Yancy wished he could smile.
He wished he could smile at how far his brother, Raleigh, had come in the past six years, but he couldn't do that in the Drift.
The Drift was a morbid shadow of the living world: the place one's conscious went to when they died. The Drift was accesible by those from the living world with family members constantly tapping in to talk to loved ones who'd died. Due to Yancy not having any family members except Raleigh it was a rarity.
Yancy knew Raleigh wouldn't accept the reality of the Drift not just being a link between Jaeger pilots. Raliegh's stubborn non-belief of the Drift being an afterlife meant Yancy had no one to talk to seeing as the dead could not talk to each other. However when Yancy's time had come he had made one last desperate attempt at convincing his dear brother with one last emotional, rushed sentence before he was brutally ripped out of Gipsy's Conn-pod by the Kaiju, Knifehead:
"I'll catch you in the Drift."
Yancy wished he could cry.
He wished he could cry due to the fact that his brother might never talk to him via the Drift, but yet again, he was merely a conscious without physical attributes.
After all his morose musings, Yancy hadn't expected anything of great significance to happen today, after Raleigh had rejoined the battle against the kaiju he mostly spent his time following Raleigh around the Shatterdome,but was surprised to drift into his brother's room only to find said brother sitting cross-legged on the floor clutching the old family photo album like a life-line.
Goodness knows where that had been all these years.
Yancy hovered over Raliegh's shoulder and watched as his brother slowly flipped through pictures of long past family vacations and holidays. His brother paused on one picture.
Yancy knew this picture well, because it had been taken just before Raleigh and himself had left to train at the Jaeger Academy, a joke that turned out to become the only life they were willing to live. Yancy stared at the printed two-dimensional versions of the young Beckett Boys: their arms draped over each other's shoulders, smirking at the camera with their famous lop-sided grins.
Something wet had fallen on the picture, Raleigh was crying, crying for the brother who met an early demise. Yancy could do nothing but watch.
"I'll catch you in the Drift." If a body less spirit could fall on its butt, Yancy certainly would have.
Raliegh's near silent muttering gave Yancy the hope he so desperately needed. He urged his brother on silently hoping, praying that he might feel the electrifying pull of being reached out to. It seemed, for once in his afterlife, hope was on his side.
"Yance? You there?"
"Yes Rals, I am."
And that's when Yancy had it.
The idea of a wonderous smile.
Ya'll can find me in the Drift,
Andromeda Da Inferno