disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: to Katie and Elle, I hate you both so much.
notes: I just really wanted this AU to happen idk
title: that time chuck was a dickweed and yancy had to put up with it
summary: Exactly what it says on the time. Or, they go on a road trip and everything is awful forever, except they make out. — Yancy/Chuck, Mako/Raleigh.
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Brrrrinnnnng!
The doorbell rang.
It was a Tuesday, the second one that month, and the sun was shining so bright out of its ass that Deputy Yancy Becket legitimately contemplates skiving off work and going back to bed. It was like seven in the A-M, the world was hardly even awake, and what the fuck, who the heel was ringing that fucking doorbell?
"HOLD ON," Yancy hollered. He took his time, didn't scramble out of the sheets—his work phone wasn't ringing, so it wasn't an emergency.
Yancy was gonna to bash some heads, seriously.
Brrrrrrrrriiinnnnnnnnnnng!
Or just take the fuckin' doorbell out of the door, because someone was abusing their doorbell privileges, and Yancy was not here for this.
"Jesus," he muttered under his breath, and pulled the door open.
Chuck Hansen stands on the stoop. Yancy yawns in his general direction. "Do you even know what time it is? Aren't you supposed to be at school?"
"Let me in, Becket," Chuck says tightly. The kid—okay, not a kid, Chuck is only three years younger than Yancy, but hell, Yancy helped teach this asshole to read, there's no way he's anything but a kid—is standing in the doorframe, bulkily taking up space and looking the kind of red that only comes with furious incoherent rage (or really bad sunburn, but this ain't Texas. This is Oregon, and people here know better).
"Fuck's sake, kid, Herc taught you better than this," Yancy sighs, and mockingly bows him in. "So. What's up?"
Chuck drew a very deep breath in through his nose.
And then he was yelling.
"YOUR BROTHER ABDUCTED MY LITTLE SISTER, BECKET, AND I AM REALLY MAD."
Yancy blinked, processing.
A minute or so passed, Chuck heaving with anger in the background.
Yancy went "…Wait, what?"
Chuck looked to be about to have an aneurysm. "You—Becket, you know what I said, I swear t'god!"
"Okay, okay," Yancy had to turn away so he could stick his fist in his mouth to muffle the laughter. "Raleigh did what now?"
"He abducted my little sister!"
"…Kid, that's what you said when he took her boating six weeks ago."
The kid looked a little abashed, but certainly not enough to drop it. This was Chuck; he'd had a vendetta against Yancy's younger brother since the day that Yancy's parents had moved the family from Anchorage to Cannon Bay.
(The story went like this:
Raleigh, all of seven years old, had taken one look around his second-grade classroom and sat down next to one Mako Mori, and told her very simply that she was the most perfect creature to ever walk the earth, and would she please marry him? From the way Raleigh's teachers put it, Chuck took offense because Chuck took offense to everything that involved his step-sibling, and tried to punch Raleigh in the eye. Yancy's little brother was a big kid, and he put Chuck down in about thirty seconds.
And so a very long-standing crusade was born. If only it had ended there. But of course not.)
"Her stuff's gone," Chuck said in a rush, "and she didn't sleep in her bed last night and she wouldn't—Mako wouldn't do that to Stacker!"
"That doesn't sound like an abduction, y'know that, right?"
Chuck made a choking noise in the back of his throat, Adam's apple bobbing gawkily up and down. What a fucking kid, jesus.
"Look," Yancy said patiently, "there's an easy way to figure this out. We'll go check Raleigh's room, and then you can go to school."
Chuck barrelled past him.
"Take your shoes off!" Yancy yelled at his retreating back.
Kids these days. No fucking respect.
Yancy yawned a second time, glanced at the clock—shit, he had to be at work in forty-eight minutes—and ambled after the kid blowing through his home like a hurricane. Thirty seconds or so later, a furious choked-off laugh left him.
Raleigh's bedroom was utterly bare. The place was turned upside down—the closet was empty, the drawers were all pulled out and left askew, and even the blankets off the bed were gone.
"Well, hell," Yancy mused, "he actually did it. Goddamn."
Chuck was frothing on the ground. That couldn't be healthy.
"Get up," Yancy said. "I'm gonna have to go talk to Stacker, I need time to go find them, jesus, there are better ways to commit to each other that isn't running off—"
"I'm coming with you," the kid squawked.
"You're eighteen and still in high school Chuck. You're not going anywhere except to class, so shut the fuck up."
"She's my sister," Chuck grit out through his teeth. "I'm coming with you."
"It's not gonna be a fun trip," Yancy said casually. "I have no idea where they are, or what they're thinking. I might be gone a while. You willing to miss that much of your life?"
"I'm going to beat Raleigh's face in," replied Chuck.
"If your dad asks, it wasn't my idea."
"It wasn't your idea, make," Chuck said smarmily, voice ticking into an old Australian accent damn near lost from years around a bunch of Yanks. "You don't even want me to come."
Yancy pinched the bridge of his nose. "I really, really don't."
"Yeah, well, I don't care what you want!"
It was going to be a long fucking trip.
—
The thing about Yancy's kid brother was that he was kind of scary-smart. Raleigh picked up languages the way toddlers picked up building blocks to stick in their mouths, Yiddish and Spanish and Japanese and Latin (that had been an interesting conversation, because who needs to learn Latin, Raleigh? It's a dead language), and it was probably what had endeared him to Mako in the first place.
Raleigh spoke four languages like a native, eight fluently, twelve others on the way to fluent, and three with copious use of Google Translate.
The kid could go anywhere in the world and vanish, if he wanted to.
But Yancy had a feeling that there was only one place Raleigh would go, if he could go anywhere.
There were twenty-five hundred miles between Cannon Beach, Oregon and Anchorage, Alaska, and Yancy Becket was going to drive them all. It was a beautiful ride, right along the coast, through Washington and then up Canadian British Columbia's coastline, through the Yukon and then into Alaska at last. It was a forty-eight hour drive, exactly. Two days of quiet music, trees, and empty road.
Yancy was almost excited.
The fact that he had an eighteen-year-old punk-ass teenager in the passenger seat, however, had not been taken into account.
"What the hell is this," Chuck said, waving at the everything that was Yancy's dashboard and the music seeping therefrom.
"Bach," Yancy said, and left it at that.
"Can we listen to something from this century, mate?"
Yancy raised a single blond eyebrow at Chuck. Very slowly, he said "The only reason you're here, kid, is because they weren't legally able to stop you. I can and will kick you out if you keep this up."
"You wouldn't," Chuck said. "My dad'd kill you."
"Actually," Yancy smirked, "I think he'd appreciate it. Might teach you a lesson—"
Chuck punched him in the ribs, hard.
(Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough that it freaked the fuck out of Yancy and sent them careening into the other lane. It was a small mercy that it was two in the afternoon, and the highway was empty. They totally almost died.)
"Nope," Yancy said, and pulled over. "Nope, this day is over, I'm done."
"Are you trying to kill us?!"
Chuck was a smug little shit. Yancy had to tell himself three times that violence is not that answer, Yance to keep from knocking the kid out just to get rid of that smile on his face. There were some things that no single person could deal with no matter how legitimate their complaints were, and frankly, Chuck Hansen was one of them.
If he actually survived this week, Yancy was going to get the fuck out of dodge and move across the country so that he didn't have to deal with these people ever again.
First, though, he was going to make sure that Raleigh and Mako got married for real so that everyone would just leave the pair of them alone. They were young, they were so young, but Yancy knew True Love when he saw it.
Raleigh had come home that day with stars in his eyes, and said "Mako Mori is perfect and one day I'm gonna marry her, Yance," and that had been that. Their parents had been like that, too, in love with each other their entire lives from before they could even walk. It didn't really surprise Yancy that his little brother took after their parents.
"Are we gonna stop for food or somethin', soon?" Chuck got whiny when they hadn't eaten.
"We stopped an hour ago," Yancy muttered, eyes glued to the road. The sun funneled down through the trees, a blur of green and gold dappling along the sides of the road as they sped through the arch of leaves, somewhere just northeast of Vancouver on the Coquihalla (what the fuck kind of name was Coquihalla, anyway? Fucking Canadians), heading through some of the most beautiful countryside in the world.
Yancy still remembered making this trip that first time, before his mom got sick and his dad started working himself to death. It had been a family thing, all five of them: Jazmine singing loud and off-key to some shitty punk boy band that had broken up fifteen years prior and never had the decency to write good music, their mother snoozing in the passenger seat, Raleigh staring out the window.
He'd been all of ten years old, but the memories were still clear as day.
(That had been before mom got sick, before dad left, before Jaz faded into the woodwork. It had been a long time, damn.)
They'd been driving for three days. Chuck was a little bitch, Yancy was so done with everything, and they were so, so close. Anchorage was a coastal city built right onto the Pacific Ocean, and they were so, so close.
"Jesus," Yancy breathed. "Finally."
The city opened up before them, light from the city gleaming off the saltwater, speckling up like bubbles in expensive champagne, stardust across the tongue. For a moment, when Yancy looked at Chuck, there was a furious heat in his gaze.
"Where d'ya think they are?" Chuck sneered, and broke away before it could turn to anything.
"Only one way t'find out," Yancy shrugged, rolling his eyes, and pressed down on the gas.
The city had changed, though.
The city had changed a lot.
Things seemed to have… warped, somehow, Yancy thought. Smeared, a little, his memories of the place melted down to a puddle of clear candle wax. Chuck slumped down in his seat, teeth bared in a pained grimace.
Yancy looked out the window at the house he'd been born in, full now of light and laughter
"My ass is numb," Chuck said. "We gonna go, yet? They ain't here."
"Your brain is numb," Yancy muttered. He really didn't want to think about Chuck's ass.
"Do you wanna start something?!"
Yancy looked the kid over bemusedly, eyebrows faintly raised. "Dickweed."
"T'fuck?!"
"Calm down, kid, I don't got the time to fight. I'm too tired right now. We gotta find my brother and your sister, or we're cooked. Let's find somewhere to sleep."
They batted at each other, half-hearted with it, the exhaustion of three days of travel already biting at them both. Yancy shoved Chuck down, called him his kid brother, and dragged him into the Super 8.
Kid brother explained the sudden fist fight.
"This is all yer fault!" Chuck was shouting. "If it weren't f'yer brother—!"
"Jesus, how old are you?" Yancy asked. "Raleigh and Mako aren't kids, Chuck! And hell, neither are you!"
"Fuck you, Yance!"
"More like fuck you," Yancy smirked.
Chuck stopped, breathing hard, nostrils flaring. "Don't fuck with me, Becket."
"Take your shirt off, and we'll talk about it."
They hit each other like a tidal wave. Chuck was still gangly, still growing into his body; he was all angles and long planes, shadows in the dips of his torso where the bones came close to the surface of his skin. His lungs stayed caged beneath his ribs, expanding and contracting as he breathed, and he shuddered every time fingers skated down his throat.
Yancy was probably going to hell for this.
"I'm not—" Chuck's voice broke a little, a snarl biting its way out of his mouth. "Yanno I'm not—"
"Shut up," Yancy said, gently, gently.
Gentle was good, though. Chuck needed gentle.
"I hate you," muttered Chuck, seething and stretched out, spine bowed up and strung tighter than a highwire. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you more than I hate your brother—"
"Don't make me think about my brother right now, kid. You try'na kill the mood?" Yancy snickered into Chuck's ear, and Chuck made a choking sound a little bit like desperation, a little bit like laughter.
Mouth easing bruising and hot down the kid's chest over freckles over freckles over freckles, Yancy couldn't help the chuckle that escaped him when he pressed a hand down against the crotch of his jeans and Chuck jerked.
"Try not to come in your pants," Yancy murmured.
"I ain't the one with the problem getting it up, old man," Chuck sniped in reply.
Yancy laughed, hard and sharp and clean.
"Jesus, you're gonna be the death of me."
Chuck's answering grin was the stuff a teacher's nightmares were made of—a little manic, a little wild, a lot shit-eating. He was a good-looking kid, when he grinned like that, and he squirmed in Yancy's lap just enough to have him groaning and tipping back his head.
"Yea," Chuck snickered. "Prob'ly."
—
They made it back to Cannon Beach four days later, scruffy and sleepy-eyed and kind of fucked out. It wasn't really a good look on either of them, but Anchorage had been a dead end, and Yancy had no idea where else they would go.
Maybe New York, Yancy thought, because New York was fast moving. Chuck thought Japan, Hokkaido, where there was snow because Mako loved snow.
Turned out they were both wrong. One Raleigh Becket and one Mako Mori had not left Cannon Beach. They had not left Cannon Beach at all.
In fact, they hadn't even left the Becket's apartment.
(Literally, they had not left the apartment.)
Chuck howled, and Yancy laughed for a week.
The little shits.
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fin.