NOTES: prompt fic - Raleigh Becket, gen, "if you could just see me now"
The Always Ache
Mako wanted a backyard because she wanted a puppy.
"But you have me," Raleigh protested, grinning until she smacked his bare buttock sharply enough to make him yelp.
"You have no tail." She smiled, her fingers resting on his tailbone, right at the top of his buttcrack. "I like you without a tail."
But they have a backyard. No dog yet. They're waiting until spring.
They have a shrine in the backyard, a little thing of stone and scrap metal beneath the cherry tree. There's going to be fine gravel paths there when spring comes and they get the delivery in. Raleigh has it all planned.
Right now, though, it's November, and rainy and damp is the order of the day.
He's forgone the umbrella – he'll take a hot shower when he gets back inside. But this...this small pilgrimage he wants to make alone. Mako understands.
Paper flutters in the bare branches of the cherry tree – parchment ribbons on which are written the names of their dead, the ink faded and smeared and the paper tatted from the wind and the weather.
Raleigh goes to his knees on the little dried-grass mat in front of the shrine, in front of the little pot of sand, where a stick of incense is lit every morning, smoky fragrance curling the edges of the fading photos of the dead.
He doesn't do this often. In fact, he's only done this one before – most of them aren't his dead, after all.
This one is.
"Happy Birthday, Yance."
Five and a half years have given him some distance, some healing. And Mako anchors him, as he anchors her. But he still misses his brother.
A part of him always will.
fin