Author's Note: The first scene in this chapter comes from the novel and extended canons, which state that both of the Beckets' parents died during the Kaiju War. The "growth spurt" scene comes from my own research, where I noticed that Charlie Hunnam is an inch taller than Diego Klattenhoff. I couldn't NOT take that and run with it!
Chapter Twenty-Six: New Heights
Anchorage Shatterdome…
December 2017…
After Yamarashi, there were a few changes in the Jaeger Program that came as a surprise. Tacit Ronin's pilots were retired while she was still in refit from the Osaka engagement, and Duc Jessop came to the Academy to teach. Kaori Jessop was there briefly during the winter, working with some of the teams refitting the Mark-2's, but she headed off to Hawaii, reportedly to work with K-Watch. Nobody really seemed to have an explanation.
Raleigh got more restless as his leg healed, anxious to be back in Gipsy or at least in the simulator. It was weeks before he could even exercise properly, let alone spar. The medics (and Yancy) were constantly scolding on him for putting too much pressure on his knee, and sometimes he was sure that people were hanging around distracting him on direct baby-sitting detail. Being laid up was torturously boring.
A few weeks after they returned to Anchorage, Raleigh and Yancy were finishing up Raleigh's daily physical therapy/torture session when Carolina came into the gym. With all the public attention in the wake of Yamarashi, they had meetings with her almost every day to go over the most interesting press commentary and pick out what mailings they wanted to answer personally - and deal with any unpleasantness.
"Boys?" The tone of her voice, and the fact that she'd sought them out before they were even showered was a warning that this was unpleasantness. And urgent, to boot.
Raleigh exchanged a quick grimace with his brother, and limp-shuffled to the nearest bench. Carolina was downright hesitant in the doorway - and he doubted it was because he and Yancy were still sweaty and gross. Well, neither of them were going to shoot the messenger however bad the news was.
Yancy beckoned her in. "Qué pasa, Abuela?" That got a faint smile, and she came in and closed the door behind her.
After only a moment's longer hesitation, she came out with it. "Since the public launch, we've been keeping an eye out for any news of your family." Raleigh couldn't help the way he stiffened, and he saw Yancy go rigid in the corner of his eye.
Carolina knew the basic details of their relationship - or lack thereof - with Dad and Jazmine. She'd gently, sensitively worked the story out of them during the first few weeks of her tenure as their liaison. She'd warned them, "You should know, it's not unusual for formerly-estranged relatives to change their mind when fame and fortune come into the picture."
"Crawl out of the woodwork, you mean," Yancy had muttered. They had doubted that Jazmine would, but Dad... neither of them could write off that possibility. And they'd never really managed to come up with a definite decision on how they'd handle it if he did.
So now, Raleigh assumed that was what had happened. From the way Yancy was scowling, bracing himself, he was probably thinking the same. After their launch and successful kill, Dad or some as-yet-unknown distant relation was looking to cash in. "After Yamarashi?" Raleigh asked.
"Before," Carolina said. That was confusing; Raleigh and Yancy both frowned. "Before your launch, actually. We didn't catch it right away because it wasn't publicized. But engineering firms have to report... accidents, and someone finally noticed the name. It happened overseas."
Something cold and heavy settled over Raleigh's insides. Yancy deflated from his aggressive stance, his expression going blank. He was the one who voiced it. "He's dead?"
Carolina nodded. "When?" Raleigh murmured.
"June, just a few days after Hammerjaw. In Taiwan. There was an explosion at a power plant where he was working. The names of the fatalities weren't released until the investigation ended last week."
Dad...dead. Gone even before, but now... never coming back. Raleigh had wondered, in the back of his mind, at launch and then again after Yamarashi... would he change his mind now? Decide he wanted to be their father again? And what would they be able to do about it? He'd known what Yancy would say... and in his heart, Raleigh hadn't exactly disagreed. We weren't good enough to be your family before, don't think you can ride our coattails now, he'd imagined himself saying.
But now it was all moot. Dad was dead. He'd died before launch, in Taiwan. Word hadn't even reached them until almost six months after the fact. "Do we need to do anything?" Yancy asked slowly. "Claim... anything?"
"If you want to. He had no emergency contacts listed, so his employers didn't realize... he was buried there. But if you want, we can arrange..."
They could arrange to bring his body back. Bury him next to Mom. Have a proper funeral. The cold feeling was still there, but it was turning... harder. Raleigh looked at Yancy and shook his head. Yancy got the message. "Has anyone notified our sister?"
Carolina nodded, but didn't go into what Jazmine's response had been, which was all they really needed to figure it out. So Jazmine wasn't interested in laying Richard Becket to rest either.
"Dad, you don't have to go." He'd gone. The day after Mom's funeral, he'd gone, leaving Yancy and Raleigh to clean up the wreckage of their family and choose between guardianship of Jazmine and the Jaeger Program. That was a choice that should never have fallen on them.
"Do you want me to give you some time?"
Yancy nodded. "We'll let you know. Thanks, Carolina." She kissed him on the cheek and patted Raleigh's head, then let herself out. Yancy came to sit down next to him. "Do you want to do anything?"
It only took a few moments for him to make up his mind. He shook his head. "No. It's just... it's too late. It was too late even then."
"Yeah." His brother snorted, shaking his head. "Funny. All this time I was worried he'd come swanning back, looking to play big happy family."
Raleigh nodded. He'd seen those visions in the drift enough, and felt the wash of Yancy's distaste, his contempt, but also his anxiety, fear that no one would understand why Richard Becket's sons might not want anything to do with him. There were memories of Yancy's arguments with Dad when they'd been younger, before Yancy had given up altogether on trying to convince Dad that his wife and kids needed him to be there for them once in a while.
"Do I not put food on this table?!" had been Dad's mantra, and the sum-total of his defense. Sure, he'd worked and made sure they were all fed and sheltered. Beyond that... even when he'd been home, he hadn't been there, once Jazmine was too big to fit into his lap. He'd tinkered with his trucks and gone out to bars with his buddies, and spent all his time at home glued to the television.
Mom was the one person he'd actually acted like he loved, like he was happy to see her when he came home. Sometimes he'd brought her flowers, always remembered her birthday and their anniversary. Raleigh had assumed that was love, and the only proof anybody would ever need.
Even before Mom had gotten sick, Yancy had thought differently. He just goes through the motions because he thinks that's his job, Raleigh had seen/heard in the drift memories. We never meant any more to him than any of his projects.
Would it have been different if he'd lived to see Gipsy Danger launch, to see Raleigh and Yancy catapulted into fame, to see them triumph over a kaiju, saviors of Los Angeles?
Would either Raleigh or Yancy have wanted it to be different?
In the end, he couldn't come up with a clear answer, so they mutually decided to deal with it the same way they dealt with everything else concerning Dad and Jazmine. Just... forgetting about it. Moving on. Distracting themselves with PT and tactics planning and K-Science until they didn't need to anymore.
Finally, between Christmas and New Year's, Raleigh and Yancy were cleared to resume simulations and exercises in Gipsy, whose shiny, newly-refurbished conn-pod was just about complete. "Best present ever!" Raleigh cheered, bouncing into the Assembly Building drivesuit room without so much as a twinge from his knee.
But then they got a surprise: "Did this thing shrink or something?" muttered Christian as they were getting Raleigh into his circuitry layer.
"We've had the drivesuit out for testing with the new rig, but it's the same one they wore in October," said Priya in confusion.
"Maybe he gained some weight while he was laid up," proposed someone.
"You got fat!" Yancy crowed. Raleigh flipped him off as the suit crew laughed.
"Too much Christmas dinner," suggested Priya. "It was better than last year's." She peered over the suit techs' shoulders as they wrestled with the circuitry suit fastenings, then straightened her wire-rim glasses and frowned at Raleigh. "Have you gotten taller?"
Everyone blinked. "Nineteen's a little late to be having a growth spurt, isn't it?" said Cady Spencer, poking his head in the door.
Now people were trickling in curiously from other parts of the building, sizing the Beckets up. Tendo looked from one to the other, then said slowly, "You know... I think you might be taller than Yance now."
"What?!" Yancy Becket was outraged. He sputtered incoherently as everyone started trying to make comparisons, and then began snarling denials. "No chance! NO CHANCE! What'd you do, you little shit?! Put lifts in your shoes?"
Raleigh was interfering with the measurement attempts by doubling over with laughter, and Carolina came marching in with a tape measure. "All right, let's settle this once and for all!"
"Feet on the floor, Becket boys! Outta those boots!" Christian ordered. "Raleigh's suit definitely doesn't fit right anymore, so we might as well."
"Okay, Becket the Elder, up against the wall. Look straight ahead." Cady had to press down on Yancy's shoulders as he growled dire threats at his sibling.
"Six feet even, same as on his personnel file," Tendo pronounced, and someone marked it off on the wall for good measure with a little Y.B. "No surprises here. Right. Okay, Yance, scoot."
"He is NOT taller than me. He is NOT."
"Last spring when we fitted him, he was a half-inch shy of Big Bro," Christian reported. "Not that big a jump to catch up."
"He. Did. Not. Get. Taller."
"Nineteen's a little old to still be growing, but it ain't unheard of. C'mon, 2.0, assume the position!"
Raleigh was flat-out giggling as he stood against the wall, and the guys marked off the top of his head...
"Eh? Eh? Eh - OOHHHHHH! Look at this, somebody's had a growth spurt!"
Raleigh let them pull him away and turned around to see Tendo gleefully putting his initials on a new notch - above the first one. "WOOOOOO! TOP OF THE WORLD!"
Like a wrestling announcer, Priya bellowed, "And measuring in at a whopping six-foot-one, Raleigh Becket is now officially the tallest!" The room erupted into whoops and hoots and laughter.
"NNNNOOOOOO!" Yancy threw himself to his knees with a howl that would give Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski a run for the money. "How could you do this to me?!"
"HAHA! Where's my phone?! I'm texting everybody! EVERYBODY! I'm tweeting it! I'm taller than my big brother!"
"BETRAYYYYED!"
"I'll write the press release!" snorted Carolina.
"Let's measure the rest of him, see if anything else has grown!" Tendo laughed.
"Just his ego. Rals, stop dancing and let us take that suit off!" one of the suit techs exclaimed, chasing Raleigh around the room.
"Aww, poor Yance." Christian flopped down next to the prostrate, wailing elder Becket. "Chloe got taller than me, senior year of high school. I feel ya, bro, I feel ya."
PPDC Internal Network
DJessop: Online
SPentecost: Online
KJessop: Online
TSevier: Online
DJessop: Evening, hula girls!
TSevier: Hey, Duc! How is Alaska treating you?
DJessop: Cold and dark.
KJessop: Poor thing. His Australian constitution just can't handle it. Hi, Stacks!
SPentecost: Hello, Kaori.
DJessop: We had some excitement in Anchorage today.
SPentecost: Dare I ask?
DJessop: Well, Stacker did warn me about the Beckets.
TSevier: Uh-oh, I've heard about that pair. They can be as bad as Bruce and Trevin.
SPentecost: I shudder. What have they done now?
DJessop: [Video Attachment. Click to play.]
SPentecost: What in God's name are they on about?
KJessop: Rehearsal for A Streetcar Named Desire?
SPentecost: In the drive suit room. I expected better of Yancy Becket.
DJessop: They were cleared to resume exercises in Gipsy today, and discovered that young Raleigh has had a growth spurt. He's now an inch taller than his elder brother.
TSevier: LOL! Poor Yancy! Have a heart, Stacks, he's traumatized!
KJessop: He's not taking it well. That is priceless. Go on, Stacker, you know it's funny.
SPentecost: Never a dull moment with those two.
On New Year's Day 2018, the first of the Mark-4's was launched: Hydra Corinthian, under the command of Stephanie Lanphier and Kennedy LaRue. Gipsy Danger had pride of place on the proving grounds in the Jaeger Guard of Honor, next to Yankee Star and several of the other Western mechs. Much to their disappointment, Sydney wouldn't give Devi and Suze leave to fly sixteen hours to Anchorage for the ceremony, but there was still a multi-hemisphere celebration going on: all of Class 2016-B's Rangers were finally active.
Gipsy was deemed deployment ready again just under the ten week mark, and they were dispatched back to Los Angeles before the orange alert halted all Jaeger movement.
Life in LA was good, especially since they were now residing there with Romeo Blue's crew. Yankee Star was still undergoing some refits; she was still a marksman Jaeger, but Engineering and her pilots agreed that they needed to improve her foot speed, so she was staying in Anchorage as "senior" to Chrome Brutus and Hydra Corinthian.
The Gages loved Raleigh's table map, and the teams spent a lot of time goofing off with it. The media loved the four good-looking male pilots assigned to Hollywood's doorstep, and the Shatterdome MPs had a full-time job keeping the paparazzi away. (Carolina Olivares and Romeo's PR liaison had full-time jobs keeping their Rangers from doing anything too outrageous in sight of the media).
In the first couple of weeks of 2018, although Jaeger movement had stopped, most of the bases were still fairly relaxed, and the Gages took Raleigh and Yancy to some of their favorite spots in the region. They made "motivational appearances" at local schools to throngs of screaming, delighted kids, and sparred out on the grounds in the flesh or in their Jaegers to onlookers' delight.
They were still on orange alert at twelve weeks, though the shortest time between any attack had been three months, one day. The next movement in the Breach occurred January 19, 2018, three months and two days after Yamarashi.
"Whoa, that's an early one!" Christian exclaimed as they all came barreling into the war room.
"Or maybe he's really, really late to the New Year's party," Trevin suggested. "There go all the MLK Day parades."
"Please tell me K-Watch isn't still putting monitors down on the sea floor," Yancy said to Christian.
He shook his head. "They got the stop order thirty-six hours ago when we hit the twelve-week mark. Good timing, huh?"
"Really. Where's Cady and Tendo?"
"On duty in LOCCENT."
The wait for news on Ningyo wasn't nearly as bad as the one for Yamarashi; he turned southwest and headed straight for the Philippines and Indonesia. The North and South American Shatterdomes gave the stand-down order, but now the teams crowded around the monitors wondering where their classmates would end up.
It was Vulcan Specter and Lucky Seven who took the kaiju on in Davao City, in the southeastern Philippines. Whatever issues Devi and Susanti had with their senior partners outside the sims, the two Jaegers were a spectacular duo in battle.
Cady Spencer was practically turning cartwheels as the Australian Jaegers took turns pummeling and shooting Ningyo, who weighed in as a Category III, if smaller than Yamarashi. And it was Vulcan who took the final shot, with the Hassans wedging one of his "lava throwers" directly into the gaping wound they had opened in the kaiju's torso, and incinerating the bastard from the inside out.
The celebrations almost reached pre-2017 levels. Somebody overrode LA's Dome-wide intercom and played Burn, Baby, Burn no less than four times, in defiance of Marshall Ramirez's increasing threats. Given that it was the original 1977 Disco Inferno, Tendo Choi was the prime suspect, but nobody ever proved it.
PPDC Internal Network
RBecket: Online
SHassan: Online
RBecket: Hail the shieldmaidens of Australia!
SHassan: Just call me Eowyn!
RBecket: What should I call Dev?
SHassan: She's always been a Xena fan.
RBecket: Hey, didn't Xena have an affair with Hercules? ;-D
SHassan: You are dead if you tell her that, Rals.
RBecket: LOL. So? Details, how was it?!
SHassan: Everybody has a mostly clean bill of health. We've both got bruised ribs from those body slams, and Herc's got some nasty burns. We're in Davao overnight, heading home tomorrow morning.
RBecket: Is Scott still being a douchebag?
SHassan: He's mostly leaving us alone now. Still talks to our chests instead of our faces, but Marshall Ketteridge convinced him it's not worth the risk of a harassment charge - or a hanbō to the balls. Right before you launched, we had a fantastic spar with him. Dev stopped her bō right above his groin, and he knows that she could unman him and make it look like an accident.
RBecket: Go Dev. Where is she?
SHassan: She's asleep. What about Yancy?
RBecket: Asleep too. Older siblings, they're so damn lazy.
SHassan: Can I ask you something?
RBecket: Fire away.
SHassan: After combat, did you feel different?
RBecket: Hell, yeah. It might not be quite the same since I was pumped full of drugs in the hospital for two days, but once I woke up, I know I did. You too?
SHassan: Dev and I ghost drifted before, but not like this. It's like if we're not touching, we're floating away. I'm actually scared to leave the room.
RBecket: Yeah, it was like that for us too. Tanisha and Caleb didn't get hurt, but they in the same bed every time I saw them. (Don't tell them I told you that, they'd kill me.)
SHassan: Pilot confidentiality. :-) It's weird. We've read all the material about drift shock and how physical the pilots get, but it was all abstract. It's overwhelming in real life.
RBecket: I had a moment in October, when we were about to drop. Just seeing Yamarashi there, ripping buildings apart, when I realized this isn't a sim, this is real, and those are real people. Afterward, even when my leg hurt so bad I couldn't see, all I could think was that I wanted Yancy and I was going to flip out if I couldn't feel him.
SHassan: Tendo told us he lost it when you got hurt.
RBecket: Yeah, he kind of did. I see it in the drift sometimes. He was thinking like you said: it was all abstract before. Now it's real. Do you regret it?
SHassan: Becoming a Ranger? No. Did he?
RBecket: Maybe for a little while. People talked to him, once he saw I was okay, he got better, but it scared him.
SHassan: Aww.
RBecket: I probably shouldn't have told you that.
SHassan: I won't tell. I know Dev thinks that way sometimes too. Maybe it's an older sibling thing.
To be continued...
Coming Soon: A new Jaeger arrives at the Los Angeles Shatterdome: Matador Fury. Our heroes navigate the court of public opinion, the slimy hands of gossip, political intrigue, and more base rivalries, and learn some valuable lessons in the process that aren't even about fighting kaiju in Chapter Twenty-Seven: Maestro.
PLEASE don't forget to review!
Translation: "Qué pasa, Abuela?" = (Spanish) What is it, Grandma?
Original Character Guide
Carolina Olivares: Gipsy Danger's Public Relations Representative. Mid-60s, Mexican-American from San Francisco, survived K-Day and came out of retirement to join the PPDC.
Cady Spencer: Gipsy Danger LOCCENT Technician (along with Tendo Choi), Filipino-American, age 27 from Portland, Oregon.
Christian Warner: Gipsy Danger drivesuit technician, age 26, African-American from Atlanta, Georgia, brother of Chloe Warner.
Chloe Warner: K-Watch trainee in Honolulu, transferred after she and her brother Christian failed to become Rangers at Academy. Age 24.
Marshall Ana Ramirez: Commanding Officer of the Los Angeles Shatterdome, formerly a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army, mid-40s, Mexican-American from Arizona.
Devi and Susanti Hassan: Rangers, pilots of Vulcan Specter, Australia's Mark-3. First-generation daughters of Indonesian immigrants to Australia, ages 27 and 25, graduated Jaeger Academy in the same class as the Beckets.
Priya Katwal: Senior J-Tech Engineer, former NASA employee who helped design and build Gipsy Danger's conn-pod and life support systems, mid-50s, first-generation Indian-American.