Author's Notes: Many thanks to everyone for all the feedback and reviews! Please keep 'em coming! FYI, the title of this chapter and the metaphor that Kennedy gives Raleigh come from the short-lived-but-much-loved scifi series Firefly, and its big-screen sequel, Serenity. Also, there's a second-hand cameo for a major character in this chapter! Blink and you'll miss it! Who caught it?
Chapter Thirty-One: Albatross
Guatemala City, Guatemala, May 24, 2018…
After the stadium gathering ended, Event Security bussed the Rangers and crews back to their swanky hotels in the nightclub and embassy district called Zona Viva. Yancy was ready to call it a night, but Raleigh wasn't. "Come on, Yance, it's Zona Viva! Live a little!"
"I'm tiiired!" Yancy mock-whined as the crews laughed.
They all compromised that the pilots and crews would have a celebratory drink at one of the many clubs that was open and waiting, and then everyone who wanted to "be spoilsports" could return to the hotels and crash.
Local Jaeger Flies swarmed the surrounding streets, but inside the clubs was mostly VIP access only, not that it meant the crews were lacking for attention. Raleigh ended up at the center of a small mob of actresses, pop singers, and officials' daughters for much of the night, which he didn't seem to mind at all. Yancy had plenty of dance partners, but their fawning got exhausting after awhile, and he stuck closer to the crew.
He didn't leave quite as early as he planned. The party was fun, there was all kinds of food and drinks, the music was terrific, and it was great being out with their fellow pilots and all the crews. They had reason to celebrate. He escaped the ruckus from time to time for the "VVIP" lounge (designated for PPDC personnel only tonight) in a loft up above the main dance floor and bar. It had a two-way mirror so the lounge occupants could observe and comment on the action below without being seen, which was pretty fun.
To Yancy's surprise, Nikki Harris was up there. "Qué tál, Señorita Harris? I don't think I've ever seen you not dancing by choice." He managed not to ask why he hadn't seen her dancing with Raleigh at all. He had a feeling he knew.
She smiled and beckoned him to join her. "Can't the R&R crews get any R&R around here?"
"Ohh, that pun was Tendo-worthy." They both laughed, but he detected some glumness. Carefully, he asked, "You okay?"
"Yeah, I'm good. Just.. thinking a lot." She gave him a sly smile. "Don't worry, I'm not plotting to poison your brother for dancing with other girls." Yancy chuckled. He'd doubted this was a jealousy thing.
"Sounded like the general public has decided you're not a villain after all," he remarked. Wrong thing to say; Nikki winced. "Did I just stick my foot in my mouth?"
She waved him off, gazing distantly at the dancers below them. "Nah, not really." Glancing around to make sure they didn't have any eavesdroppers, she said, "You know my mother was from Guatemala?" Yancy nodded. "I've never been here. Never expected to come. Mama hated this city, the whole country, ran north with her brother and sister when she was seventeen. I'm surprised the press didn't make a big deal about her having been an illegal."
Wow. He hadn't known that, and was definitely surprised the Fox News jerks hadn't jumped on it. "Did she ever get legalized?"
Nikki nodded, studying the dregs of her drink. "The year before K-Day, when I was fifteen. Growing up, the thing we all were most afraid of was that she'd get picked up, sent back, and Papí and I'd never see her again. This place... the way she talked about it, it was hell. Now here I am. And... it really ain't that different from home. It's not terrible." She smiled wryly in the reddish club light. "Mama died last year, a few weeks before Yamarashi. I'm just... thinking a lot. Something like this makes you wonder things."
Yancy nodded. "I can understand that. You didn't have any siblings?"
"Not exactly. Papí was one of six, Mama was one of three, and the whole family lived right together, so it was me and about a dozen cousins. Three of us tried Academy, but I was the only one who made first cut, and it took two tries."
He grinned. "I've never forgotten you at Raleigh's Final Spar. Did I thank you then?"
She laughed more easily. "Nah, you don't need to. Big Brother had stuff on his mind. I'm the oldest cousin; you make me jealous of Raleigh sometimes!"
"It drives him nuts," Yancy replied. He gestured to Steph and Kennedy, who'd come staggering up the stairs and collapsed onto one of the couches. "They've each got an older sibling; they've yelled at me for pushing him around."
Alex Quispe came up a few moments later and ordered drinks for himself and Sunya, who was still downstairs, but turned and trotted up after her co-pilot just as the bartender finished mixing their order. Nikki watched the Solar Prophet Rangers with a still-thoughtful, but less-melancholy expression. "Okay, I've always wanted to ask: is it true drift partners can find each other blindfolded, or is that just the Gages?"
"Hah! I've heard that one. We haven't really consciously tried it... hang on." Yancy shut his eyes and concentrated, reaching towards Raleigh as if they were drifting. "This isn't exactly scientific method..." And if it didn't work, he'd just have to send a text rather than keep on talking to Nikki Harris by himself and igniting the gossip chain.
Nikki peered down through the two-way mirror at the crowd below, giggling. Raleigh didn't appear to suddenly get a mental vibe, though he did pull free of his throng of dance partners and make his way to the bar. But then he was muttering in Andrés and Daniel's ears, and they gestured to the stairs - and he looked right at the mirror as if he could see through it.
"Holy shit!" Nikki exclaimed.
Yancy eyed his brother through the glass, unsure if this really was eye/brain contact or just power of suggestion. "You think?"
Raleigh came into the lounge with Matador Fury's pilots in tow a few moments later, and only unsurprised to see Yancy at a table with Nikki. "I was wondering where you disappeared to," he told Yancy.
Nikki pointed at Yancy, wide-eyed. "He was trying to 'mind buzz' you! Did you feel it?"
"Huh! I dunno... maybe."
Now listening to the conversation, Kennedy and Steph were grinning. "We've tried that, but it doesn't seem to work. The Gages can definitely do it in a test setting... though you two are brothers. Maybe you really can do it."
"Those Chinese triplets can do it," said Sunya. "They came to Sao Paulo to help with pons development. You only have to call one of them, and all three look up."
"Now how come they don't have a Jaeger yet?" asked Antwan, coming over with drink refills for himself and Team Hydra. "I thought Silver Lion or Shaolin Rogue would be for them."
"They're Raleigh's age, but they're like the main pons trainers in Asia," Kennedy pointed out. "Or maybe they can't figure out which two should be the pilots."
"Haven't you heard?" Daniel grinned. "They're building a special Jaeger just for those triplets, with a three-way conn-pod."
Everyone started talking at once. "Whaaat?" demanded Tendo.
"Seriously?!" Raleigh exclaimed.
"Aw, bullshit," Steffie snorted.
"How would that even work?!" Yancy mused. "Instead of left-hemisphere-right-hemisphere... three dimensions? I'm not a pons neurologist, but I don't know if a brain could do that."
"He is pulling your legs," Andrés confirmed, cuffing his partner. Then he gave them all a shifty look. "At least I think he is."
"Who've we got on crews that's actually worked in Hong Kong?" Raleigh asked. "I bet they've met 'em."
Yancy yawned in unison with Daniel. "You kids start the private investigation. I think I'm calling it a night."
"I'll join you, Becket. I'm done!" said Antwan.
"Okay," said Raleigh, accepting Yancy's one-armed hug of farewell. "Fogeys and lightweights, go with Yancy. Young and able people, let's order another round!"
"Don't worry, we'll look after hermanito," Alex told Yancy with a sly grin, getting a huff of annoyance from Raleigh.
"Behave yourself, kiddo. Night, everyone!"
"People still think I need looking after?" Raleigh grumbled, dropping onto the couch next to Kennedy and Steffie. (The truth was, he was getting a little run-down, but damned if he was going to admit it yet.)
"Of course not; they're just harassing you!"
Sunya chuckled. "We're not actually going to hover over your shoulder all night." But she did ruffle his hair.
"That gets old," he muttered to the girls.
"You need more alcohol," Steffie decided, and got up to order them all another round.
Kennedy flopped lazily against him. "That's the burden of being the youngest, bro." She fist-bumped him. "We got it a lot too. Still do."
"And it never bugs you?"
She shrugged. "Sometimes. Not much anymore." She accepted the drink Steffie brought her and took a long gulp before continuing, "When I was younger? Man, I hated my big brother and his friends sometimes. It was so condescending. He's five years older."
"Geez, and you're a girl. Yance can be a pain in the ass, but I bet you got it worse."
"My big sister wasn't much better," Steffie told him.
"So you just got over it? Or did they stop?"
"Mm… neither. Virgil - my brother - liked to boss me around, and when he wasn't bossing me, he was trying to baby me. Sometimes it was fun, but sometimes you just wanna scream, I'm not seven anymore!" Kennedy wrinkled her nose. "Steffie said she told you about Katrina?" Raleigh nodded. "Yeah. That didn't help. I'm still not really sure how much danger we were really in. My parents always said we were still safe, and Virgil did too, but the water was up to our second-floor balcony when the rescue boat came. After that, the first few years after we moved to Seattle, Virgil was even worse. He wouldn't let me out of his sight, wouldn't trust me to take care of myself - and I wasn't exactly a daredevil. God, the fit he threw when I enlisted."
Raleigh snorted. "Is he over it yet?"
"No," she said, so matter-of-factly that he was startled. "But I am. And... you know? When I stopped arguing with him, he finally... stopped trying. I know he still worries, but I can't do anything about that. But it doesn't bother me so much anymore when he fusses over me."
"How come? Distance?" That wasn't really a workable remedy for Raleigh and the crews, and he wouldn't want it to be with Yancy.
But Kennedy shook her head, then mused, "You and Yance are good cultured boys, right?"
"Huh?"
She giggled. "Haven't I heard you quoting Firefly?"
"Ohh, yeah, definitely, we're cultured. Shiny!" he added, for good measure.
"Remember The Hero of Canton?" Raleigh started humming it at once, and Steffie giggled and joined in. "It's what Mal tells Jayne at the end: It's not about you, it's about what they need."
That was... an interesting way to think about it. Raleigh contemplated the ceiling. "They need to fuss over someone?"
It turned out Tendo Choi and Cady Spencer were listening now. "Fuss over, adore, cherish, be proud of," said Tendo. "Call it what you want, kiddo. We did it to Lea Franklin too, remember?"
"Aww, you adore me, my man?"
"You're just so cute sometimes!" Raleigh shot him the bird. "Emphasis on 'sometimes.'"
"The rest of the time, we wanna knock your head against the wall," Cady agreed.
Alex and Sunya were observing the conversation too. "Most Rangers will not have children," Sunya pointed out. Raleigh blinked at that, and she scoffed. "Well, we are all working above giant nuclear reactors, no? Maybe not these two," she conceded, gesturing to Kennedy and Steffie. "But the Mark-1, Mark-2, and Mark-3 Rangers, we have paternal instinct. It has to go somewhere."
Raleigh groaned. "I did not sign up for that."
"Neither did Little Lea. Them's the breaks, Baby Becket." Kennedy punched him on the arm. "Virgil still calls me his little albatross. Ya know? I'll let him baby me sometimes, if that's what he wants. The world's a big, scary, shitty place. All those people out there, we're symbols to them. We big bad Rangers need that for ourselves too, and so do our families. So do us a favor and let us baby you sometimes. Or at least Yancy, because it's so goddamn cute when he does it."
Sheepishly, Raleigh admitted, "I don't really mind it from him, not most of the time, anyway."
"He's a hell of a lot more restrained than Virgil," Steffie agreed. "Or Trisha - my big sister. That's probably why you two are so compatible; my sister and I would probably have blown up the pons."
"I know about you guys smacking him about the bar fight," Raleigh told them, grinning. "I meant to thank you and Devi and Suze."
Both girls both started to laugh. "We wondered if you'd see that in the drift! Yeah, that was the time he reminded me most of my brother. Never you mind!" Kennedy told their curious audience. "Confidential Ranger stuff!"
"We're Rangers!" protested Alex.
"Confidential Class 2016-B stuff," Steffie amended it, and everyone whined.
Nikki had just been observing the conversation until then, but now she put in, "Yancy and I were talking about family earlier, before he tried 'mind-buzzing' you. I got raised with a bunch of younger cousins. It can be hard, wanting to look out for 'em but also let 'em be their own person. Especially since K-Day."
Raleigh felt a pang at that. What did it say about him that he couldn't recall many times that he'd felt that way about Jazmine? Maybe it was their ages, the fact that they'd been so similar and spent all their lives as "Yancy's younger siblings", to the point where it seemed like they were mostly on equal footing.
He didn't remember Nikki coming to his rescue after the Final Spar, but he'd seen it in Yancy's memories in the drift. Maybe it wasn't just EMT instinct that had driven her.
A part of him wanted to fume, I didn't sign up to be on a pedestal as some symbol of hope! But on the other hand... Pentecost, the other Marshalls, the instructors at the Academy, they all reminded the Rangers and the personnel that they were symbols. Hope, courage, protection, the Jaeger program wasn't just about the literal fighting against kaiju.
Outside the Corps, a lot of people didn't understand. Raleigh loved the events like today, the attention from pretty girls, the pick of partners and the admiration... but sometimes it was a respite just to hang out with people from the Dome. They could understand as nobody else would. That was why he'd hooked up with Nikki sometimes instead of always picking up a Jaeger Fly. He could let his guard down with his own people, and they could with him.
The medics had given him and Yancy and the other Rangers the warning that between the nearness of nuclear reactors and all the powerful chemicals they were exposed to, fertility would probably be affected. It hadn't concerned either Becket much; that was such a remote future for guys their age.
But for couples like Alex and Sunya, or even Steph and Kennedy? The older techs and support crews who also worked around the nuclear Jaegers day in and day out? That had to be a more immediate concern, something they knew they had to sacrifice.
He eschewed the company of local celebrities and Jaeger Flies for the rest of the night and just hung out with his fellow Rangers and the crews. They talked philosophy and politics and all the big controversial stuff that would give the PR personnel heart attacks if any of them were caught on camera. They danced and sang karaoke and played bar games. A lot of them (including Raleigh) got drunk. They were in trusted company, after all.
By the end of the night, Nikki invited him back to her room, and he almost took her up on it. But then he decided, "Actually, I better check in with Yance."
No complications. Nikki smiled and whispered in his ear, "Remember when I flipped out at you in April? It wasn't just the Jaeger I was worried about."
They strolled back to the hotel arm-in-arm, no longer concerned with the paparazzi despite knowing this would spawn a new chapter in their media love story. "He remembered you when you came back in 2017, from the Final Spar."
"He told me earlier. I envy you, Spunky." He looked at her in surprise as they got into the mirrored elevator, and she leaned against the wall, punching their respective floor numbers. "After Yamarashi, yeah, but even back at your first cut. It's so obvious what you mean to him."
After she'd gone and he was alone in the elevator riding up to the presidential floor, he absently scanned through his email on his phone and saw a new one from Suze Hassan. I was thinking about you and Yancy today. One of Lucky's crew has a son, and Devi is teaching him chess. She misses having you around to fuss over.
He laughed to himself. She had also forwarded him an Internet meme about the fight with Grindylow. It was a picture of Matador Fury with Esperanza in his hands, and the caption: A more prophetic name was never given to a ship.
Esperanza meant hope.
"If you stay with this Program, you're not merely officers, nor merely fighters," Marshall Pentecost had told the Rangers before Gipsy launched. "You are symbols, not just of protection but of hope. Be prepared to live up to that."
That was why they smiled and nodded through the five thousandth repetition of praise and gratitude, even though they might be tired and bored and impatient to get away from the cameras, because for the person talking to them, it wasn't the five thousandth time. That was why they signed autographs until their hands cramped up and tried not to scoff at the press questions. It was why they managed not to run away or break down in tears when they met someone who'd lost loved ones to the kaiju.
"They need you," Carolina always said. "They need someone to believe in."
Raleigh Becket felt like he'd already failed to live up to some things that he'd needed to be, like the kind of son his dad would've wanted to stay for or that his mother would've quit smoking for, the kind of brother that his sister needed. He'd been astonished to find that Yancy felt the same way after they drifted.
Now they were both trying to live up to what the rest of humanity needed from the Rangers: strong, stalwart defenders. No doubts, not visible anyway.
And he knew Yancy was trying to live up to being the big brother that Raleigh believed him to be. Raleigh was desperate to be the partner and brother that Yancy wanted too.
In their room, he found his brother sound asleep, as expected, and felt a rush of warmth. Okay. I guess if you and the others need me to be the kid, be your albatross, I can try to do that too. It's probably not too much to ask.
He kissed the top of Yancy's head and went to sleep smiling.
To be continued...
Coming Next Weekend: Our heroes finish their victory tour and transfer to the Lima Shatterdome while Gipsy Danger gets repaired... but the next movement in the Breach brings a nasty alignment of bad luck and bad judgment in which Raleigh bites off way more than he can chew, and Yancy and Team Gipsy struggle to contain the fallout in Chapter Thirty-Two: Pushing the Envelope!
PLEASE don't forget to review!
Spanish Translations:
Qué tál = What's up?
Hermanito = Little brother
Original Character Guide
Andrés Alcazar and Daniel Moreno: Matador Fury's Rangers, Mexican nationals, age 39. Andrés was a historian and Daniel was a lawyer, both writing and working against institutional corruption before being imprisoned for an unknown period. They were released along with other non-violent prisoners to attempt the Jaeger Academy, but have not yet been granted a pardon.
Alejandro (Alex) Quispe and Sunya Flores: Solar Prophet's Rangers, early 30s, Peruvians of mixed Quechan/Latino ancestry. A romantic couple who worked in the Peruvian railway industry before K-Day.
Nicola Harris: Rescue/recovery EMT with Whiskey Gamma, age 21 from San Diego, CA, daughter of Brady Harris's cousin and a Guatemalan immigrant. Occasionally has a casual hook-up with Raleigh.
Antwan Ferrier: Gipsy Danger Personnel Coordinator, directs Whiskey Gamma, a team of Strike Troopers. Age 39, Jamaican national.
Cady Spencer: Gipsy Danger LOCCENT Technician (along with Tendo Choi), Filipino-American, age 27 from Portland, Oregon.
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.