his son.

He lets his brother put the boy to sleep in the guest room, is lying face down on Scott’s unmade bed when he comes in. Mercifully, Scott doesn’t try to talk to him about it.  Knows when to shut the fuck up sometimes, at least.  Just—takes off his sweaty shirt and flops down next to him and goes to sleep.

The next day, the two of them go back to see Stacker and sign on with the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps.

That night, Scott tells the kid his mother’s dead, and the way he just slides to the floor on his knees, looks up clear-eyed at them and doesn’t cry, just silently opens his mouth like he wants to protest but can’t, makes Herc’s stomach turn.

If it were Angela standing in front of him hearing that their son was dead, she’d be punching him in the face. She’d be pounding her fists against his chest, screaming at him, telling him what a fucking idiot he was to pick her when there was an eleven-year-old who needed him. His boy, though, he doesn’t understand the choice Herc made.  He just knows they’ve both lost and his soundless shock is opening the wound further.

He can’t help feeling like something good has left the world.

That something good would have left the world either way.

He dreams about the way Stacker sometimes looks askance at him even when he’s not doing anything wrong, and about the shadow of the kaiju falling over his son’s school, and about Angela, screaming, as the bomb descended, even though he knows she wouldn’t have known it was coming.

Scott is steadier those first few weeks than he has been in his entire life combined, probably, dealing with Charlie when Herc can’t and talking to people for him, and Herc can’t help but love him for that.

He’s not a bad person, Scott isn’t, not really.

Just not nice.

Herc’s not nice either.  All but three of the children from Charlie's class are dead.

Not his boy, though.  Not his boy.

Raleigh Becket is destined to die twice of hypothermia, apparently, once in the pond and once on the streets. Yancy doesn’t really know that, but he does really know that if he weren’t here, that’s where Raleigh would be: the streets.

Because Raleigh, Raleigh’s not him.

Raleigh’s a good guy.  He’s nice.  He’s got a decent head on his shoulders.  Yancy’s proud of him.  Proud of the person he’s growing up to be.  But he’s not what Yancy is. And he’s not resilient.

Raleigh is good at admitting defeat when he’s really sure he has no other option.  Yancy, on the other hand, knows that admitting defeat is never the other option for him.  He has this advantage over his brother, that he knows what he’s supposed to do, even if he’s not quite sure how he’s supposed to do it.

Dominique Lapierre-Becket dies and Richard Becket leaves and Yancy sells everything.  Gives it all up.  Sacrifices.

He works.  Drops out of school.

He can learn to be a person on his own terms.

His jobs have him working sixteen hours a day, sleeping six hours a night, eating twice on good days, once on bad ones.

Surely this is sacrifice enough.

Raleigh, though, Raleigh can’t be him. Raleigh has to be something better; he needs to grow up to save the world, not get stuck in some shitty backwoods Alaska town with a brother who’s barely scraping by.  Raleigh can’t stay here.

He worries about it every night.

But he knows, if he weren’t here, busting his ass, Raleigh would have given up.  He would be on the streets begging, or something.

And in Alaska, in winter, the streets aren’t a good place for humans to be.

That’s what keeps him getting out of bed and going to work most mornings; the thought of Raleigh shivering against a building. That and the way his brother’s always hungry and they never have enough food.

He’s not surprised, the night he turns twenty, when he goes to sleep with Raleigh curled into his side, shivering because it’s been a cold month and they’ll go over the limit if they use much more energy for heat, that he wakes up to see a galaxy out the window.

The window is his eyes this time.

He thinks he can still feel the warm press of a body close to his in space, but Raleigh’s gold shape is floating beside him instead, face screwed up in a way that clearly means he’s cold, and not asleep.

Yancy’s heart aches.  The kid doesn’t sleep enough.

Creator, he says, confused and a little annoyed. He’s not dying.

No, They reply, But he would have if not for you.

Haven’t I sacrificed enough already this time?

He’s already given up everything he loves that isn’t Raleigh.

A life comes with a hefty payoff, They tell him, in a tone as quiet as a voice produced by the collisions of comets can be. Although neither of yours have been totally unavoidable even without you; he simply isn’t lucky. But you are; the prices for those deaths are lower.  The others won’t be so fortunate.

What do you want from me, Creator? he asks, and he’s tired, and bitter, and he just wants to be back asleep with his little brother shivering at his side, where he’s supposed to be.  Always at his side.  You know I’ll give anything.

I know.  But your pain won’t suffice this time.  Something precious to you will always be a greater gift than something you endure for his sake.

Yancy stares into the abyss and sees the beasts that are eating their way through the core of the earth, the way the membrane of it drips with rot.  This is Raleigh’s. Raleigh will be the cure some day if Yancy loves him enough.  This is a test of what he will do for his brother and the answer must always be everything. Take an hour from all of my days, he says.  Until I die, or my body does.  During sleep, every night, I’ll give you an hour.

Already he doesn’t have enough hours in the day to work and be Raleigh’s brother and be himself all at once, already he’s always exhausted.

So this, in a way, is still giving Them his pain; it’s just that he rephrases it.

To rephrase that: this is another way of giving Raleigh his life.

 The Creator kisses the dwarf star shining at his core, and he feels like a jolt of lightning has gone through him.  Don’t be miserable, Yancy; I don’t need your misery, They tell him.  Just your hours.

He feels more exhausted and more peaceful all at once.

What will you do with the hours?

You’ll see, They say.  You’ll see.  Come visit me during them. I miss the two of you.

Yancy looks at his Creator and doesn’t love Them.

He doesn’t love Them.  The realization is as odd as all the people he’s learned to love being human.  They’re just what is; he doesn’t love Them.

Yes, he says anyway, mechanically.  Yes, I will.

You’re willing to give this for him?

Of course I am.

Remember, They say as They push him back into the Earthworld.  All things must be equal.

He opens his eyes to a dark room.

His brother, shimmering gold beside him, is pressing gently at his shoulder with a palm.  “Y-Yance?  Yancy?”

“What’s up?” he asks, and slings an arm over his own forehead to cover the silver there, so he’s in the dark except for Raleigh’s light.

“I’m cold,” Raleigh whispers, sounding embarrassed, and a hot rush of fury comes over Yancy at himself, for letting his little brother be embarrassed of being human.  He opens his arms for his brother in the dark, wills the supernovas in him to add a little heat to the room, which is not cold enough to be dangerous, but cool enough to be very, very unpleasant.

“C’mere, kiddo.  Bring the blankets, we’ll nest up or something. Body heat.”

“You sound like a bad porno.”

“Please don’t talk about porn while I’m hugging you.”

“Please, Yance, you’re not hugging me, you’re spooning me.  Get it right.”

“Fuck off, Raleigh,” he says, and kisses his brother’s hair the same way he always used to when Raleigh was a toddler. “And get some sleep.”

When Yancy wakes up the next morning, he feels like he’s been hit by a train.

Six hours of sleep is four complete cycles.

Five hours is three and something, and he feels like absolute shit because he's only had part of the one.

He drags himself out of bed anyway, because even with the hour vanished in the night, he has to get up and work for sixteen hours today.  He has to get up and provide.

She can’t take from him what he’s already giving, he supposes.

But part of him wonders, momentarily, if this is fair. If it’s really fair that he has to give all this.

And the answer he comes up with is that he’s spoiled.  He was spoiled last time by the low price and now he’s stingy, and the sacrifices he’s making now are nothing compared to what Raleigh’s life is really worth.

To the world.

To him.

Learning to be human means learning to be selfish.

For himself, he needs to keep Raleigh alive, if not for the world. He keeps this secret in his heart because he knows he’s not supposed to have it.  He’s supposed to be noble.  He’s supposed to be better than this; supposed to be selfless.

But he ended up with a little brother, not a duty, through no will of his own.  He ended up with a family.

And that makes him more human than any other thing in this world has managed to.

Chapter Text

Stacker Pentecost grows up angry.

Because the world is supposed to be fair, it’s supposed to be balanced and everything is supposed to be equal, but it’s not.

It was all a lie.

Because his sister at nine comes home from school and asks his father, “Dad, why do they hate us?” and when his father asks who they and us are like he doesn’t know, she says, “White people.  And us.” Because his mother is called a whore on the streets by men who were throwing money at her last night. Because he is made fun of in class for having a backpack passed down from his sister because they couldn’t afford another one and it’s pink.  Because his father has to sit him down and tell him not to look so angry, because it makes him look dangerous.

Because store clerks watch him like hawks when he’s eight and he’s buying a tube of lipstick that his mother sent him around the corner for—and then laugh at him when he comes to the counter with his purchase.

It’s not fair. Nothing is fair.

Life isn’t.

For years he’s angry. His father is killed and that’s not fair either and he’s angry.  There’s smoke in his lungs and the heat of the inferno is pricking his eyes and his fists are raw and bloody like his palms, which are collecting the blood from his wrists where he’s been pulling at the handcuffs they have him in.

For years. So fucking angry he can hardly stand it.

He goes to military school and excels and he’s still angry, because he is here on this Earth because some cosmic laws of fairness dictate he must be and that lives are worth something and that he has the power to keep that balance, but as far as he can tell, his life, as a juvenile offender, as a black man, as a soldier, is worthless in the eyes of half the world.

Well, he considers that club owner’s livelihood partial recompense for Obadel Pentecost’s life, at least.

He learns how to fight properly.  Learns how to give back as good as he’s given.  How to even his odds.

And when he’s seventeen, he takes a chemistry course and learns two things: he’s terrible at chemistry, and it’s not enough for one thing to balance out in an equation system, everything has to.  From there, he gets his temper under control, because now, at least, he understands. For every bad thing that happens to him, something good happens to someone else.  The world is equal after all, but only when he views it as a whole.

It’s not fair to him.  It’s never going to be fair to any one person.

(At eighteen when no little girl appears magically to remind him what he’s doing on this planet he wonders if he’s insane.  If the silver light burning on his forehead when he looks in mirrors is just his brain playing tricks on him.  But he waits anyway.)

He graduates military school and goes on to train in the officer track; he has, they tell him, a flare for leadership.

There, he learns how to weaponize his anger—it’s not gone, just under control, tethered by pragmatism. Learns how to suppress it until he uses it to make himself larger than life, overwhelming.  And he’s good at it.  Good at leading by combination of trustworthiness and force. He’s good enough that he moves through ranks quickly.

At twenty-five he’s a wing commander and flying demonstrations at Air Force events when they need someone to because he’s fucking excellent at them, even though it’s way below his pay grade.

That’s how he meets Hercules Hansen—not in combat, the RAF and the RAAF don’t come together often enough on the ground for them to encounter each other there, and probably they wouldn’t have here, either, except that as he’s swinging his wingtip around his focal point for a spiraling drop towards the ground in formation with the other six pilots in the air, he sees the flash of light from the ground, and when he gets out of the cockpit after the demonstration, he rakes his eyes through the crowd until he catches it again, so obvious he wonders why he didn’t see it immediately.

Standing in the RAAF ranks, looking bored, is a man with a red-bronze glow illuminating him, so bright it touches the people to either side of him as well, casting them in copper.

For a moment, Stacker thinks this must be it, but it doesn’t make any sense.

For one, whoever this is is obviously too old, and for two, he is at least presenting himself as male, and he remembers the she in the litany even if the rest of it is faded in his memory a little.

But it’s still something, so after the speeches and various frills and fanfare of the thing, he weaves through the crowd and tries to be casual about bumping into the man. Maybe this is his counterpart?

But Hercules Hansen doesn’t appear to have any reaction at all to the silver light Stacker knows is emanating from his forehead, just exchanges pleasantries like a good soldier and moves on.

Something else entirely, then.

He doesn’t figure it out until he can see the world shaking with bronze as the bomb goes off in Sydney and Herc appears with a man who looks almost exactly like him and a child with wide, scared eyes and messy reddish hair.  All three of them are ringed with the same colour that had just decorated the blast in his eyes.  He receives word of Angela Hansen’s death, just rumour, really, but he believes it.

Bronze, bronze, bronze.

He doesn’t know what it means.

He tells Herc she’s dead and sees him shudder like he’s been stabbed, close his eyes and get himself under control so he can walk back out.

And, to himself, he wonders, was Angela Hansen bronze, too?  Is this a Hansen family trait?  He suspects, from that flash, that it must be, but he supposes he’ll never know.

By that time he’s already part of the Jaeger program.

By that time Luna Pentecost is already dead.  Tamsin goes in with the class of 2015 mostly for her; he goes in with the class of 2015 mostly because he’s known since he saw the first videos of Trespasser that this is what he’s going to have a hand in stopping.  He’s the only one out of all of them who’s Drifted before the first tests, and he’s never done it with another person, so he’s not expecting it when he can see her entire life and she can see his.

He can feel her mind pouring through the cracks of the thoughts no human was ever supposed to see, but she holds steady in the Drift with him anyway, and after they walk out of the room, stumbling and feeling like there’s an invisible string connecting them, she slams him into the wall outside their quarters and says, “Start talking, Stacks.”

He does, even though she knows everything already.  “I recognize how insane it sounds.  But you saw it. Tell me I’m insane.”

It’s a challenge. She doesn’t rise to it. “Explain.”

In short sentences, he complies.  “The kaiju are the end of the world.  There are two people who’ll stop it.  One of them is going to die unless I’m there.  That’s about the long and short of it.”

“So, what, you’re some sort of guardian angel?”

“You could put it that way. Personally, I think of my job description as arbiter of justice.”

Tamsin laughs, a little, hysterically, and lets go of him, pulling back.  “This is insane. This is a science fiction movie.”

“Godzilla was the prophecy,” Stacker says, deadpan, and she keeps laughing, flopping face down onto her bed.

“Get out, Stacker. I need to think.”

“There’s nothing to think about.  You know everything.”

“You’re an angel and the Hansens glow.  I think I need a minute.”

He leaves.

And they don’t talk about it until Coyote Tango is overlooking the streets of Tokyo and he catches a flash of gold in the crowd, a pull hooking into him so hard that they shiver out of alignment for a moment in their pursuit.

Is that her? Tamsin thinks into his head, squaring her shoulders as he does to reach for the kaiju. The gold?

It must be.

That’s all they need to talk about; she knows everything he’s thinking, from the determination budding in his chest to crush this kaiju into the ground for threatening her to the fear growing snakelike beneath his ribcage.  Let’s fuck it up before it hits her, then, she says, a smile in her thoughts, and then he’s not with her anymore.

He can still feel her, but it’s distant, barely-there, and for the first time in thirty-one years, he is looking up at a massive, starry face.  Creator, he says, voice steady.  He feels like he’s losing time even though he probably isn’t.

What will you give me for her?

He doesn’t know it, but he’s the second one to try this first: Take me.

You’ll need your life later, They tell him.  But you’ve already given it.

If he had eyes here, they would narrow, confused.

Beside him hangs a golden shape, and when he examines it, he sees a little girl with dark hair, face terrified and hand upstretched like it’s clinging to someone else’s. That’s her? He asks, and They move, shifting—the stars around him seem to spin, and it’s dizzying.

What will you give me for her?

The Drift is pulling him back; he can feel Tamsin in his head, mind screaming silently, like she’s halfway trapped here too and can’t take it.  Take my—arms, then.  He doesn’t know what needs doing here.

To save her from this, that isn’t sacrifice enough.

He looks blankly at her and at the little girl suspended in the air next to him.  What do you mean, I’ve already given my life?

You gave your life to move the fingers of a Jaeger.  Your death is growing in your skull.  What will you give me for her?

Stacker looks back at his charge, but doesn’t need to control his face, for once, because here he hasn’t got one; just a maw of gravity where his features should be.   Take Tamsin, he says after a very long pause, feeling the guilt of the words drop low into his stomach.

His decision was this: there are three single things he values over his own life.

The first is the life of the girl glowing gold next to him, which, for obvious reasons, cannot be his sacrifice.  The second is the Jaeger program, which, he is certain, is going to be the instrument by which this girl saves the world.  He wouldn’t have given his life to it if he didn’t think it was worth it—although he had hoped it wouldn’t mean he would “give his life” quite so literally.

The third is Tamsin Sevier.

Who is his sister. Who is his best friend. Who he loves.

Who he is going to have to give up, because his family is all dead and all he has left is her and the Jaeger program.  In the first of many such decisions he will have to make, he weighs his copilot against the fate of the world and finds he has no other option.  She would make the same decision about him, he knows. And she would endorse this decision of his, if she knew he was making it.

You’re willing to give this for her? The Creator asks, and for a moment, Stacker is overcome with his old anger at having to give this for her.

Absolutely, he answers.

To his ear, it sounds hollow, but They kiss him and send him back to his battle, where Tamsin abruptly seizes in the saddle and leaves him alone in the Jaeger with his decision. By the grace of her sacrifice he turns back the kaiju by himself.

When she comes to in the hospital, he’s sitting by the side of her bed, and he can tell she knows.

There’s bronze lightly shining in her eyes, and he understands now what the colour means. She balances. He doesn’t know what Hercules Hansen balances, nor his family, but he suspects he’ll find out.

She doesn’t condemn him for his decision, just as he knew she wouldn’t.  Just reaches out to take his hand and says, “You’d better own this, Stacker.  She’d better be the happiest kid in the world.  Make it worth it, all right?”

He hates himself a little for this choice, but what can he do?

It’s made already.

“I’ll bring her in to visit you when all my paperwork goes through,” he tells her. “And you can make sure of it yourself.”

“What’s her name? Mako Mori,” she answers her own question.

“Mako Mori,” he confirms.

“Tell your Creator to make it quick,” she says, trying to joke and failing; the quiver of something scared in her eyes gives it away to him.  ”All right?”

He can’t talk to Them. But he says, “I will,” anyway.

She’s dead, mercifully, just over a year later.

Stacker Pentecost meets Raleigh Becket before he meets Yancy Becket, and immediately the gold mark on his forehead takes him aback, strikes him to the bone.

His protection extends here, then.

The end of the world is coming, with three of them so close.

But Yancy doesn’t follow very far behind, lit in silver that burns brighter than he knows his own does, and he looks Stacker dead in the eyes and grins slow and easy, like he’s saying I know you.  “Marshal Pentecost,” he says, voice respectful like a well-trained soldier’s should be, but the little bow that accompanies it is all a tease.  “Excuse us.”

No one is better at keeping his feet in the midst of a surprise or crisis than Stacker is. He doesn’t acknowledge them especially, just nods.

Looks up their file late that night by flipping through the folders until he finds Raleigh’s by his picture, because Becket, R. is alphabetized before Becket, Y.—flips it open and reads it with fascination.  Then he flips open the next file.

Yancy is a stupid name, but he supposes he can’t talk.

That same lazy smile is on display in his profile photo, no teeth showing, eyes half-lidded, tilted downwards.  Psych profile describes lack of ambition and notes codependency, referencing Raleigh’s file with the same note, but it also mentions high self-efficacy and self-sufficiency.

He tries to align the description of the boy in the file with himself, with the realm of reality they came from. Try as he might, he doesn’t understand, really.

There’s a knock on his door, and it’s too late at night for anyone to be bothering him but Mako, so he calls out in Japanese for her to come in.

But it’s not her, it’s Yancy Becket, wearing a loose white shirt with his dog tags riding over it, glinting in his light and throwing out auras to either side of him, like wings emerging from the centre of his chest.  “Marshal,” he says.

“It’s past curfew.”

That indolent smile curls up at the corners.  “I thought talking to you might be more important.”

“Yes,” Stacker agrees, “but there are supposed to be cameras to make sure you don’t break that curfew, and I need to know if my security here is compromised.”

Yancy slips across the room, soundless, like he’s hovering and not walking, bringing his glow closer. Shrugs one shoulder as he sits on the corner of the desk.  “I didn’t sneak out, I’ve just been waiting in the closet across the hall since a little after dinner.”

Despite himself, Stacker wants to laugh.  “A contingency that’s difficult to protect against.”

“I’m nothing if not resourceful.” Yancy sighs.  “Have you found her yet?”

“I adopted Tokyo’s Daughter after the attack on the city,” he replies.  “Mako Mori.”

“I was wondering who Miss Mori was who you were talking to in Japanese,” Yancy says thoughtfully. “Where is she?”

“Here.”

“Can I—?”

“It’s the middle of the night, Mr. Becket.  No. You cannot.”  Yancy shrugs, as if he’s not put off by that at all, and smiles again.  Stacker wonders if he usually grins so often, or if this is just his reaction to meeting others of his kind.  “Has your brother died yet?”

“Does he look dead?” Yancy asks idly, and Stacker grits his teeth and levels him with a look he knows can melt metal.

“Don’t play games, Mr. Becket.”

“He’s had two already. He didn’t die. They’re more glitches than deaths.”  Despite his still-flippant tone, his face is very serious about this.  Stacker suspects, from their files and from this, that he’s attached to his brother personally.  And, frankly, he cannot blame him without being a hypocrite.  ”I assume Miss Mori has had one.”

“Onibaba.”

“What did you give her?”

“My copilot.” The words taste bitter in his mouth. Tamsin is dying in Hawaii. Soon, she’ll be gone entirely and no one will ever know how much she truly gave but him, and that sits ill with him.

Yancy’s face twitches, then hardens a little.  “Ah.”

He’s become too human, Stacker can tell.  He doesn’t remember that there are more important things at stake than his personal loves, because, probably, he’s never had to give up his personal loves.  “She approved of the decision.”

“So you told her about everything?”

“The Drift told her,” Stacker says shortly, because he doesn’t want to talk about Tamsin anymore. “I suppose you haven’t thought about how you’re going to keep this out of the Drift with your brother.”

Yancy pauses. “Can’t I just—not think about it?”

It’s so obvious he’s never drifted before that it’s almost sweet, except Stacker doesn’t find it sweet at all, he finds it stupid.  “The Drift doesn’t work that way.  You won’t be able to keep it from him without practice.”

“Well, fuck.” Yancy pauses, then seems to settle. “You trusted her—I trust him.”

“Don’t. It’s not for him to know what he’s going to do.”

“Is that a rule?” This time his voice is a challenge, and Stacker doesn’t take challenges from his subordinates unless he asks for them, so he quells the resistance with a small, deliberate lift of his eyebrow.

“It’s my rule. And I believe you’re here to obey my rules, Mr. Becket.”

For a moment, tension passes between them, Yancy staring him dead in the eyes, not backing down, back bristling. The light from his forehead is flaring, shifting around him.  Then, finally, something breaks, and when Yancy speaks again, it’s more desperate than defiant.  “I’m not letting anyone in that Jaeger with him but me.”

“You need to. I’ll arrange for you to ice out.”

“I’m not leaving him here alone,” Yancy says, and now it’s half a snarl that makes Stacker stand up abruptly, drawing himself up to his full height, several inches taller than Yancy.  But even this doesn’t cow the other man.  “I can’t.  I need to protect him.”

“Stand down, Mr. Becket,” he orders sharply.  “Take that chair.” He indicates the one in front of his desk, because this way he knows Yancy isn’t about to start a fight.

Movements jerky with fury, Yancy obeys him without a second thought.  “I’m not leaving him here alone,” he repeats.

Stacker watches his face carefully, sees the shadows of silver in his eyes, flaring there like bursting stars. Sees that this isn’t about his urge as a protector, because he has that urge and it isn’t like this, but rather about his need as an older brother.  “You’re putting what you need above what he needs.”

“I’m not!” Yancy says, starting to stand again, but Stacker stops him with a wave of his hand. “I don’t want him to get hurt.”

“You’re putting your need to feel as if you’re protecting him above his need to be human. You can’t empathize because you’re not.”

“I am.” Now Yancy’s voice is petulant.

He is reminded of nothing so strongly as a child clinging to a favourite toy.

“Then imagine how you would feel if you knew your brother wasn’t really your brother and you’re destined to save the world and ask yourself what that knowledge would do to you.”

Yancy drops his head into his hands after a moment, shoulders trembling—not with tears, he suspects, but with strain.  “I am his brother,” he says finally, quietly, voice calm as he lifts his head.

His eyes are glowing silver.

He has never looked less human.

When he opens his mouth, that glows too, like he’s lit with some inner fire.

“Then think of him and not yourself,” Stacker says, although part of him is leery about the way Yancy is shining, aura casting bright light across the dim room. How his movements have gone fluid and almost unhinged, like his human joints are gone.

“I do,” Yancy says, voice seeming to echo through the space, and the glow starts to subside. “I am, I—”

“Think.”

The silence is long, and Yancy’s eyes fade back to blue as his shoulders drop.  “I can’t do it?”  Stacker studies him, and notices how he looks slightly nauseous, how even the glow on his forehead is beginning to dull.  “What if he needs me and I’m not there?  Would you let Mako—”

“Mako is not going to get into a Jaeger with or without me.”

“What if that’s how it’s supposed to be?”

“Then he’s supposed to be her copilot and not yours.”   He ignores the idea of Mako piloting a Jaeger, because the same protective instinct controlling Yancy controls him, too, if with a softer hand.

(But a decision is made, then and there, as to the fact that she’ll be trained as though she will be getting into a Jaeger.  There’s a red shoe in his desk, wrapped in cloth, that some day he’s going to give back to her.)

Yancy jerks like he’s been struck, and Stacker wonders if he’s always this honest with his emotions, this much of an open book.  “Sir, I can’t just—there has to be some way I could keep it from him in the Drift.”

“You’re not good enough with the Drift to do it without carryover,” Stacker tells him. “And those Drifts aren’t strong. You risk him more by doing it than you do by letting him go out without you.”

“He won’t go out without me,” Yancy says softly.  “That’s my fault, I know, but—I don’t think he will.”

He seems to have given up; his voice is defeated.

“Then he needs to be convinced, somehow.”

Yancy’s head comes up again, back straightening, jaw set in a rebellious square.  “—I’m going to try something.  If I don’t tell you it didn’t work, tomorrow, then leave me in the program. If I do, then we can talk about icing me out.”

He stands, and Stacker yanks him back by his shoulder.  “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to see the Creator.” Yancy’s pupils are glowing again.

“That’s not possible, unless you plan to kill your brother.”

“Tricks of the trade, sir,” Yancy says, insolent, and disappears out the door before Stacker can take him to task for it.  “I’m going to get some sleep. If I don’t know you in the morning, try not to remind me.”

He has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but the next morning, Yancy doesn’t spare him a second glance when he walks through the mess hall, like he doesn’t notice him there. When he tries to pull him aside by the collar, the first chance he gets, and ask him what the hell he was thinking, Yancy flinches, hands coming up like he’s going to hit him to get free if he has to.  “What did you do?” he asks, harsh, one hand batting away Yancy’s fists.

“What do you mean, what did I do?” Yancy asks, voice cracking lightly.  He’s only twenty, Stacker reminds himself, not quite out of the stage where his voice breaks under stress.  “Marshal Pentecost, sir, I don’t know what you’re—”

“You said you went to go see Them.”

“Who the fuck are they supposed to be?”  Yancy claps a hand over his own mouth.  “I mean, sorry, sir, just—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Stacker lets him go, stepping back.

He doesn’t know?

If I don’t know you in the morning, try not to remind me.

That doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense, and he dislikes that.

“About your business, Cadet,” he says, and walks away, leaving Yancy against the wall, looking after him like he’s gone insane.

“Are you all right, sir?”

He doesn’t dignify that with a response.

Yancy Becket’s soft heart is going to ruin everything.

For weeks after that he tries to get in touch with the Creator, but Yancy seems to genuinely not remember how he did it, or, in fact, who he is, who either of them are. Who Raleigh is, even, other than his little brother.  Nothing works. He can’t ask.

He has to fly blind, but he’s always been good at that.

Yancy Becket dies off the Anchorage Miracle Mile, and Stacker Pentecost is standing behind the microphone listening to his brother scream.

And scream.

And scream.

When they bring him back to the Shatterdome, barely lucid, he’s still crying for his brother. Yancy.  Yancy.  Yancy. His gold light is flickering, but it doesn’t go out.  When Stacker goes in to see him, he’s wreathed in silver, too, and he stares for a moment.

“Yancy?” he asks, finally, not sure whether Raleigh can even hear him; he’s so deep in his own head he hadn’t even been able to produce his own name when they’d tried to assess his condition.

“Yancy?” Raleigh repeats, voice cracking.

The light moves, and Yancy Becket appears, vague and pale and barely-there, standing next to his brother’s bed.

Raleigh starts crying again, silently, choking on sobs, when their lights are no longer touching, and Yancy looks like he takes it like a knife to the gut.

“It was his third glitch,” he says helplessly.  “He wasn’t supposed to need me after this; I didn’t have anything else to give—fuck, I can’t—help him, please, he can’t see me.  He can hear me sometimes, but it doesn’t help, it just makes him cry again, I can’t—”

Stacker closes his eyes, blocking out their twin misery for a moment to clear his head.

“Raleigh,” he says, but Raleigh just looks through him.

Yancy vanishes again, and his light settles over Raleigh once more.

There’s a moment of quiet, where Raleigh doesn’t even breathe, and then he says, “Yancy, Yancy,” again, and his eyes squeeze shut, tears leaking down his cheeks, staring into the ceiling like Stacker isn’t even there.

Taking another look at the pair of them, Stacker turns on his heel and walks out.

He will never do this to Mako.

Chapter Text

The Wall of Life near Eureka, California, will look on one side out over Humbolt Bay, and on the other into the Pacific Ocean, and Raleigh Becket arrives on the line up from the completed section near San Francisco on a cold day, with the sea wind blowing in off the unassuming Pacific.

Doesn’t look like there are monsters in it.  Just looks like an ocean.  He thinks of it as the Atlantic and that helps.

When he checks in, the foreman looks at his ID card and squints at him.

He’s used to this.

He stares dead into his eyes and challenges him to say anything.

The name on the card isn’t his, it’s his brother’s first name and his own middle name. Not like it matters, since no one remembers names on the Wall.  Everyone moves from place to place too fast.  People die too often.  The Wall is as much of a sham as the Jaeger program ever was; tossed up as quick and dirty as possible, its workers are drifters and the formerly-homeless and people with court-ordered community service.  They’re called by number as often as anyone ever tries to call them by their names.

The foreman hands him back his card and sends him on his way, and he doesn’t see the silver light enveloping the hand that palms him the pamphlet outlining his work detail and schedule.

He doesn’t look like Raleigh Becket, Gipsy Danger’s 02.  Not anymore.

There’s dirt on his face where Yancy never would have let it stay for long, stubble creeping along his jaw where he wasn’t careful shaving, always quick about it because he doesn’t trust himself around razors anymore.

(Because he thinks about it. All the time.  Stepping in front of one of the backhoes that circles the base of the Wall as it’s erected.  Failing to dodge a beam when it swings down.  Grabbing an electrical wire instead of a steel cable.  All those little ways the workers on the Wall just die, sometimes. Accidents.  Simple construction stuff.  Somehow, he never works top of the Wall, never gets handed that shift, or he’d have thought about throwing himself off it, too.

Every time he thinks about it he thinks of Yancy, and that almost makes it worse, but at the same time, it keeps him from ever doing it. He thinks of Yancy after Mom’s funeral, squaring his shoulders and biting the bullet and taking care of him, and he’s pretty fucking sure that if he could see all the ways Raleigh thinks about dying, he’d punch him and say Don’t you fucking dare throw everything away.

So he doesn’t do it.

Because Yancy didn’t do it. Would never condone him doing it.

Even though he wants to.

God, he wants to.)

His shoulders have broadened, frame filling out in hard muscle instead of the more well-rounded combat strength of a Jaeger pilot.  He’s substantially stronger up top from lots of heavy lifting.  He wears sweaters to disguise his frame and always, always keeps them on, even when it’s warm out, because his scars are recognizable as things gotten from Jaegers, and it’s easy enough to recognize him if you’re looking for Raleigh Becket, Gipsy’s left pilot.  Keeps his helmet dropped low over his eyes whenever he can. He stopped styling his hair a long time ago, just lets it get fucked up and doesn’t care.

He used to dream about Yancy, about just sitting with him in a room and talking, like he was alive again, but he hated those fucking dreams, because they were too normal and waking back up into a world where Yancy is dead was almost enough to break him. He told Yancy that in one of the dreams and they stopped, and now he misses them.

Because it’s not like he doesn’t still dream about his brother, the dreams just aren’t nice.

They’re about Knifehead, mostly, every night, and he’s learned how to wake up from them without screaming or crying or making any noise or commotion, because he sleeps in a room with seven other guys who don’t need to know anything about how he fucked up and got his brother killed.

He carries all their pictures with him.

His brother’s clothes.

His name.

It’s a little masochistic, but it’s all he knows how to do, keep rubbing salt in the wounds. He deserves it, he thinks. Deserves to remember.

(But he still thinks about dying to get away from how much it hurts.

Yancy would be angry, though. So he doesn’t.)

The first week he’s in Eureka, some guy gets blown off the top of the Wall in the wind and dies on impact with the ground, and the foreman offers up his shift, top of the Wall, and Raleigh, who is having a shit day because one of his roommates has picked today to try and make friends with him and keeps calling him Yancy, raises his hand for the position, just to get off the ground and away from the guy.

Yancy was always the outgoing one.

On the top of the Wall, it’s cold, but he barely feels it after a while.

He’s felt colder.

There’s breeze in his hair, which has both lightened from all the sun he’s been getting and darkened with the grit of construction and sweat, and for a few minutes, it’s pleasant, with the sun on his back and the wind cutting through his clothes keeping him in the moment.  He isn’t happy. Hasn’t been happy for a long time. But the whistle of the California sea wind drowns out the noises of shouts and construction, and it’s peaceful.

He lets himself get lost in his work for a few hours.

Allows himself that time without being in his head.

When he comes to, there’s a guy standing on the platform below him, hand on his shoulder, and he blinks, raising his head.  “Break,” the guy yells over the wind.  “We’re heading down.”

“Yeah,” he says, quietly, knowing he’s inaudible, and locks down his tools, stands up to turn around and dismount, finding himself looking out at the ocean.

For a moment it’s like looking through Gipsy’s eyes.

He shuts his, tight, and feels that urge again.  He’d thought it wasn’t going to happen today, maybe, but he guesses that’s too much to ask for. For what seems like forever to him but is only a few seconds, he stares across the water.

His lungs don’t move in him.

His heart doesn’t beat.

The cockpit is around him again.

It’s like an out of body experience, like he’s watching himself from a long ways away, and with everything he has he wants to scream Yancy’s name like he’d done the long walk back to shore alone in the saddle.  Wants to jump.

No, not jump.

Just—step.

Sway off the edge.

For a moment it feels so easy that his eyes slip shut and he almost doesn’t notice himself tipping. Everything is settled, he’s still riding that feeling of peace.  Just wants to let go and never have another nightmare about his brother dying again. See if being dead fixes being alone.

For a moment he thinks it will.

For a moment he feels like he’s falling asleep.

It’s been so long.

Then there’s a hand on the back of his collar, yanking him backwards, and he’s hitting the platform a few feet below the beam hard, all the air in his body leaving him in a hard rush, a wounded noise torn from his throat as his left arm jerks and clenches with the pain and his head hits the boards.

“Holy shit, man,” someone says, “You almost fell.”

“Don’t you ever fucking do that again,” someone else says, and it sounds like Yancy.   “Do you hear me, Raleigh?”

“Dude, lay off him. You okay—Raleigh? Is that his name?” There’s a new set of hands on his arm, helping him sit upright.

Raleigh sits up, but he’s dizzy.

There are hands in his pockets, and he’s shaking his head.  “His card says his name’s Yancy,” the first voice says.

He finally opens his eyes, and Yancy isn’t there.

Of course he isn’t there.

And Raleigh’s not dead, either.

He stares at the Wall as the platform descends, unable to form words.  “I think he has a concussion,” the second voice says, sounding concerned, and again it sounds almost like Yancy’s—but no, it’s too high. It’s too sharp. He focuses on the differences to keep himself sane.  There’s a face in front of his, now.  “Hey. Kid.  How many fingers’m I holding up?”

“Three,” Raleigh tells him, woodenly.  “And I’m not a kid.”

“We should take him to the doctor anyway,” the first guy says.  “Why’d you have to yank him back so hard, Jack?”

“I didn’t,” the second guy protests, and Raleigh swears his eyes were lighter before now, greyish, as he’s blinking them confused, but now they’re brown.

“We all saw you, man,” the third guy says slowly.

Jack pauses, brow furrowing like he’s trying to remember.  “Yeah—guess I did.  I dunno, I just saw the breeze push him forwards or something, it must have been gut reaction or some shit.”

“Wasn’t the breeze,” one of the other two says, and Raleigh closes his eyes again, knowing one of them, at least, knows why he can’t be allowed to have pain medication or razors or high places or cars.

“Of course it was the breeze,” Jack scoffs.  “What else would it be?”

Raleigh opens his eyes and stares at the Wall and wants to be dead.  Wonders if they’re still up high enough.

Spends the night in the shoddy little infirmary, having his condition monitored.

Staring at the ceiling in the dark.

He sees Yancy in his dreams, but this time his brother doesn’t die, just punches Raleigh dead in the face, which doesn’t hurt, in the dream, and then drags him up off the ground, eyes sparking.  “Don’t you ever fucking do that again,” he snarls.  “Don’t you dare, Raleigh.”

“’m sorry,” Raleigh apologizes, stumbling over his words, and god, he’s so tired and Yancy doesn’t understand.  “’m so sorry, Yance.”

“Don’t even think about it again,” Yancy snaps at him, and shakes him by the collar, and Raleigh wonders if he could feel it in real life if he tried hard enough.  “Promise me, Raleigh.”

“I promise,” Raleigh says weakly, and doesn’t mean it.  “Yancy, please, you don’t—”

“I didn’t give up everything so you could throw it away,” his brother tells him, but his anger is fading. Raleigh can tell, because he’s making this all up in his head and his brother would never be mad at him for long, not for this, anyway.  Yancy never was any good at staying mad at him.  When he speaks again, his voice is quieter.  “Raleigh, listen to me.  You gotta stay alive, kid, okay?”

“I don’t want to,” Raleigh whispers.  “Yancy, I don’t want to.”

“Do it for me,” Yancy orders him, but he’s pulling Raleigh forwards like he’s going to hug him. “Okay?  You know I wouldn’t want you dead.  Call Jaz.  Get her to come get you.  Something. Don’t fucking do this again, you’re not supposed to die.”

“How do you know,” Raleigh asks him, because he thinks he was supposed to die years ago, in the cockpit, and Yancy’s body passes right through his as he starts waking up.

“Think of me as your guardian angel, kiddo,” his brother says, voice fading, and there might be some black humour in it, but Raleigh is probably imagining that.

He swears a pair of wings sprout from Yancy’s back before he’s awake.

Then he’s alone in the dark again.

And Yancy’s dead.

And he isn’t.

When Stacker gets into his office, exhausted and with a headache he swears is the worst he’s ever had, the same way he swears, privately, all his headaches are, he wants nothing more than to just finish his paperwork and then go to sleep, but of course that isn’t going to happen.

Yancy Becket is standing in his office.

Just as dead as ever, but standing there.

Stacker wonders if this will happen to him, too, when the cancer eventually takes him.

The boy is pacing, back and forth, movements jerky as if he’s forgotten how to move his body, and through his silvery shape Stacker can see the window behind him. He eases the door shut behind him, and Yancy’s head comes up.  “Where have you been, Mr. Becket?”

“With Raleigh,” Yancy says. “Where else?”

“We can’t find him,” Stacker informs him.  “So you’ll have to be more specific.”

“He’s in Eureka, California right now.  Or he was when I was there. I’ve been waiting for you to come back to the Icebox for two weeks now.”

He marks down Raleigh’s location in his mind, careful of it.  “If you need me again, the next time I plan to be here after this is April the fourteenth. Now, what is it?”

“He almost died three weeks ago,” Yancy tells him, voice brittle. “Working the Wall of Life. I pulled him back from falling off the edge.”

Stacker’s eyes narrow. “You can—?”

“I can step inside of people. For a while.  I used someone else’s hands.  That’s not important.”

It is. It’s extremely important. But he supposes he isn’t going to get the full story on it.  “Then tell me what is.”

“He wasn’t supposed to need me,” Yancy breathes.  “He was supposed to have three deaths and he had them.  Once when he was nine, once when he was sixteen, once at Knifehead. Twenty-one.  He shouldn’t have had this one.”

“What did you sacrifice for him to live?”

“I didn’t,” Yancy says. “That’s the thing. It’s like it didn’t even happen.”

“Maybe, since you’re—” He gestures, vaguely, at the translucent outline of Yancy’s body.  “—it counted towards the man you ‘stepped into’, and not to you.”

“No,” Yancy says. “It was me.  Not him.  It wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“All things must be equal.”

“They’re not equal now,” Yancy snaps.  “He shouldn’t have died.”

“He didn’t,” Stacker points out.  “You saved him. And speaking of which, you have some things to explain to me, Mr. Becket.”

“I shouldn’t have been able to,” Yancy says, and vanishes into a cloud of silver again.

“Yancy,” Stacker calls him to heel, voice harsh.  “Explanations.”

“What is there left to explain?” Yancy asks, coalescing back out of the dust.

“Start with how you talk to the Creator.”

“I gave up an hour every night of my time for Raleigh’s second death.  She took me to visit her.  Always made me forget it after so I couldn’t do taxes in my head or think about his English essays or stuff for work, generally be productive during the hour, so I didn’t remember anything that ever happened during it, but I knew it was coming every night.”

Not something he can replicate, then.  “And what did you ask for the first night we spoke, if you remember that now?”

“I told her to take my memories of all of this in exchange for this,” Yancy says, gesturing at himself the same way Stacker had a few minutes ago.  “She told me I’d need my life later, so I knew I’d be giving it up at some point, and I wanted to be able to see him after.  And drift with him before.”

“And a damn good thing you did,” Stacker tells him, because Yancy’s voice is starting to sound miserable and mechanical both.  “But not a very practical idea.”

“I didn’t need to remember what he was to want to keep him safe, Marshal,” Yancy says softly. “I was his brother, that was all I needed.  How’s Mako?”

“No more deaths,” Stacker says.  “She’s twenty. Working on Gipsy Danger.”

“Resurrecting the old girl, huh?” Yancy says, and it wasn’t as if he ever had much interaction with the boy while he was a Ranger, but he always seemed brighter than he seems now; it’s as if he’s fading.

“That’s the idea.”

“Who are you putting in the cockpit?”

“It’s uncertain. All the Mark III pilots are dead. Possibly two rookies, but the idea doesn’t tempt me.”

“Raleigh’s not dead.”

“I am not putting someone three years out of training into one of my Jaegers,” Stacker tells him shortly. “Prophecy clearly does not conform to human variability.”

“How do you know that?”

“You brother just escaped his fourth death.  If it did it never would have happened.”

Yancy breathes out through his teeth, long and slow—measured—and that’s when Stacker realizes that otherwise, he isn’t breathing.  “It shouldn’t have happened.”

“But it did.”

“We’re going in circles,” Yancy says, and his voice is tired, and it sounds old, and Stacker abruptly wonders if Yancy Becket had been the man he was supposed to be and not the thing that fell from the sky, if he would still be dead.  If he would sound happier than he does now.

There’s no way of knowing and it’s best not to dwell.

But Yancy Becket died when he was twenty-four.

This war is stealing youth from children left and right.

And that’s why it needs to end.

That’s why he’s going to end it.

“If he’s working the Wall,” he says finally, “he’s moving.  And clearly, he’s not going by his name, or we would have turned it up when we searched for him after he left.  So tell me, Yancy, how do I find your brother?”

“I don’t think he wants to be found,” Yancy replies, after a moment.

“You asked me after Knifehead,” Stacker reminds him, sliding his pen out of his pocket and opening a notepad, “To help him.  I can’t do that if I don’t know where he is.”

Yancy pauses, and capitulates, image shuddering like he forgets to maintain it. “Give me a number I can call you at and I’ll take someone’s phone whenever we move and tell you where we are.” Stacker starts to write the number down on the paper, but Yancy’s glowing hand swings out and passes through the pen, the paper, the desk.  Through his hand, too, and it feels like he’s put it in icewater for a moment. “Can’t carry a paper, sir. I’ll memorize it.”

“It’s 201-507-8443.”

“Two billion, fifteen million, seventy-eight thousand, four hundred and forty-three,” Yancy says easily, and smiles for a moment, somehow, just like he used to. “Still got it. Two billion, fifteen million, seventy-eight thousand, four hundred and forty-three.”  Then his face turns serious again.  “Don’t bring him back unless you mean it.”

“Unless I mean it.” He endeavours to keep his voice as flat as possible, the inflection that lets the mouthy little cadets know they’ve overstepped, but what can he do to a man he can’t even touch?

“Yeah.” Yancy seems to know he’s invincible, in a way.  “Unless you really fucking mean it.  Leaving tore him up, don’t make him do it again.”

“Leaving had nothing to do with how he is or isn’t feeling at the moment.”

This makes Yancy flinch, finally, but then his face hardens.  “I get it.  I fucked up. But you’re going to need him, fucked up or not, so you better suck it up and be real damn careful not to fuck him up any further.”

They’re the sort of words that would generally lead to a verbal evisceration so brutal someone winds up crying.

But Yancy disappears into the silver, and sinks through the floor.

“Coward,” is all Stacker manages to get out before he’s gone, taking deep breaths to calm his anger.

He gets the sense that if Yancy hears, he doesn’t care.

He gets a call six days later from a woman with a Spanish accent.  All she says is Victoria.  In British Columbia.  He’s going by my name.

Then the line goes dead.

The next time he sees Yancy, it’s the day after a phone call, when he shows up at the Wall where Yancy told him they’d be—it’s dirty, and loud, and disgusting—and the silver practically encasing Raleigh is the only reason he recognizes him. “Mr. Becket,” he says, just after Raleigh looks up like something is guiding him.

The gold on his forehead is barely there.

He looks like he’s aged fifteen years in the space of five.

Negligent, he almost accuses Yancy, but Raleigh is right there, and besides, Yancy doesn’t take well to being accused of taking care of his brother properly, he knows that from trial and error over the past year and a half. “Marshal.  Looking sharp.”

He always is, when he has to do things like make an impression.  “It’s been a long time.”

“Five years, four months.”

He knows his eyes are drawn to Yancy’s features, forming from the silver, but Yancy isn’t looking at him; he’s deliberately looking away.  “Can I have a word?”

“Step into my office,” Raleigh says, and makes a stab at a smile.

Yancy trails behind them as they move.  “You’re serious, then,” he finally says, quietly, like he’s trying to make sure Raleigh can’t hear him. Stacker flicks his eyes over at him, hoping his question is implicit.  Evidently, it is.  “He can hear me sometimes. I try not to talk much when he’s around. I don’t know how it works.”

“It took me a while to find you,” Stacker lies to Raleigh, in hopes of making the silence sound less obvious.  He feels somehow that the third person present is unmistakable.

“No, it didn’t,” Yancy whispers, and Raleigh twitches, slightly, frowning a moment before he starts speaking again.

“Yeah, my position travels with the wall.  Chasing shifts to make a living.  What do you want?” Suddenly he seems far more eager to get the conversation over with than he had previously been, and it takes all of Stacker’s self-control not to look at Yancy and see if he’s doing anything to influence it, somehow.

“I've spent the last six months activating everything I can get my hands on. There's an old Jaeger, Mark III.  You may know it. It needs a pilot.”

Yancy steps to stand over Raleigh’s shoulder and looks dead into his eyes.  The look on his face could not be more plain if he had written what it meant on his chest: Tread carefully.

And sure enough, Raleigh’s laugh is somewhat hollow.  “I’m guessing I wasn’t your first choice.”

Yancy is still staring.

It would be disconcerting, if Stacker Pentecost ever allowed anything to disconcert him. “You were my first choice. All the other Mark III. pilots are dead.”

Both of their faces change, Raleigh’s from false amusement to blankness, and Yancy’s from warning to frustration.  He shakes his head, for a moment almost fading to a silver blur.  “That’s not what he wants to hear,” he mouths, clear as day.

“Look, I can’t have anyone else in my head again.  I’m done,” Raleigh says, and now his older brother, behind him, is flinching, is walking away from him, stiff-shouldered, and towards Stacker, looking anywhere but either of them.

He disappears as he passes Stacker’s shoulder.

“I was still connected to my brother when he died.  I can’t go through that again.  ‘m sorry.” And then he starts to walk off too, in the other direction from Yancy.

When Stacker turns around, Yancy is nowhere to be found, so he improvises, grasping at straws.

No—at pieces of information.

Yancy, so careful around his brother, no longer happy to be standing at his shoulder, but still hovering. Raleigh quiet and blank-faced, refusing his Jaeger, flinching at his brother’s voice and walking away. The two of them chasing shifts down the wall when Raleigh at least is still good for so much more.

It boils down to this: subsistence. Bare subsistence, uncomfortable subsistence. “Haven’t you heard, Mr. Becket?” he starts, unsure of where he’s going to finish until he does. “The world is coming to an end.”

Raleigh Becket doesn’t want to be where he is.

Possibly he doesn’t want to be anywhere.

“Where would you rather die? Here, or in a Jaeger?”

Yancy flares to life in front of him, blazing, furious, but his brother turns around and steps through him like he isn’t there, eyes fixed on Stacker’s face.  No anger in them at all.

Something like hope, for a moment.

“Well, when you put it like that.”

Chapter Text

Since the day his mother died, Chuck has been able to see things he doesn’t think he ought to be able to see. He’s smart enough, though, even at eleven, not to mention it to the therapist.

The thing is, he thinks it’s his mother he’s seeing.

And, like, it’s not that he can see her face or anything, and it’s not like she ever talks to him, but he doesn’t know who else it could be.

He trusts his mind enough not to play tricks on him: he knows the shimmer in the corners of his eyes is real, he knows he’s not imagining the icy fingers he thinks he can sometimes feel on his back, he is certain that sometimes people who shouldn’t have brown eyes do.

Angela’s eyes weren’t brown.

But still, it’s weird.

The reason he’s so sure he’s not seeing things is that he’s pretty sure his father and his uncle can see her, too. Yeah, it’s the flick of Herc’s eyes towards her those first few months every time she’s there, the barely-visible wrinkle in his brow, the way Scott never looks at her at all and laughs too loudly whenever she’s in the room.

He’s not going crazy.

Or if he is, anyway, they all are.

He doesn’t know it’s her. Of course he doesn’t. But who else, he wonders? Who else would possibly have come back for them?

She’s not even shaped like a person, just a sort of twinkle in the side of his vision, red-brown-bronze, and it’s like she’s following them.

Following Scott, particularly, he thinks, because that’s with whom she always seems to appear, and Scott’s the only one of the three of them who doesn’t get over her presence. Herc eventually seems to stop noticing her, stops reacting to her presence.  Chuck has never found it particularly disturbing, more inclined to be comforted.

But more and more, Scott gets that sort of haunted look on his face, starts drinking heavily, smoking every second he’s not drifting, and all his laughter is too sharp, high and false.

By the time Chuck is fourteen, his uncle is twitchy and thin, and his temper flares like an active volcano, unpredictably and frequently, and the Drift between him and Herc is shaky and unreliable, but the Sydney Shatterdome keeps running Lucky anyway, because they’re too good to lose.  He fucks his way through half the city and then keeps going, which Chuck thinks probably he’s not supposed to know, but it’s so obvious he’s not sure why his dad bothers putting him in a separate room from the two of them.

And when he’s fifteen, Herc and Scott go into Lucky as brothers and come out brawling.

He doesn’t know what it is that snaps, but Scott is a mess for the few days he’s at the ‘dome before he’s summarily tried and discharged, at least from what he can glimpse of him past Herc’s ever-present shoulders in his fucking way, which he’s not tall enough yet to see over without getting on his toes.

Angela gets brighter when Scott leaves, and now she’s following his father.

It’s sort of like she envelops him, because the light isn’t at the edges of his vision anymore, but burning around Herc, like she’s looking over his shoulder all the time. And Chuck spends his six months at the Academy wondering why even she doesn’t pick him, even though he knows it’s ridiculous to be upset about a ghost not favouring him.

If she is a ghost.

He doesn’t know what she is, exactly, but that’s what he thinks of her as.

Sometimes, he wants to talk to her, but she’s never alone with him, she’s always with Herc, and he suspects that, even if Herc can still see her, he wouldn’t appreciate Chuck speaking to her.

Acknowledging that she’s there.

In his head, she walks the line between real and unreal: just the right side of real for him to know he’s not crazy, just the wrong side of real for him to be able to talk to her without feeling crazy.

Fighting with Herc puts them both in her cloud, like they merge into one person for a time that always seems too short.  And, like, maybe it’s fucked up that he’s pretty sure his dead mother is following his dad around and that he hits his dad to get her to follow him too, but Chuck’s known he was fucked up since he was a hell of a lot younger than sixteen. And it’s not like there isn’t worse shit in the world.  It’s not like he’s hurting anyone, he’s just sixteen and he misses his mother.

When they’re strapping into the conn-pod simulator for the first time and Chuck’s jittery with excitement and apprehension and the whole damn space is glittering with copper, Herc turns to him and says, “You know what not to do,” instead of giving him any actual advice, the way Chuck almost expected him to do, for a minute.

But fuck him, he doesn’t need any advice.

Except, they go into the Drift and Chuck chases every RABIT he can get his hands on, even the ones he doesn’t want to see.

The way every fucking rookie who’s ever gotten into the Drift has.

Herc keeps pulling him back, with all the tired resignation of extreme experience, but that’s no way to drift, and they barely make seventy percent brainwave coincidence before they get cut out of the stream.  He’s not even listening to LOCCENT enough to know it’s coming before it does, and he drops from the harness like his bones have gone soft.

The whole pod is filled, still, with copper light.

It’s so bright now he can’t help but squint against it.  And he can see Herc squinting too.

“You can see it,” he says as he scrambles up, feeling disjointed and nauseous, with a massive fucking headache like his brain has swollen in his skull, and it comes out more of a croak.

“See what,” Herc lies, and he fucking knows it’s a lie because he can feel it, and besides, he saw her in the Drift, and not all those memories can be him.

Herc doesn’t think of her as Angela, though.

Herc thinks of her as It.

It’s another reason to hate him, as far as Chuck’s concerned, and he knows it’s ridiculous. Of course he knows it’s ridiculous. He knows most of the reasons he thinks of for hating Herc are ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop him from being angry about them; he can’t control that.

And yeah, maybe this is a little more ridiculous than some.

“You can see her, old man,” he says, and as the techs enter the room to help them out of the drivesuits and start debriefing them, he snaps his mouth shut, because he’s wanted this his whole fucking life that he can remember, or since his mother died, anyway, and he’s not throwing it away because someone who doesn’t even fucking know him might think he was crazy.

He knows if he was Herc would turn him in.

But he’s not.

He’s not.

His father doesn’t reply.

But he doesn’t hide the bronze from him in the Drift, either.  Doesn’t even try.  The only thing he ever hides is Scott.

Chuck hates Scott a little, too, because he got everything first.

And he keeps seeing his mother’s ghost, who is always with Herc, up until they day Otachi and Leatherback hit Hong Kong.

The truth is, when it comes down to it, Chuck can protect himself.  And if Herc thought he needed saving, he’d never have let the boy into the saddle.

Revenge is a common motivator for Jaeger pilots.  There are three main ones: vengeance, duty, and glory, and Chuck is all in the first two. It’s dangerous work, piloting, and Angela would kill him if she knew he’d let her boy into the cockpit, but the way he sees it, sixteen was plenty old enough for Chuck to make that call. He doesn’t need daddy to protect him. If he’s old enough to pass through the Academy—to graduate top of his class at the Academy—well, then, he’s old enough to kill a fucking kaiju.

And the boy’s good at it.

He’s better than Scott was, nonwithstanding Scott’s massive fucking breakdown. Probably he’d be better than Herc is, but he doesn’t have near the same sort of practice in the Drift.

He was incompatible with every person they tried to pair him up with until Herc came along, needing a new copilot.

He thinks, before they start drifting, that maybe that will fix some of the shit between them, but he knows after the first time he comes out of the pod with Chuck stumbling after him that that’s naïve.  His son chases RABITs like it’s going out of style, the same way every rookie does, and the things he sees don’t really endear his father to him.

Funny, though, that Chuck sees that glow too.

He’d thought it was just him and Scott, because Chuck never seemed to follow it with his eyes the way he was always tempted to, but no, it’s there.  It’s ringing Herc in his vision the same way Herc can see it ringing himself, when he looks in the mirror.

Whenever they fight, whenever they get into the conn-pod, it spreads.  Like a shield, or a blanket.

Scott, he knows, always thought of it as Angela.

Really freaked his brother out.

Chuck thinks of it as Angela, too, except he’s pissed that Herc doesn’t.  But Herc, he doesn’t believe in ghosts.  Doesn’t believe in spirits or angels and he’s ambivalent on God. He believes in what’s right here, and what’s right here is a little bit of bronze light.

Took it a while to show up, after Angela’s death, too.  Maybe he’d be more superstitious if it had been instantaneous.  Maybe he’d be more superstitious if it followed Chuck around instead of Scott, because it makes no fucking sense that that’s what Angie would do.

So yeah, it’s just it.

Until the night Otachi and Leatherback hit Hong Kong.

He and his boy watch Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon be torn apart, helpless, and they’re dead in the water, thrown out of the Drift, alone in the conn-pod in the January cold, which feels like it somehow creeps into Striker’s pod, through the lining of their drivesuits, even though that’s impossible.

It’s always cold in the Drift, for him.

It was for Scott, too. For Chuck.  But the cold usually goes away when they’re out of it, and now it’s still here, and over what’s left of their poor ghost Drift, he can feel Chuck thinking that if the pod were open, the copper light in here could replace all the city lights that Otachi extinguished.

But more than that, he’s panicking.

And if there is one thing that Herc has never allowed to happen to his boy, it’s that.   He wasn’t always the best father and he knows that, wasn’t always around, hasn’t been as leery as he should have been about throwing his son into danger.  He’s been a shit father, really, in all the ways he always promised himself he wouldn’t be, but that’s that, it is what it is.  But if there is one thing he has always, always done for Chuck, it is make sure they don’t get here: helpless and alone in the bay of Hong Kong with a city of people who have no one to save them.

Letting him get in the conn-pod is one thing.

This is a whole ‘nother ball game.

So he unstraps, even though his son screams at him not to do it, and when the Jaeger rocks, he feels his arm snap against her walls, hears himself cry out rather than feels the sound torn from his throat.  Grabs the flare guns.

Gives Chuck an option, and knows there isn’t really an option for Chuck here.

“Do something really stupid.”

Stacker would kick his ass.

He can’t hold the gun proper, because his fucking good arm’s gone and got fucking broken, can’t steady his hand to squeeze off a good shot because he doesn’t want to mess his arm up any more than it already is, but at least he hits the fucking thing. Chuck, though, Chuck nails it right in the fucking eye, and he wants to punch him in the shoulder and tell him good one, for a minute, before he remembers there’s no way on earth his son would allow that.

“I think we just pissed it off!”

And yeah, he’s right about that. But having that gun in his hand has calmed Chuck’s fear, and he’s staring at the massive face in front of him in the dark like it’s a wall or a tank, not like it’s something to be scared of.

And it’s something, something until Gipsy gets here or the PPDC nukes them all to kill the fucker.

It’s not until they’re being airlifted back to the ‘dome, the emergency medic strapping his arm to his chest, taping it all up nice and pretty to go to the doctor with, that he realizes the light’s gone.  It’s left him, even though for the five years since Scott’s dismissal, it’s been with him.

And it’s not like he feels bereft, but he doesn’t know what’s going on.

Maybe he’s going crazy; although he discarded that thought years ago when he figured out Scott could see it too.  Maybe it’s a mass delusion, who fucking knows.  Maybe it’s gone for good, now that he’s out of commission—maybe Chuck and Scott were right and it was Angela and now that her boy’s short a copilot and he’s down for the count she doesn’t need to hover.

No, he tells himself, grunting as they set the bone, it’s not Angie.

Angie is dead.

“Fucking hell, old man,” Chuck says from behind him, the first words he’s spoken to his father since they were pulled off Striker’s head.  “You sure know how to cock up a fight, don’t you?”

Ordinarily, he’d say something back, tonight, he knows Chuck is just blustering.

That’s what he does, when he knows he’s been scared.

Instead he turns around, and there it is.

The light.

He almost says, fuck, can you see that? to the man now putting his arm in a sling, because it’s as bright as it was in the conn-pod, only much, much more localized now. It’s around Chuck the way it used to—albeit in a much less ostentatious manner—be around Scott, around him.

But it’s so fucking vivid it almost hurts his eyes, lights Chuck’s face up like it’s the sun, turns his eyes bronze and his hair almost gold, makes every freckle lined up on his cheeks visible.

If it weren’t terrifying it would be beautiful.

When Chuck turns, the light flashes and it almost looks like he has wings, for a moment, like the light is throwing halos off of the dog tags that are always swinging around outside his shirt like he’s got something to prove.  Herc cannot, for a moment, imagine that none of the other people in the bird can see it.

But they’re touching down, and he’s gritting his teeth at the jostle of landing, and when he walks out to join Stacker, Stacker’s eyes widen for a moment before he settles back into that poker face he’s so fond of.  Irises fixed firmly in his boy’s direction.

“You saw that, didn’t you?” he asks, hoping Stacker will know he doesn’t mean the fight.

But his friend’s face is blank, supremely so, when he looks back at Herc, although his eyes narrow slightly.  It’s hard to say what he’s talking about when he replies.  “Yes. You and I need to talk after you see the doctor, Hercules.”

“Right,” he acknowledges, and lets himself be led away.

Who else can see the light?

Something about it doesn’t sit well with him.  The way he can almost see it through the wall when Chuck comes in to ask about how his arm is, trying to pretend he’s only asking because he’s worried he won’t be able to drift. The way it’s almost too brilliant to look at, like his boy is on fire.

“She’s gone,” Chuck says, when they’re alone, lips flat.

“It’s not,” he replies, and that’s all he’s got for his son before he leaves to talk to Stacker.

If Chuck can’t see it anymore, more’s the better.

“How’s the arm?” Stacker asks mildly, disguising his examination of Herc by staring him dead in the eyes.

“Hurts like a bitch, but I’ve got more pills in me than gears in a Jaeger.  I’m good and functional otherwise.  What’d you need?”

“A favour.”

Herc’s light is gone, the same way Scott’s was gone after his last Drift, the same way he suspects Angela’s disappeared when she died.  He isn’t sure what that means, except that Chuck, who is now suffused with bronze, must be the third child.  He hasn’t been sure of that for long, but now he recalls that line, that there were intended to be three children, but there were only ever, as far as he knows, two of him and Yancy.

Yancy is here, too, silver light weak and barely-there after he’d run through the city following his brother, as if he still had the capacity to be tired.  But he isn’t talking, and Stacker isn’t going to talk to him while Herc is here.

He needs his credibility about him for this.

“Fire away,” Herc says, waving his good hand with the air of someone with nothing left to lose, although they both know it’s not true.

“I’m going to pilot Striker Eureka with your son, Hercules.”

Yancy looks entirely unsurprised, but Herc blinks a few times before he nods.  Never one for words, that man.  “Can’t be good for the cancer.”

“No,” he says simply. “It’ll kill me. Which brings me to the favour I need from you.”

Herc just nods, silently, waiting, and Yancy pipes up.  “You’re going to have to explain it to him, if you’re going to turn Mako over. If you even can.”

He doesn’t think that’s necessarily true and he’s going to avoid it if possible.  “I need you to take care of Mako for me.”

“’course,” Herc cuts in, waving his hand again.  His face is serious. “You’ve got my kid, Stacker, I’ve got yours.  Would’ve done that any roads.”

Stacker raises an eyebrow. “I know.  But I need to be very clear about this, Hercules. If she’s hurt and I can’t protect her, Pitfall is going to fail, and it needs to succeed.”

Yancy laughs, and it sounds a little hollow.

He’s wondering, probably, the same way Stacker is, if at the end of Pitfall their family will die, if their job saving the world is done.  There’s a nuclear bomb involved, after all.  These things happen.  And if they don’t save the world they’ll be dead anyway.

He can almost taste Yancy’s premature grief in the air, or maybe it’s Herc’s, or maybe it’s his own.

All three of the children won’t make it back from this.

It isn’t possible.

Maybe none of them will.

And Yancy and Herc are both choking on it the same way he is: silently and with unreadable faces. “I get it,” Herc says, slowly, and Stacker knows he doesn’t, really, but that’s best.  It’s best no one knows their destiny, in his opinion; from Yancy Becket’s example he knows it makes a man who isn’t what he should be. The Yancy Becket who was supposed to be was probably not half so viciously protective of his brother. Nor half so dependent on his presence.

“You don’t,” he says shortly. “You’ll be in LOCCENT during the drop. You know where the panel controls are. If I give you a signal—say, the word ‘over’, jettison her pod.  And Mr. Becket’s. Or get Gipsy out of there. Am I understood?”

Now Herc’s brow is creased, but his eyes are still compliant.  “Yes, sir.” And he changes the subject. “You can see Chuck, can’t you?”

Stacker adjusts his tie. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He doesn’t notice, for a moment, Yancy walking behind him until he’s flaring brightly, lighting them both silver. “That,” Herc says, remarkably calm as he points.

Stacker only barely doesn’t turn on Yancy and reprimand him.  The boy oversteps habitually.  “Don’t worry about it, Hercules.”

Behind him, Yancy subsides and then disappears through the floor, silently.

Stacker can feel his eyes glowing in irritation.

Herc doesn’t quite step back, but his jaw does tighten, shoulders tensing until the point at which he winces from the pull on his injured arm.  “How long?”

The man who has become his friend is possessed of admirable courage.  “Since I first met you.  Since before I first met you.  Take care of Mako, Hercules. But for now, I have an assault to plan.”

It’s been a long time since Herc has saluted him outside of formalities.

But he does now, before he walks out the door.

Stacker has always valued his thoughts, but today he values that silence.

Until it's time to make his entrance—Yancy will let him know, he believes, when the proper time is—he breathes slowly, staring at the ceiling, and tries to convince himself of his logic in his head.  He's a little bit like Raleigh Becket, he thinks.  There isn't much left that he can lose except for her.