Author's Notes: This is it, dear readers, the final chapter of this installment of Generation K! Many thanks to all of you for your reviews, praise, and constructive criticism! It means the world to me. Never hesitate to post questions and comments about this fic and the series on my review pages or my Tumblr! See the end of the fic for some tidbits about the next story in the saga! Chapter Six of Tales From The Front Lines should be up next weekend.
Chapter Thirty-Nine: He Ain't Heavy
July 26, 2019…
Los Angeles Shatterdome…
"Y'know... nobody warned us that being heroes meant feeling like shit while everyone else gets to party," Raleigh observed four days after Clawhook. "It's no fair!"
Everyone on Team Gipsy was pretty happy. Carolina was running around like a maniac juggling competing appearance requests. The medics kept shoving them into the brain scanners, and the crew was designing a new set of T-shirts. But neither Raleigh nor Yancy Becket could seem to stay awake more than four hours at a time.
In some ways, post-Clawhook recovery was more uncomfortable than post-Yamarashi, even though both Raleigh and Yancy were in physically good shape. Destabilization shock wasn't like drift shock. It was definitely worse.
In those last moments in Gipsy, instead of floating and falling, Raleigh and Yancy had felt like they were melting, their brains losing shape and form. Worse was that now, the usual grounding techniques weren't working. They both woke panicking multiple times, right next to each other, able to "feel" physically, but not mentally, not right.
The crew told him that Yancy had even gotten up and wandered out of the infirmary on the second night, completely confused. Yance didn't remember that, apart from a general sensation that he'd been looking for something. "You were right there, but... it was like you weren't, and I had to find the rest of you. That's all I remember." The medics said he'd been found passed out again in the hallway.
It was Caitlin Lightcap who proposed the solution for the aftermath of destabilization: another drift. "We need to test the handshake anyway. I don't think there's any risk, and once your brains fall back into the normal pattern of the pons connection, you'll re-adjust."
They didn't talk about it much with the crew, and definitely not with the psychs. Just Caitlin and Tendo and Cady, since they were the LOCCENT guys who monitored the handshake and might have an inkling of what was going on. (And Carolina, because she hardly ever left their bedside, and they didn't want her to.)
"It'll get better soon, bro," Tendo reassured him when he lurched awake in another cold sweat, searching for his brother despite Yancy being asleep at his side, trying not to yell or cry in sheer frustration. "Doc says you guys'll be clear for the pons tomorrow morning."
What if it doesn't work? What if we've broken it? How are we supposed to live like this?
"Just hold on tonight," Carolina said, wiping his face. Yancy was tossing fitfully in his sleep, and Raleigh was clinging to him and still not entirely certain that his brother was really here.
"Why's it feel like this?" he muttered. Yancy's here, I'm here, what the hell is wrong with our brains?
"You charted new territory with this kill," said Tendo. "Nobody's ever taken a handshake to the point of destabilizing like that. Nobody's ever had three kills either," he added, punching Raleigh lightly. Raleigh had to force a smile. "But Cady and I've been looking at Doc Lightcap's scans; she thinks you'll link back up just fine, and I'm not seeing anything that says otherwise either even if I'm not a genius neurologist. There've been theories before now that the handshake could be therapeutic after a traumatic fight."
Something in Cady's expression made Raleigh curious. "What?"
His friend shrugged, looking thoughtfully at Tendo. "You remember we tested back at the Academy?" Cady mused. "Where'd we top out... seventy percent?"
"Yeah, something like that," Tendo confirmed. "Why?"
Cady smiled, looking from Tendo to Raleigh and the dozing Yancy. "I thought the handshake was the most uncomfortable thing ever. It's just weird, imagining it could be therapeutic."
"I get that," Raleigh admitted. "It wasn't easy at first. We got used to it. And then..." Was this an addiction? Something that'd felt so painful at first, now they were both ready to fall apart because they didn't have it? "Drift shock hurts, but not like this. If we're touching, we're fine after combat. Now it's like everything's... broken, and..." I'm scared. I just want to feel safe again.
He didn't say that. There wasn't anyone he'd say that to who wasn't Yancy, and by now, under normal circumstances - normal meaning the way things had been in their minds since they started drifting - Yancy would know without him having to say it. Even without a full-blown ghost drift, he and Yancy could sense so much of each other, anticipate, understand, commiserate. Raleigh could easily work out what was bothering Yance as his brother tossed and murmured in his sleep, and Yancy held Raleigh when they were awake... but there was this dissonance, this uncertainty, like jagged edges on a connection that had once been so smooth.
All the other crews were now safely back at their Shatterdomes, and the Hassans were engaged in a campaign of half-wheedling, half-defiance to put off going back to Sydney long enough to stay in LA for Raleigh and Yancy's recovery. It was a relief having their old friends here with them, two women who'd gone through pons training and all the stresses that went with it along with them, who'd mentored them as elders in so many ways even when Raleigh and Yancy had higher scores in the simulator.
Devi in particular was mothering the hell out of them whenever Carolina was called away. (Any other time, Raleigh would've thought that was weird, given her on-again, off-again thing with Yance, but now he was too distracted to care.) Indra had come with them to command their LOCCENT crew, and was comparing notes with Cady and Tendo.
They were nervous about it and so were the crews, judging by the large group that gathered silently in the sim lab. Well, Raleigh supposed he couldn't really blame anybody; he and Yance still looked like the walking dead. But he was so desperate that he'd try anything, anything to end this sense of mental wrongness.
Yancy's hand was on his arm as they waited for the techs to finish calibrating the pons caps. Raleigh put a hand on his brother's shoulder, trying not to fidget or get agitated... it wasn't right, it wasn't right. He could feel Yancy's hand, feel his shoulder, even feel him in the ghost drift... but disjointed, off, like a poor copy or a surreal dream.
"Ready, guys?"
Raleigh swallowed hard and nodded. Please let this work... "Yeah."
"Yeah, ready," said Yancy.
Over Dr. Lightcap's shoulder, Raleigh noticed Marshall Pentecost now watching too, his brow furrowed as if this was worrying him as much as it was the others. "Five... four... three... two... one..."
They plunged into drift space... it washed up around them like the ocean and they were trying to clean off burning Kaiju Blue from their iron skin, cool and soothing...
"Ready to step into my head, kid?" Yancy had been ready to deny he was nervous, that first day of full testing, but then he realized there was no point; Raleigh would be in his head in a few minutes, and he'd know it was a lie...
"No point in not wanting me to know anything anymore..." Sitting on the floor of their room afterward... drained... tired... hurting. Would they be hurting so much if Mom hadn't died, if Dad hadn't gone and they hadn't had to give up on Jazmine, if Diane hadn't thought they were scum?
"You're still the best brother ever..." He'd meant to be snarky, joking his way out of serious things, but he made Yancy cry. He felt awful, but then Yancy hugged him so hard it knocked the wind out of him and they were hanging onto each other for all they were worth and it was perfect.
"You think maybe we can do this?"
"Yeah, we can do this."
We did it. Yamarashi, Grindylow, Clawhook. We did it.
Time and space and feeling, stray thoughts and emotions rushed around them, but unhindered and undamaged again, flowing free - whatever had been blocking it was washed away...
They were there in the drift space, side-by-side in their rigs in the conn-pod, but in their shared minds, unseen, they clung to each other and cried as Gipsy rolled out of her bay for the first time since Hardship claimed twelve of their friends...
"This one's for the Gamma Twelve..."
It's okay now. We're okay. We did it.
Rals? Raleigh looked through the bluish drift space and found himself swept into Yancy's mental arms. A mental hug in the drift wasn't as good as hugging physically after drift shock, but now, he knew it was real again. Yancy was here, and Raleigh was here, and whatever had been wounded by the destabilized link was healed.
I love you, baby brother. I should be able to say that outside the drift. I love you so much.
It's okay, he whispered back in his mind. There were dozens of people around them and it didn't matter; none of them could hear. You don't have to say it anywhere else. I know it. You do too, right, old man? Hell, couldn't he not be snarky once in a while?
But this time Yancy didn't cry. His laughter rippled through the drift like bubbles in the ocean. It's okay, kiddo. I'm in your brain; I know.
Fuck that; if Yance was willing to say it, even just in the drift, then Raleigh had no right to be self-conscious. I love you, Yancy-man.
Warmth and relief and tenderness rushed over and between them, back and forth in both directions, and they were buoyant and floating and completely safe. They rose out of it together and broke the surface back into reality, into here and now: Los Angeles, 2019.
Safe. Together.
"Neural handshake strong and holding, one hundred percent," said a familiar voice. They blinked, and Tendo and Caitlin and the other techs were grinning at them, and there was applause all around through the speakers, people smiling, clapping each other on the back, hugging in relief. Tendo was grinning and told them a la Han Solo, "I told you it was gonna work! No problem!"
"How do you feel, guys?" Caitlin asked.
They grinned at each other. We're good. "We're good." They said it in unison, and everyone cheered.
Caitlin put them through a round of cognitive tests like they were back at the beginning of Term Three, but they grinned and joked through them. It was tiring; the medics kept warning that they were still going to need more recovery time from the physical and mental strain of the fight with Clawhook. Truth be told, neither of them were averse to being shoved back into the infirmary afterwards to go to sleep.
But it was okay, because whatever came next, they were together again. They collapsed onto their shared bed no longer doubting that.
Devi and Suze and their crew came to hug them (and possibly tuck them in) in farewell, since Sydney's Marshall about to dispatch the Aussie military to haul them back across the lake for desertion. So the four of them crowded onto Yancy and Raleigh's shared bed for a Skype call down to their classmates in Panama.
"How'd it go?!" Kennedy and Stephanie demanded.
"The greatest handshake in the world has a clean bill of health," Tendo informed them over the pilots' shoulders. "Our Becket boys are gonna be fine."
The Hydra girls looked a little nostalgic. "I wish we'd been allowed to just come all the way up there," Kennedy sighed.
"Well, we're getting dragged back at gunpoint in two hours," said Susanti, ruffling Yancy and Raleigh's hair with each hand. "We've all got jobs to do."
"At the rate things are going, it's only a matter of time," Yancy told them. "We'll all ride together someday."
"Believe it." Cady Spencer reached past the Hassans to knuckle the Beckets' heads. "You guys may have the craziest, scariest job in the world, but it's got its good points. Like mindmeld therapy."
"And the ability to get laid whenever you want!"
"Tendo!" Suze practically crawled across them to swat at him, getting grunts of protest.
Lucky for Tendo, Marshall Pentecost poked his head into the infirmary. "Rangers Hassan, Marshall Ketteridge is on the com for you."
Devi groaned and gave each of the Beckets a one-armed hug. "That's our final warning before the court martial. Come on, Sis. Let's round up the crew and get on the bloody plane."
"Safe flight, girls!" said Steph over the Skype. "Say hello to all the kangaroos for us!"
"Nyuck nyuck nyuck!"
But as they left, Yancy gazed after them and Pentecost and felt a twinge of anxiety. Raleigh looked at him. "What?"
"Dunno," he murmured, rubbing the back of his neck. "Maybe nothing." His recollection of destabilization shock wasn't any better than his memories of drift shock. It was all hazy, incoherent images and muted voices that he couldn't make out. But just now, his heart had thudded at the sight of Pentecost, as if...
As Tendo and Cady went off to see the Hassans and their crew to the plane, Raleigh was falling asleep fast. Yancy found it ironic that in this particular case, he'd been the restless one who wandered around when he should've been asleep. But now he was wondering just what had gone on when he was under the influence.
Well, once more for old times' sake. He tugged the blanket over his brother and told the nearest nurse, "I'll just be a second."
The crew had told him Pentecost was leaving today too, for Anchorage. Nervously, Yancy hurried down to his office, hoping he hadn't gone yet.
He'd cut it close; the Marshall was coming down the corridor with a briefcase. He raised an eyebrow at Yancy. "You do tend towards walkabouts after this engagement, Ranger Becket."
Yancy felt himself blush. "I think I'm fully awake, sir. But I... uh..." Sheepishly, he stepped closer and lowered his voice. "I don't remember exactly what... happened before." Something changed in Pentecost's face then, confirming Yancy's suspicion that the blurry recollections weren't just from dreams. He had talked to Pentecost. Well, he might as well just face whatever he'd said. "Do I owe you any apologies?" Why do I have this feeling that I was yelling at you?
To his relief (and surprise), Pentecost actually smiled. "You don't. You were in…some distress, yes. But you were impaired through no fault of your own, and I was well aware of that."
Crap. That means I did shoot my mouth off. Maybe I'm better off not knowing. "Thank you, sir," he mumbled, staring at the floor.
"No, Ranger. Thank you." Startled, Yancy looked up. Pentecost was no longer smiling, but there was something intense in his gaze. Something familiar, even. "You're a fine pilot, and so is your brother. Exceptional, even, and that's according to a very high standard. You owe no apologies to anyone. Considering that my fellow Marshalls and I should have acted faster to prevent your being overextended, the apologies should be ours."
"No harm done, sir." Yancy relaxed, and pointed out, "Whatever destabilizing did to us, Dr. Lightcap had the fix. We can always find each other in the drift."
"Interesting way to put it."
He shrugged. "Three years in, I'm still learning new things."
"I'm glad to hear it."
"All personnel. 1730 flight to Anchorage boarding in five minutes."
Pentecost glanced up, then looked at Yancy. "I'll be teaching at the Academy for several months. After the next engagements, I'd like you and your brother to be reassigned for a few terms. Like the Gages, you now have experience that could be helpful to the candidates."
Yancy couldn't hold back a grin. "Our influence wouldn't be deemed unwholesome?"
Pentecost didn't take the bait. "No more than the Gages' or the Tunaris'." Yancy thought it had to be his imagination or just still lingering exhaustion that made him think the Marshall had a twinkle in his eye. "Get back to the infirmary, Ranger. You still look dead on your feet."
"Aye, sir." Yancy wasn't as good as Raleigh at making a salute look sarcastic, but he tried anyway. "Safe trip."
When he got back to sickbay, Raleigh was awake, but fortunately not fretting about his whereabouts. To Yancy's surprise, Raleigh was in hushed conversation with Brady Harris. Rals hadn't exactly been avoiding Nikki's cousin, but he'd felt understandably awkward since her death - with Brady and even with the rest of Team Yankee. Now, while they were both looking sad, they seemed to be comfortable talking.
"Hey, there you are!" Tendo pushed himself off the wall and waved a hand in front of Yancy's face. "Did you go drift-walking again?"
Yancy laughed and shoved him. "Nah, not this time. Just wanted to touch base with – someone leaving for Anchorage." He waited until Brady finished up talking with Rals, suspecting this wasn't a conversation for his ears - at least not until the drift. Yankee's PR rep gave him a casual wave as he got up and headed back out, and Yancy returned to his brother's side. "Everything okay?" he asked, glad to be off his feet again.
"Mm-hmm." Raleigh's eyes were distant, but not as depressed as Yancy might have feared. "He... was saying thank-you." He looked at Yancy with a sad smile. "For Nikki. Y'know she was from San Diego. That's where she grew up. If Clawhook had gotten across Coronado, it would've gone right into her Dad's neighborhood."
Yancy tugged his brother against him. "We did them all proud, kiddo. Every time. We'll keep on doing it."
"It's not like she was the love of my life." It whispered in their drift memories, half a protest, half a defense, all confusion and doubt. Raleigh still wasn't sure what he was supposed to feel about Nicola Harris, searching for a "right way" in a world where there was no such thing.
"That doesn't mean you're not allowed to miss her," Carolina had told him.
I miss them all. The ghost drift was back in full force, although if they'd wanted to talk out loud, they could have. After all, the only people here were Corps personnel, and they understood. Raleigh and Yancy were Rangers. Nobody would judge.
"It's... Capitaine I miss the most, sometimes," Raleigh admitted softly.
"There's nothing wrong with that."
It was like having a dad again. He felt Raleigh wince, embarrassed as that thought slipped out, and ruffled his hair.
That's not wrong either. Antwan said so himself. "We'll keep it up. For all of them. I, uh, I ran into Marshall Pentecost in the hall. He's going up to the Academy. He wants us to be assigned for some of the second-term training." Yancy grinned at Raleigh's astonished, delighted expression. "Seems he thinks we've got something to teach now."
"And here I thought I drove him nuts."
"Oh, I think it's a safe bet you still do. He'll just put up with you for the greater good." Yancy knuckled his brother's head, making Raleigh grunt and whine in protest. "Now go to sleep."
"Not everyone needs eighteen hours, ol' man," Raleigh mumbled, but his eyes were already drooping again. "You're the one who keeps breaking curfew." He draped an arm across Yancy's shoulders as if to pin him down. "Movement in the Breach in a few months. We got ass to kick again soon."
Yancy grinned and closed his eyes. "Sounds good. Don't wake me up before then."
***FIN***
And so ends my take on the history of the Becket boys. I hope all my readers will stick around for the next installment, which should start posting after Christmas. (Previews will probably be up on my Tumblr before that.)
As you can probably guess, that fic is my take on the history of the Hansens. Here are some tidbits that form the basis for that story: (1) Good and bad men aren't simple to identify, even when you mind-meld with them; (2) most people don't know that Herc Hansen and Stacker Pentecost didn't truly bond until after the Mark-1 glory days; and (3) Raleigh didn't realize that Chuck's attitude in Hong Kong wasn't just general disdain - it was personal.
All that and much more in Generation K: Aurora Australis.
PLEASE don't forget to review!