This was written for the secret santa exchange on AO3. All the thanks to my betas: zempasuchil (who also needs to be credited for the brilliance of the title) and likeappletrees. Remaining mistakes are exclusively mine.
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Water Damage
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Before the PPDC, when Raleigh just turned 18, and Yancy is 21, they have a place in Anchorage. A small, two bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen that has them checking hips when Yancy is reaching over to turn off the stove and Raleigh is trying to steal a bite from the still hot pan.
They never thought of selling it.
They still haven't.
But it is 2020. It's been seven years since the first Kaiju made land, and Knifehead comes through the Breach. Gipsy Danger doesn't stand down when it makes its way to the edge of the miracle mile off Anchorage, and what happens next is what makes even the best, especially the best, drift partners tremble in their drive suits.
The date is February 29th, 2020.
The water is cold and his drive suit is heavy.
Yancy doesn't die, but Raleigh doesn't know that.
.
There are lines burned in broken fragments over his heart, a hand brushing his hair back.
Raleigh, listen to me—
There is a broken sentence burned into the deepest parts of his soul.
.
Raleigh wakes up, too many days later.
They don't tell him anything, just that the Marshal will come by when he is feeling better. He is weak but he tries, tries to get his brother's name out of his chest. Maybe then it will feel substantial, like Yancy Becket was real, that he still is.
Raleigh doesn't feel better for a long time after.
.
"He's awake."
"Thank you."
"He doesn't know."
"And he doesn't need to, Marshal." A pause. "I can't be a Ranger anymore, but Rals can. I'm a liability, but the kid—" He lets out a breath and it sounds awfully like pain and relief all mangled into one firm conviction, "Raleigh is strong, he'll be just fine without me. But there's no way he'll get back in a Jaeger if he knows I'm alive. Bring Gipsy back online, he'll jockey again."
"You're sure?"
"I've been in his head, Marshal. I know the kid." A smile that the no one else can see. "Keep me updated on his progress, I won't be visiting anymore."
"Alright, Becket. Take care of yourself."
"Of course, Marshal."
.
His left arm is busted.
Probably not for good, though he wishes it was. The limited range of motion is awful, but a dead brother is so much worse. He's been told that grieving a loved one is done in steps, one thing at a time, one step in front of the other.
And that is just the start, Gipsy Danger has a nuclear reactor for a heart and he is alone in the drift before Knifehead is finally brought down for good. They alternate him between neural rehabilitation and then physical therapy.
Except his knees are locking and he is dropping into the abyss where the ocean is dark, the floor falling away beneath his feet. The night sky is an endless stretch and those stars he used to see, well, those are gone too.
.
It takes him close to six months before the doctors give him the okay, check off the box that stamps him as fit for duty, pass him off to the Marshal with his papers signed. Raleigh hands them over and looks at the man. What now?
"We can fix her." Pentecost tells him, tentative and slow, like the man never is.
"What do you mean, Marshal?"
"Gipsy Danger."
Raleigh freezes, and the only mangled sound that he manages to let out is a simple, breathy, "no." And it nearly takes his all to swallow down the please that desperately wants to follow.
"You can jockey again." The Marshal holds up the official release forms like he hasn't just handed him those a few minutes ago. "We can find you another—"
"No." Raleigh shakes his head, already standing up. He doesn't think his hands are trembling, and neither is his voice, but his entire body feels like it's ready to revolt, shaken down to its very core. "No, I can't. I can't have anyone else in my head. I felt the neural bridge break when Y—"
A breath.
"I can't do it, Marshal. It will kill me."
It already did is something that sits like a jagged shard of glass in his throat.
"Ranger." The man's voice is steel, Raleigh grounds himself, his heart clenching in a vice and his voice nearly breaking when he swallows. "Yes, sir?"
"I want you to think on it. The PPDC can't afford to lose any more Jaeger pilots like yourself."
Raleigh nods with a jerk of his head. "Permission to be dismissed?"
Marshal Pentecost looks at him, and Raleigh doesn't know what he sees. Maybe a fraction of the man that used to be there. Maybe, not even that.
"Permission granted."
.
The next morning, Raleigh does what all Beckets are good at doing.
He runs.
.
Before the Becket brothers became rock stars, they had a tiny apartment tucked into a corner of Anchorage. And after they fall, well, the apartment is still there.
Raleigh walks up a worn path, and the footsteps already tracked deep in the snow go unnoticed.
(The Marshal's call doesn't come in time. And Yancy can't move the way he used to.)
Raleigh unlocks the door to their old apartment, flicks on the lights and the world seems to fall into an alternate universe lit in fluorescent.
.
"…Yance?"
After the Becket brothers became rock stars, they never imagined they would return. They were going to win this war or, at the very least, die trying. Either way, they never imagined this to happen.
"Raleigh."
He sees Yancy, and he is a ghost.
A fraction of a man that might have been his brother, once.
Raleigh drops his bag, arm seizing up in a sharp pain.
For one long minute, he understands how a drowning man might feel. But then again, maybe Yancy knows exactly how that feels, down to the very last breath that goes out of his lungs.
The Alaskan waters are cold and their drive suits heavy.
"I thought you were dead."
Letting his duffel bag fall to the side, Raleigh's words seem to take the air out of the room.
"Raleigh—" Yancy starts, and this is not a ghost Raleigh is seeing.
.
(During his recovery, Raleigh remembered a dream. He remembered a dream where he is given a second chance, one where Yancy isn't really dead, he doesn't know how. The details were blurry, like the lenses of Yance's camera before he focuses it just right.
This isn't that. The focus is sharp.
This is the realization that the hand, brushing his hair back, is real after all.)
.
The relief that Raleigh should feel is wiped clean by the lie. He thinks he might be trying his hardest to blink back the tears because there is Yancy, worse for wear but alive. He thinks he may be shaking his head and he is almost frantic.
"Six fucking months, Yancy!" And it's apt that he is shouting at a dead man when he has barely spoke more than a sentence to a handful of people for the last half year. "Fuck, I felt you die in my head, we were still connected when you were ripped out of Gipsy! How could you let me think you were dead?"
"…I can't jockey anymore." Yancy doesn't let the reign of silence settle over them, doesn't let it fold into them until they can't seem to breathe. Instead, Yancy shakes his head with the kind of conviction that has Raleigh looking away. "But you can, Rals. You can still save the world."
Raleigh has his fists at his side, and his next words carve out a world of hurt when he finally speaks in a small voice, one that makes him feel like a child all over again.
"You don't get to make that choice for me, Yance."
The pain shoots up and down both his good and bad arm.
"…I am your older brother, Raleigh. I do, I have every right."
He can feel the weight of his older brother's gaze as he turns away, heading for the bedroom door that hasn't been opened in years. He is standing by the entrance, back turned to him, one hand resting on the doorknob. And it feels like they are an ocean apart.
"Then you're wrong, Yance. I'm not that strong."
.
Raleigh opens his eyes to sunlight coming through the windows of a home he long ago abandoned for a metal coffin out at sea. He aches and it reminds him that he is still alive and breathing when his brother is no—
He is up on his feet, heart hammering in his chest, breath catching somewhere in his throat. He wrenches open the door, and nearly trips over his own duffel bag.
Raleigh stills.
And all he can hear in the silence of the house is the rushing of blood through his ears.
YancyYancyYancyYancyYanc—
Raleigh has never had a mantra. Not a prayer or a good luck charm, but his brother's name hasn't stopped being his since he broke through the first wave of anaesthesia.
Standing in the centre of the living room, feeling like he has taken down Knifehead all over again, Raleigh sees the opened bedroom door next to his, sees the dark shadows of another man in a bed that hasn't seen a living body in just as long.
He sees Yancy breathing, and he sinks down to their worn couch that has seen much better days, just like the Becket brothers. The man lets out a soft snore.
And Raleigh can't help but gasp out a wet laugh that may have been a sob.
.
Raleigh comes home.
But the Beckets have changed. Once, they would have never cut each other out of their lives. Once, there were never any secrets between them. Now, the Becket brothers have a rift opened between the two of them. One that seems to be gaping in blood even when the red has long since washed off of the white of their drive suit armours.
.
Yancy comes home.
And he has eyes that don't belong to him. There are no regrets or defiance or even a flicker of defence for his actions. In fact, there is hardly anything at all.
There is a loud bang, a curse cut short, and the sound of metal colliding with metal.
Raleigh sits up on the couch and gives it a few seconds of silence. There is another bang, the tap turning on, a fizzing that sounds a whole lot like water burning at the bottom of a pan. He stands up, and makes his way to the kitchen where his brother is standing there with a knife clenched in both hands.
"What're you doing, Yancy?"
"What does it look like?" He snaps and Raleigh recoils. He doesn't know who is hit by fear first. It may be Yancy, hearing the tone he has taken with his own brother but he deflates just as quickly. "…I'm trying to cook dinner."
"…That looks like it's going well."
Raleigh averts his gaze and opens the fridge door instead.
"I'm your older brother." Yancy breathes out, barely able to contain the urge to muss up his own hair like he used to when the frustration built too high. "I'm supposed to take care of you, you're my responsibility. Look at me now, Raleigh. I can't even hold a knife without my entire body protesting."
Raleigh stands up with two drinks in hand.
Both Becket boys look down at those hands and the exertion it takes for Yancy to hold on.
"Can you hold a beer bottle, or do you need a straw for this?"
Yancy glares at him but takes the bottle, the cool glass shaking just a little before he takes it in both hands. Raleigh pretends he doesn't see a thing and turns to the drawer with the takeout pamphlets.
"Let's just order something and call it a night."
Yancy doesn't say no.
.
What the ocean gives back is not Raleigh's brother.
Yancy is subdued on his good days. There is a kind of distance in the way he carries himself. He no longer does any of the things he used to do, he can't do half of the things he used to do. He is frustrated and he is frayed.
Raleigh doesn't know how to wake him up, just glances away when Yancy is lying on the bed, motionless even when he isn't asleep. What the ocean gives back is a fraction of the man, fractured in places Raleigh can't reach. It's a spiral downward that Raleigh knows he can't follow.
So he takes a job on the Wall.
(Like it's an apology, or a mockery of the salvation they used to be, of some sorts.)
.
Raleigh gets away for most of the day.
Yancy knows exactly what he is doing but he doesn't say anything about how they both know the Wall is nothing but a distraction for the people still forced to live on the Pacific rim. Yancy doesn't say a thing when Raleigh comes home at the end of the day, the cold of Alaska still frozen on the edge of his clothes. He doesn't know what to say until he sees a red ration card peeking out from his brother's bag.
It is there that he draws a line.
The fire comes out in a rush that surprises even him.
"Are you trying to kill yourself?"
Yancy demands when he is standing in front of Raleigh, wrapped in a sweater that has become loose with the way he keeps shedding pounds. He has a finger pointed at the red ration card, eyes burning at the sight of the smears of dirt on his little brother's face. And it pangs.
Raleigh has always been kind, but he can be cruel. And if it gets a rise out of Yancy, all the better. He shrugs off his jacket and says with a bite, "You made that choice for me then, you don't get to do it again."
It is Yancy who looks away first.
Raleigh doesn't back down.
"I felt you die in my head, Yance."
His eyes are trained on the red ration card, and the thin smile that cuts across Yancy's lips is just a fraction short of devastation. He doesn't look at Raleigh but he does finally speak.
"And I saw you get Gipsy back to shore."
.
It's not forgiveness when they give each other wide berths in their home.
But it is a mutual truce when the sound of something breaking in the kitchen has Raleigh coming in to see his brother gripping the counter, shoulders shaking with an all consuming fear. A plate is shattered into splinters around his bare feet and the food burning on the stove.
"My hand slipped." He excuses himself with a shrug of his shoulders that drives out the rest of the tremors from his bones.
It's not forgiveness, but it is understanding when Raleigh doesn't say anything, just reaches over to turn off the stove and takes his brother's arm in hand to get him somewhere where there isn't broken porcelain strewn on the ground.
He has him sitting on the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table as Raleigh brings out the first aid kit from the bathroom. Yancy flinches at the antiseptic wipes across the shallow cuts, and Raleigh pauses before repeating the motion, a little more careful than the last.
"You denied treatment." Raleigh says when he puts one last bandage on Yancy's feet.
His words are just enough to startle Yancy into looking up. And with his brother's eyes so sad, Yancy aches. "I can't get back in a Jaeger, Rals."
So he sits up from the couch, and there is a hint of hesitation before he is pulling his shirt over his head. The damage is extensive. Scar tissue and cuts made in his body from being operated on to get to the internal bleeding that kept the older Becket suspended between life and death for a good eighteen hours. But Raleigh doesn't need to know that (not that the kid can't put it together himself).
Raleigh stands up.
"I need to clean the kitchen floor."
.
It's not confrontations like these that get them back.
They have always been men of words because they understand what goes unsaid leaves lifelong regrets. What is said is different than what is done. Their father goes with the words I love you, the two of you are my world. Their mother goes humming a song that Raleigh knows by heart. And Jaz goes without saying anything at all.
He doesn't know what he'd rather have.
But Raleigh does stop taking the high risk positions on the Wall.
.
In a world where Yancy manages to keep Raleigh safe, he never almost dies.
In fact, no one has to die.
.
The weather goes bad, so bad they had to bring everyone back down from the Wall. It is barely the afternoon when Raleigh gets back into town where the heavy snow has blanketed the world around him in white. He comes home, opens the door and shakes off the snow gathered in the folds of his coat.
And there on their couch, Yancy is taking a nap, one arm hanging off the seat, curled fingers a fraction of a centimetre from touching the cold tiles of their apartment. His brother has his legs dangling over the armrest on one end, and his head propped up uncomfortably on the other.
Raleigh shuts the door quietly after him. Outside the windows, there is nothing but falling snow. He stands by the doorway, staring, catching himself, not for the first time, wondering if they could've have done this a different way.
Instead, he goes to Yancy's bed and brings out the thick blanket he loves most.
He drapes it over his older brother, folds it around those hunched shoulders. He thinks Yancy murmurs something underneath his breath but his attention is caught by the photographs lying spread out across their coffee table.
Back in the day, the Becket brothers used to be the Becket siblings.
Back in the day, there was Jaz. And there was mom, and dad, and there they were in Munich, and Budapest where their mother's lighter lit up a world unlike this one.
Raleigh gathers the photos into a pile, sits down by the foot of the couch, and ends up falling asleep with his head tipped back to rest against Yancy's hip.
They both wake up with cricks in their necks but at least there isn't anymore yelling for the time being.
.
There are still lines burned in broken fragments over his heart, scars that don't fade even when it has almost been a year. And in the deepest parts of his soul that are solely his, there is still a broken sentence that remains.
Raleigh, listen to me—
.
He wakes up on his day off.
It's blinding white outside where the snowstorm has blown over Anchorage. All that's left is a town with naked tree branches shaking in the wind and doors that open out into knee-deep cold. The sun is bright enough to hurt his eyes, and he hasn't slept a good night since he's woken up from the fight with Knifehead.
(He doesn't think having Yancy here will change a thing, he doesn't think Yancy sleeps like he used to either.)
Raleigh opens his bedroom door to see Yancy putting on his coat in pained stuttering movements.
"Where're you going?"
His question is harmless enough but there isn't anything to account for the sudden pang of fear that hits him. His eyes widen, just slightly, when Yancy looks up from slowly buttoning up his coat.
"Fridge's empty, Rals."
"Give me a sec, I'll come with you."
Yancy nods, stunned. Raleigh turns around, pulling off his threadbare t-shirt as he heads back inside his bedroom for a sweater and a pair of pants. He doesn't close his door like that first night.
Raleigh doesn't see the smile that stretches faintly over Yancy's lips. And he doesn't see it either when he comes back out, grabbing his coat from the end of the couch, the bottom half of Yancy's face already buried inside his scarf.
"Let's go."
Yancy nods and follows him out.
.
(They come home with the biggest bag of hard candies.)
.
The night after, Yancy is standing by his side, telling him, step by step, how to cook something half decent. They aren't laughing or holding on to each other with tears in their eyes, but Raleigh bumps Yancy's hip when he turns and Yancy hasn't pulled away with a flinch.
Yancy points at the salt, and Raleigh shakes it into the pot until Yancy stops him with a hand at his wrist. The kitchen is a little too warm and on the wrong side of too crowded. But he isn't angry and his brother isn't falling apart.
It might be progress.
.
He is sitting at one end of the couch when Yancy walks out of the bathroom in shorts and a t-shirt that is wet around the collar from the water dripping off of his hair. He has a towel draped over his head, eyes already half-closed with the steam curling from his shower-warmed skin.
Raleigh doesn't roll his eyes. Instead, he beckons his older brother over, throws a cushion down on the ground between his legs and nudges his half-asleep brother to sit.
"You better not have used up all the hot water." Raleigh tells him when he gingerly stretches out his scarred legs, pink from the heat of the water. Yancy shakes his head, and more droplets fall from the ends of his hair, turning the grey shirt into a darker shade. "Better make yours quick though."
Raleigh just swipes the towel off Yancy's head and starts to dry the blonde hair.
They turn on the television and end up watching a game show with tasteless Kaiju mascots and trivia questions neither of them can answer. Yancy leans his head back, the motion keeping Raleigh's hands still.
"Rals."
He looks at him upside down, hair still wet, skin still pink.
"I'm sorry, you know."
"…Don't assume I don't know a thing that goes on in your head, Yance. I've been there too… I would know." It's been a long time coming when Yancy smiles a little, and it doesn't look so empty.
.
The day doesn't go by unnoticed even when it doesn't exist.
There is no February 29th that year but there isn't a day where Yancy isn't trying to get the sound of the ocean out of his head, the taste of salt water out of his lungs, and the fear of leaving behind a little brother that has had him for his entire life.
But he can't.
"Yance."
He startles from where he is sitting with a cup of coffee going cold in his hands. He doesn't know how long he's been here. He tries to offer a smile, but Raleigh understands when he takes a seat across the dinner table from him. "What is it, kid?"
"I want to ask you something."
There is something resolute in those eyes, and he doesn't know if it's hope or dread when he cocks his head to the side and waits for Raleigh to speak his mind.
"…What did you want to tell me, when you were being ripped out of Gipsy's Conn Pod. What were you going to say to me?"
Raleigh, listen to me—
They don't need the ghost drift to know what the other is thinking.
The ocean is in a turmoil around them and the Kaiju are getting smarter. The kid's too cocky, and so is he. When the Conn Pod is torn open, when he is lifted into the air, he feels like his entire head is a swell of fear and pain, and RaleighohgodRals—
There are so many ways they could have ended that fight, that day, just a year ago.
Instead, they are both haunted by the last words of a dead man still alive.
Yancy lets go of the cup and stands up, pain in his stiff joints and walks around the edge of the table to stand in front of Raleigh. He waits for him, with a faint smile over his lips. And then Raleigh is reaching out and pulling him to stand between his legs as he wraps his arms around his brother's waist.
The Beckets have always been close, but death has a way of changing all that. He hasn't hugged him in just as long, and for a moment or two, neither of them knows how to let go.
He has Raleigh's head tucked against the thick wool of his sweater, arms around the mess of dirty blonde hair. And there are so many ways Yancy can complete that sentence, then and now.
"…Hey kiddo, listen to me," Yancy gives him a tap at the back of his head, drums fingers against the ends of his hair until his baby brother finally looks up at him, "I think I left the oven on."
There is a second of silence before Raleigh bursts out into laughter, fingers clenching tighter into Yancy's sweater as he shakes his head with relief. There are so many ways Yancy can complete that sentence, then and now, but he doesn't have to.
And that is the most important thing of all.
Yancy joins in with his own chuckling laugh, and it's a sound that fills Raleigh's head with the reminder that Raleigh doesn't ever need to know because Yancy isn't dead.
He isn't dead, at all.
.
It'll be five years before the Marshal comes knocking on the door of their Anchorage apartment.
The world will still be ending, and Yancy will never get back into a Jaeger with Raleigh. But what they have now will not be a RABIT that Raleigh ends up chasing when he is inside Gipsy Danger's Conn-Pod.
What they have now is worth saving the world for.
XXX Kuro