Yup.

Many thanks to my tearful beta-chan, paradorx. Also, Yancy's twitter is a thing. Find him at NurseBecket~

Raleigh, keys in hand, ducked low and attempted to sneak into the garage. He got halfway there before the door partitioning their duplex burst open and Yancy physically attacked him.

"Yancy!" Raleigh wriggled in a headlock, suddenly ten years old again, "Yancy, let me go!"

"Only," Yancy allowed, releasing him warily, "if you change your shirt!"

"Don't you have better things to do?" Raleigh demanded, straightening his sweater where Yancy had mangled it.

Yancy counted off on his fingers. "I watched all my Netflix DVDs, Tendo is chaperoning the dance with you, and Chuck is doing some father-son thing with Herc."

Raleigh made a face. "I still don't know why you're friends with that dick."

Yancy shrugged. "It is far better to be on the right hand of the devil than in his path."

"You stole that from The Mummy."

"And you're changing the subject, when you should be changing your shirt."

"It's a shirt!" Raleigh protested, "for the purpose of wearing out!"

"It's a sweater," Yancy hissed, "for the purpose of making you look like a dork!"

"Well, what should I wear then?" Raleigh threw his arms in the air, deciding not to mention that it had taken him a long while to decide on the precise sweater to wear, weighing colors and material in an attempt to look his best during the school dance.

Within ten minutes, Raleigh was parading for Yancy in a white button-down and a blazer he couldn't remember ever buying, let alone wearing, while his brother nodded to himself.

"Better," Yancy lorded. "I mean, you actually look like a teacher."

"I am a teacher!"

Yancy shrugged. It was as much of an approval as Raleigh was going to get.

"Then I'm leaving." Raleigh turned on his heel and made a break for the garage door. Yancy was about to call out after him when Raleigh flipped him off behind his back. He could almost hear how his brother smiled. With that at his back, Raleigh finally escaped into the garage and drove as calmly as he could. It would be an easy night, chaperoning in Newt's place with whoever was bracketed. Easy.

Because of the large size of the classes allowed at the dance, it was not taking place at the school, but at a venue downtown. Raleigh arrived early, as he was supposed to, greeting Tendo at the door. The decorations had been handled by a student organization, decked out in blue and silver streamers. The main dance floor was crowned by a stage with a triple set of spindecks for the entertainment. Raleigh was taking it all in when he felt a presence beside him. Even without turning, he knew who it was. It filled the air in his lungs with warmth. Frightening warmth.

"Hello," he said to Mako, who echoed his stiff smile.

"Hello," she said. She was gorgeous, radiant, beautiful, and slightly awkward in a bright red dress that could only have come from Sasha's closet, along with the smoky makeup around her eyes. They were both out of place, out of their element, standing in the middle of the empty dance floor looking at a vacant stage.

With that one awkward passing of pleasantries done, almost like an alert, "Warning, I am also here", she walked back towards were Sasha was standing with a judgmental look and crossed arms. Raleigh's smile was still frozen on his face as Tendo stood next to him, eyes flickering back and forth, taking in the new turn of events.

"I'm going to kill Newt," Raleigh said cheerfully, through bared teeth. Tendo chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder.

"Oh," Tendo laughed, leading Raleigh off towards the entrance, "this is going to be fun."

Raleigh pushed him casually into the wall, but Tendo only laughed harder.

Tendo outlined the schedule for him. When the students entered they would check their tickets and ID cards, and then after the first half hour of entry, it would fall to student body reps to handle the door traffic. Tendo, Raleigh, Mako, and Sasha were chaperoning, with the cycle of two people on the dance floor, and two people at the food station, switching off every hour. Simple in theory, arguably challenging in execution when it came to Raleigh not making an even bigger fool of himself. Raleigh frankly didn't know what he expected, but it did hit him out of left field when a giggling gaggle of girls walked up to his ticket station, one of which undoubtedly had a picture of him shirtless saved on her phone.

He stamped their tickets and they walked off tittering about getting dances from him later on. He mentally punched himself, and mentally kicked a mental image of Chuck in the mental nuts.

After half an hour, Tendo nudged him with a shoulder. "Time to get the show started," he said, "grab a dance with Mako for me, will you?" Raleigh dutifully ignored him.

Mako was standing off to one side with Sasha, talking quietly and hurriedly to her, looking over her shoulder as if for eavesdroppers in the crowd of boredly milling kids. Her met her eyes and she quickly looked away. Great. They were still in some strange state of being opposite poles on a magnet. Raleigh headed off towards the food tables and stopped as Tendo mounted the stage with a microphone in hand.

"While the night is still young," Tendo announced, "I give you, your master entertainers, a musical group unlike any other… three times the power, three times the strength, and three times the cold, hard bassline—The Wei Tang Brothers!" he sang out and headed off of the main stage, to the applause of the students. The lights dimmed, and artificial fog poured onto the stage. Lights and lasers danced through the murk, and a single shadow appeared in the back of the stage. It grew closer, lights behind it keeping it shadowed, and at the last minute before approaching the three deck spreads, it separated into the three Wei Tang brothers. Cheung, Hu, and Jin. Hu wore sunglasses and a white wifebeater; Cheung, on his right, wore a leather jacket, and Jin, on his left, had a hat turned backwards. Raleigh had to raise an eyebrow at their getups. But then again he couldn't judge, having only seen them in their normal collection of tracksuits and exercise wear.

As one, the triplets raised their right hands high above their heads and then slammed them down, triggering the first riff of sound from their setup. They went to work, and the students poured onto the dance floor. Raleigh was impressed; he knew that the Tang Clan DJ-ed on the weekends for fun at large venues, but he had yet to see them in action. It was incredible. They followed the beat of the music, sometimes in sync and other times passing the dance from one to another, like it was a ball they were moving down the court. Students were drinking it up, moving like their young lives depended on dropping it low, lower than anyone else. Some kid was breakdancing.

Raleigh saw Mako beginning a round of the dance floor, and nearly ran to the food table. There, he caught a kid already trying to tip a flask into the punch bowl behind his back. He took the kid by the arm and snatched away the flask.

"Really?" he asked, and took a swig, grimacing. "This is disgusting. Get out of here." He propelled the boy towards the exit, and he sulked to it. Raleigh pocketed the flask.

Slowly, time moved, blurred by the music and the lightshow the Wei Tang brothers put on. Cheung stripped out of his leather jacket and a few girls shrieked. "Take it off!" one girl shouted, higher than the others. Raleigh rolled his eyes.

After a while, Tendo came and relieved him of his duties, sending him to the floor to stop students from disguising fornicating as dancing. Raleigh was on the dance floor, and he was keenly aware that Mako was watching him from where she stood by the snack tables with Sasha, keeping an eye on the students taking a break from dancing. Raleigh still watched, and felt ice slide into his gut, as Tendo withdrew from the crowd, talked to Mako and Sasha, and then with a hand on the small of her back, propelled her into the fray. He and Sasha then fistbumped.

Raleigh had to think quickly. He wanted nothing more than to sit down with Mako and talk about where it was they were going—why she was so anxious around him after the drive to the hospital, how much he was drawn to her—but that was not something he could do in what was quickly becoming nothing more than an underaged dance club. On the stage, one of the brothers was doing a handstand on his deck. Raleigh backed towards the edge of the crowd, and turned sharply to find some exit.

He bumped right off of the tiny stone wall that was Sasha Kaidanovsky. "You take one step off of that dance floor before the hour is up," she warned, pushing him back onto it, "and I will personally remove your testicles."

Completely taking her at her word, Raleigh held up his hands and backed into the crowd with her eyes glittering at him like a hawk's. He was soon swallowed by students, and his back bumped into someone less hard than Sasha. He turned around, apologies starting.

Mako looked at him, face flushed. Raleigh didn't see how Tendo, off to one side, threw his hands in the air in triumph, having been ushering Mako in the right direction from the sidelines.

She was still looking at him. Oh. He wanted nothing more than to ignore the awkwardness between them and start fresh—Raleigh grabbed at this spark of an idea before he could really think about it, the music and the heat of the other bodies getting to his head, almost intoxicating him, and shouted above the sound, "Wanna dance?"

A challenge glinted in her eyes as she surveyed him, looking for sincerity. His response was to bob his shoulders to the beat, horribly. With a wide grin, she grabbed his hand and pulled him deeper into the heart of darkness and moving bodies.

It was like they were running again.

The crush made their dancing more like synchronized bobbing and weaving, sticking close together, occasionally placing protective hands on shoulders and arms to keep them together in the sea of dancing students. Her heart was the beat of the music and it was in his blood like a drug, making his head swim with pure Mako, how she moved her hips and shook her shoulders, the blue of her hair striking under the colored lights. They moved, never getting too close or touching too long, all the ice between them melting into the music and the movement. It involved no thought, only their reactions to each other. It was almost like a game, like a race they had run—if Raleigh moved one way, how would Mako react? How long could they play the game, holding each other's hearts in their hands, without making contact? How long could they make their one night without expectations last?

Mako spun through the air, dress and hair fanning, and Raleigh caught her, dipped her, let her escape and chased her. The lights pounded into his mind and the music drowned everything he was saying to himself, every negative thought he had been embracing hours earlier. He wasn't thinking about how much she knew, all of his shameful, secret things, how much she fit the empty cavern in his chest he didn't even know was empty until she slipped by again and again and again—

All he thought about was that if she was his current, all he needed to do was drift.

Her skin was alive.

Like a jolt of electricity, his hands—warm and smooth and strong—brushed against her and made her move, and still he followed. He was a constant point that didn't hold her down, a polar north she could follow all the way home if she was lost.

She looked into his eyes and they were warm, so warm, and her favorite shade of blue. She danced and he moved and the music bled them together, oh, oh, oh, her heartbeat reminded her that he was in her mind, in her chest, his name pushed in among her teeth and her tongue every time she opened her mouth to talk to him. Tell him, the pressure in her lungs told her, tell him how he was a current, a live wire, waking you up and keeping you steady.

He was a current, and all she needed to do, with his eyes on her and his heartbeat next to hers, was drift.

"Mr. Wei Tang."

Cheung jumped slightly, and looked offstage in the wings, and saw none other than Stacker Pentecost standing there in his customary suit, waiting. Cheung signaled his brothers and got them looking in the right direction.

When Stacker had their full attention he spoke again, barely audible above the pounding bassline. "Cut the music." It took them a while to catch his meaning, helped along with a pointed look towards the heart of the dance floor, where two people were most definitely not students were dancing. With a shared grin, the triplets spun their records down, slowly, until the music was melting around the dancers, seguing into something slow and melodic.

In the center of the students, Mako and Raleigh were frozen.

Stacker nodded his approval to the triplets and drifted off to wherever he had come from.

Slowly, cautiously, giving her ample time to change her mind and shrug him off, Raleigh placed his hands on her waist, and she brought her hands up around his neck, bringing them close together. He could feel her, the rise and fall of her chest next to his, the aftermath of their dance keeping her heart rate going. His heart beat alongside, swollen and one hundred percent smitten.

She placed her head upon his chest, and he wondered if it was possible for his heart to give her a Morse code message—I love you. His chin rested on the top of her head and he breathed in the smell of her hair, intoxicating. His chin slipped down, and his lips were against the crown of her head. He expected her to move. She didn't.

They swayed to the music together, bodies moving in tandem without any need to guide—they just were. She was all his missing pieces, and Raleigh felt everything he wanted to say to her filtering through his mind, flowing into his mouth. He tasted confessions on his teeth and poetry on his tongue. The words were pushing, begging, and he was almost dizzy with them—your eyes make me believe, I don't know in what, they make me drown in the best way, your legs and your arms, your mouth and your neck and how you duck your chin into your collar when embarrassed, how your heartbeat sounds, I want to taste your pulse, open up a window in my mind and have you whisper into it, find me in the wreckage, all I want is to hold your hand, kiss you, take you out on a date—

"What?" Mako looked up at him, eyes wide.

He hadn't realized that he had spoken, but he could still feel the words in his mouth, aftermath of a question he shouldn't have asked. Without thinking, he spoke again.

"Will you go out with me?" he repeated, and his lungs were full of stars.

Her face warmed in a smile fit to outshine the sun.

Herc couldn't say whether he preferred the Anniversary before Chuck was old enough to drink, or after.

At its core, the Anniversary remained primarily the same. Excuses. Flowers. Badly fitted suits and dead grass beneath their shoes as they stood on the hillside silently. There was a lot of silence, both before Chuck turned twenty-one and after, but the silence that went hand-in-hand with sobriety was hard and flinty, like steel and tasting of punches that begged to be thrown, but weren't. Chuck after a long afternoon and evening of drinking was silent like ice, deliberately swallowing his words with a mix of beer and harder liquor. All Herc could do was try to keep pace with him at first, usually giving up soon enough to keep a clear head. Chuck kept going. And going.

It had seemed disrespectful to Herc, at first. Drinking on the Anniversary, that was. But he cowered away from the other option; being sober. Painfully sober, with a son he had no idea how to handle, let alone talk to the way he should be, given the occasion.

The Anniversary was the same as ever, although it did happen to fall on a day when a school function was also scheduled. All it took was a few short words with Stacker to get them out of any obligations. Herc steeled his way through it, through the cold morning, the suits, the long car ride, and the drinking in the afternoon. Rain began into the evening, with both of them drinking at the same bar as ever. He welcomed it. The sound of the rain on the ceiling smothered everything in a blanket of continual noise, like fuzz on a television.

Herc could feel his silence inside him like a knife the entire evening.

Finally, around eleven, last call was given and Herc used that as an excuse to collect his son from the bar, making sure to grab his tie and jacket as well from where he had shucked them several hours before. Chuck went willingly, if a bit sluggishly, grumbling nonsense things through the stench of alcohol that covered him.

In the parking lot, the rain cold and clean on Herc's skin, Chuck wrenched himself free with a mumbled "Get off of me," and began to lurch towards his parked truck, splashing haphazardly in puddles as he went. With a sigh, Herc followed him.

"Come on," he said, grabbing at Chuck's arm again, "You're coming with me."

"'ike hell I am, old man," Chuck slurred, and attempted to wrench himself free. Herc's hand tightened.

"You're bloody plastered," he told his son, "get a hold of yourself. You're not driving, not on my watch."

Chuck's eyes bored holes into his skull. "So what?" his voice was low. Herc tightened his jaw and escorted his son to his own car, nearly punting him into the cab of the truck. Chuck grumbled but nonetheless sank into the seat while Herc circled around to the driver's side. Chuck's apartment complex was in the digs, a section of the town that seemed constantly under construction. Herc headed that way, blearily aware in the back of his mind that they would pass the school as they went.

The car was quiet except for the sound of rain and the windshield wipers. It slugged through Herc's veins and made a grab at his chest. His life hadn't always been this quiet. He thought of a fire. Of a closed door.

Then, Chuck spoke.

"I hate," he started, and coughed up a lungful of stale air, smelling like a distillery, "I hate."

Herc wished that he could drown in the sound of the rain, wished that he had stopped Chuck from drinking so much he actually became articulate. "I know," he sighed, heart clenching, "I know you hate me." He barked a self-depreciating laugh. "God, I'm the whole reason we're in this bloody mess." A fire. A closed door. Silence like ice.

"No," Chuck said, and straightened. Herc noticed he wasn't wearing his seatbelt. "I hate…" he made a vague gesture towards his chest. "My fault." His voice raised a few octaves. He leaned his forehead against the cool window, and Herc caught a reflection of his face in the glass, pointed away from him.

He had his mother's eyes.

Herc found himself shaking his head. "It's not your fault," he insisted, swallowing heavily. "Your mother…" he couldn't say her name.

Chuck could. "Angela."

The school was coming up on the side of the road. The land across the street was leveled, a dirt parking lot entering into the woods and hiking trails. Herc was trying to think around the wall in his mind, telling him that talking would only open up wounds he didn't know how to heal.

"Your mother," Herc started again, grabbing onto his courage, "she loved you more than anything. She told me…" a closed door. A fire. "She told me to take you outside." The house was on fire, and Angela was trapped behind a closed door. Chuck was screaming from his room, and Angela shouted through the door—"I wanted to go back, but it was… it was too late." Eleven years later all that remained of her was the yearly ritual of wearing suits, buying flowers, and visiting her grave. "If you want to blame anyone, blame me. You were—" You were everything to her. You are everything to me. I can't say it because I don't want to hurt you anymore than you already are—but that's my fault, too. His hands tightened on the wheel and he watched the road, in silence, waiting for the returning slap from Chuck. He expected nothing less than what he deserved.

"Dad," Chuck said. His voice was quiet and heavy.

Herc was turning to look at his son, when something dark flashed across the street in his periphery. The streak paused, frozen, in the center of the murky lane. With a bitten shout, Herc threw the wheel sideways to avoid a collision.

The tires shrieked, slipped on the watered road, and the car tipped ever so gently over. It rolled before thudding to a stop on the side of the road, upside-down, and crushed.

The crash and the bellowing of alarms broke the rain-smothered silence; water and gasoline pooled beneath the wrecked truck, chilling Herc to the bone and flooding his nose with scents bitter and mechanical. He was aware of the unnatural stillness beside him in the mangled cab, a silence too deep to be anything else. Ice poured into his mind.

He struggled to say Chuck's name, but the air caught in his lungs, coiled there, burned. A fire in his chest. A closed door in his mouth.

He never made a sound.

See you next time, you guys! :D