Raleigh Becket couldn't sleep, again. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept, eaten or even how many days it had been since he'd rocked up on the Alaskan shores inside brave Gipsy Danger. Had rocked up alone. He stared up at the cracks in the ceiling of the Shatterdome officer's quarters, wondering if anyone else had noticed how extraordinarily similar to the circuitry burns he wore on his body they were. Or perhaps there were no cracks in the ceiling at all, and there was just blood in his eyes and the Drift hangover in his head.

He rolled over to focus on the wall over the desk instead, but looking at the pictures there made it hard to breathe, so Raleigh scrunched up his eyes hard in an attempt to turn off his senses and sleep. It didn't work. His ears picked up the sounds of people passing by in the corridor, having a heated discussion amongst themselves before their footsteps as well as their conversation faded away. If Raleigh strained, he would have been able to hear the mechanical sounds of the lift at the other end of the sleeping quarters, which patiently made its way up and down the Shatterdome every day.

Raleigh didn't hear anything in his own room, and that was half the problem. Back before Knifehead, in the glory days of the Jaeger programme when the Beckets were treated like rockstars and partied like them too, he'd often find a wave of exhaustion passed over him by the sound of Yancy's head hitting the pillow and the dependable soft snores and sighs that would follow. Just as it had been their whole life, every sleepy breath Yancy took had been Raleigh's own personal lullaby. When they had been just small boys sharing a room with a roof that sloped up towards the stars, all Raleigh had had to do was climb into Yancy's bunk when he couldn't sleep, snuggle under one lazy arm his brother had held out, and blissful oblivion was never far off.

Now Yancy was gone, and Raleigh couldn't sleep.

Feeling trapped in his prone position, Raleigh stumbled to his feet and somehow found himself clinging to Yancy's empty bunk for support. He rested his forehead against it for a moment and his betraying senses caught the scent of something homely and familiar. He balled his fists into the sheets that Raleigh had not yet allowed any cleaning crew to change, and with some effort, finally let go and sank down to his own area again.

Perhaps the Shatterdome doctors would examine him again, if the Marshal found out he didn't sleep, hounded constantly by the Drift hangover that the scientists said should have long since ended, but that any Jaeger pilot knew never really severed.

I'll always find you in the Drift, bro, Raleigh thought, feeling a tingling in his skull as he remembered the precise moment the neural handshake had been severed; but why won't you let me sleep?

Perhaps, thought Raleigh, it was his brother's way of telling him not to give up. Raleigh had never been one for sitting around with the wide world out there waiting to be discovered; Yancy was the lazy one, but Raleigh would waste away if he were trapped in the Shatterdome, a condemned pilot shunted into an administrator's role because that's all he was good for.

Mind made up, Raleigh finally settled down into his bunk, pulling Yancy's pilot jacket emblazoned with Gipsy's logo over his shoulders as he'd done every night he had to try and sleep in their room alone. Tonight he might finally get some peace.

OOO

In the Alaskan Shatterdome, in the wreckage of Gipsy Danger's conn-pod, the engineers working around the clock to fix the old girl could have sworn the ruined harness of Yancy Becket twitched. Meanwhile, in Gipsy's pilot quarters, Raleigh Becket drifted off to sleep in Yancy's jacket; for the first time since the loss of his brother had torn a hole in his soul.