Spy Games . Sons of Anarchy/Pacific Rim . One-shot . Gennish Raleigh/Chuck . Slight AU . 5+1
Author: Pprfaith
Title: Spy Games
Summary: In which Chuck isn’t really subtle. Or: five times Chuck suspected Raleigh Becket was more than he seemed, and one time he actually figured it out. - AKA a sort of fill for a PR Kinkmeme prompt.
Warnings: General spoilers for both, show and movie, a little slash, language and Chuck's inner monologue, which is a little cracktastic. I think the fact that I wrote this in under an hour deserves a warning, too. Unbeta-ed.
Rating: R for language
Words: 4k+
Disclaimer: I'm a poor teacher who owns nothing. Respective creators/owners do.
A/N: So, this isn’t actually a fill for the prompt, unless you count “SoA/PC fusion fic” as a fill, because I took that bit and ran with it. And this is the result. So here, have the five plus one fic no-one asked for but I wrote anyway.
I hope I didn't miss the characters by too big a margin, and that the OP has at least a little fun with this.
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Spy Games
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1
Ra-h-leigh doesn’t take his shirt off.
Which is not to say that Chuck wants that washed-up has-been to strip, or anything, but it’s kind of something he notices. It’s hot inside the Shatterdome on principle because there are no windows and a whole damn lot of giant machines and everyone runs around in t-shirts or tanks.
Except for Pentecost, but that man’s a cyborg anyway.
And Becket, who wears his ugly, lumpy sweaters like he’s on a fishing boat in fucking Alaska, and not inside a giant metal structure with shitty AC.
Chuck gets hot just watching the guy. (Shut up, not like that.)
The one time the asshole actually strips down to a t-shirt is in the Kwoon. His left arm is criss-crossed with scar tissue from his drivesuit and at first Chuck thinks the little girl is just self-conscious because he’s not pretty anymore. Then he notices that Becket’s entire right forearm is taped up.
It’s not to stabilize anything because it’s only a single layer, neatly wound round and round, but it’s still there. Covering something. Something that’s not a scar, because Becket wears his scars openly. Well, at least right now.
Chuck draws the only possible conclusions: Either Becket is a cutter, or he’s got his momma’s name inked on his arm, or something equally dumb. Drunk tattooed, probably. It’s the kind of thing a washed-up has-been would do.
Now Chuck absolutely has to know what’s under there. Has to, has to, has to. (And no, that’s not childish at all. He’s 21 years old, he’s a grown ass-man. It’s not childish.)
So he plans. And briefly gets distracted by the way the has-been wipes the floor with all his drift-potentials, almost blows up the Shatterdome and then saves Hong Kong (and Chuck’s ass), followed by the whole world.
It’s understandable that, somewhere in all the panic of dying-not-dying, blowing up the Breach, and saving the fucking world, Raleigh Becket’s embarrassing ink takes a backseat.
But then the world is saved, his broken bones heal and Becket is still there and still walks around in lumpy sweaters like it’s the fucking Arctic.
So Chuck does what anyone would do.
He pours a cup of scalding coffee over the man during a late breakfast one day.
Raleigh yowls, grabs his sweater and rips it off at record speeds, holding it far, far away from himself. It drips sadly and steams a little. Possibly, Chuck should have at least put milk in there to cool it off a little.
“What the fuck, Chuck?!” he hollers, pissed-off as hell.
Herc, who is well aware of Chuck’s little project (fuck the Drift, no secrets in it), doesn’t look very pleased, either.
Chuck shrugs. “Sorry man, tripped.”
He’s not even trying to make it sound sincere because he’s more or less transfixed by what he’s seeing.
It is ink that’s got Raleigh hiding all the time. And not just a little heart with a dagger through it. It’s a giant-ass grey scale of a gravestone, with the words In memory of written above it and a name on the marker. The details are pretty good, Chuck thinks, but can’t really appreciate them from across the table. Also, he’s distracted by the other tat Raleigh sports, right above his heart.
“Who the fuck is Abel?” he asks, brain-mouth filter shot by the fact that Becket is actually hot as fuck. All pilots are fit, but damn.
The look his question gets him is… he’d call it terrifying, but he’s had Kaiju trying to eat him, and that’s not it. Vicious is maybe a better word. Becket stands, throws his soaking sweater over his shoulders like a fucking cape and stalks out of the cafeteria like a man on the warpath.
Herc takes step closer and cuffs Chuck upside the head none too gently.
“You’re an asshole, son,” he says. but they’re both watching the other pilot leave and Chuck doesn’t think he’s the only one noticing the hints of more ink spilling out from beneath the edge of Raleigh’s sweater-cape.
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2
“Hey, Becket?” Chuck asks, carefully, because the look in the older man’s eyes earlier was… well, murder, and he’s too young to die so tragically.
Raleigh is sitting with his back against one of Gipsy’s epaulettes, legs drawn up to his chest, feet wedged against a ridge to keep him in place. His beloved Jaeger is lost forever, but the techs are working overtime on creating a dummy version of her from spare parts. Not functional, but good enough for a museum. The Jaeger that saved the world. If they could, they’d dunk her pilots in amber and put them on exhibit, too.
It’s not the real Gipsy, but it’s close enough for Raleigh, Chuck guesses.
He’s smoking.
Chuck, who has followed the famous Becket Brothers’ life through magazine spreads, interviews and videos since he was a little kid, knows for a fact that Raleigh does not smoke.
The other pilot rubs a hand over his face, glowing butt between his fingers and it’s really unfair that someone gave a man who already looks like sex on legs a damn cigarette.
Chuck’s buttons are pushed.
He swallows and rips his gaze away from the smoke now dangling from those perfect lips and… meets the frigid gaze of the man he assaulted with scalding coffee only a few hours ago.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts. It was an accident, he means to add, but what comes out instead is, “I just wanted to see your ink.”
And in doing so, obviously fucked something up. Spectacularly. But hey, he was raised by a giant robot and the most emotionally constipated man to ever walk the earth. They didn’t even manage to hug before a suicide run. It’s a pretty good excuse for how Chuck turned out.
Raleigh takes another drag, exhales noisily and then guns the butt against the wall behind Gipsy, where it drops a dozen storeys and probably fizzles out on the cement floor. He closes his eyes. “You could have fucking asked, Hansen.”
Ouch. They were on a first name basis this morning.
“I’m sorry.”
One eye opens, half amused at the way Chuck can barely open his mouth enough to say it. “Come again?”
He glowers. “You heard me.”
“Yeah, I did. And I wanna hear it again, kid.” Getting ordered around by Raleigh fucking Becket should not be turning Chuck on.
Nothing about that washed-up loser should be turning him on. It’s the story of Chuck’s fucking life.
“Sorry.”
This one earns him a chuckle as Raleigh’s hands start wandering down to his pockets, pulling out a pack of smokes and a lighter. He lights up almost without conscious thought, goes right back to smoking like he didn’t just finish.
Chuck takes not being kicked off of Gipsy’s scaffolding as permission to take a few steps closer and sit down. “Since when are you a fucking chain smoker?”
Raleigh laughs, twirls the cancer stick between his fingers, studies it briefly. “Since I was fourteen,” he finally admits. He takes a long drag and Chuck can actually hear the paper crinkle and burn. Then the half finished cigarette gets fired into oblivion, the same way the last one did. “Stopped though, almost ten years ago.”
Roughly around the time he signed up, then.
Chuck leans his head back against a beam, remembers the one and only time Herc caught him smoking. He was sixteen and a man. His father sat him down and made him smoke the whole pack until he was sick as a dog and wanted to die.
“My dad almost killed me when I tried,” he admits, after a lengthy pause, where Raleigh keeps turning the pack of cigarettes over and over in his hands like he really, really wants another.
A laugh. “Hell, mine taught me how.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
That… doesn’t fit with anything Chuck thought he knew about the man next to him. But then, neither do the tattoos.
They stay up there for a good long while.
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3
Chuck hates kissing hands and shaking babies. Or whatever. He’s not good with people and everyone knows it. He’s worse with kids.
So usually, when the saviours of the world go out to rub elbows with the peasants, he hides himself away somewhere with Max and no-one calls him on it. It’s a working system.
Which is why it’s supremely unfair that there is suddenly a kid toddling around the ‘dome on two wobbly feet, adorable grin on her miniature face. And she’s coming right at him. Her pudgy hands are outstretched and she’s babbling in a language that he’s too terrified to analyze. And then -
(He’s not panicking. But it’s a close thing.)
- she smacks into his calves, holds on and gives him a toothy grin.
Automatically, Chuck’s arms rise high in the air, away from her, and he might stop breathing. Possibly. Who knows where that kid has been?
“Get that off me!” he demands (whimpers).
On either side of him, Herc and Raleigh are laughing their asses off.
Fucking assholes.
The sprog starts trying to climb him and he’s seriously considering kicking her off, because tiny person climbing him, when Raleigh takes pity on him and grabs her under the arms, hauling her up. He sets her on his hip in one practiced move, one hand going under her diapered bum, the other behind her back to support her. She immediately zeroes in on his dogtags and he laughs, dips her backwards away from him and then back up.
The kid screeches with laughter, sufficiently distracted from the shiny, and he asks, “And who do you belong to, sweetheart?”
She babbles something in answer.
“Ah,” Herc says, watching the tableau with something close to the shock Chuck knows his own face is showing. Of course Raleigh fucking Becket handles toddlers like a pro. “That’s German.”
“Oh,” Raleigh beams. “That means you’re probably Hermann’s little princess, right? Johanna?”
She bobs her tiny head hard enough to make it almost fly off and then starts to struggle suddenly. The pilot doesn’t even flinch as she starts flailing her limbs, just does some complicated manoeuvring with his hands that ends with her sitting backwards on his forearm, her back to his chest, his free arm belted across her stomach.
She’s effectively flailing at nothing now while he looks around for the source of her agitation and finds it limping closer with his cane on one side and his wife on his other.
Raleigh hoists the kid a little higher, “That yours?” he asks, and when the woman - Vanessa - nods, he sets the kid down and lets her go with a swat to her cushioned bum.
She smacks right into her mother the same way she smacked into Chuck, only Vanessa does as Raleigh did and raises her up immediately.
“Sorry,” she greets as soon as they’re close enough. “she’s constantly running off lately.”
Chuck bites his tongue and does not suggest a leash. He looks down at Max, sitting docilely at Herc’s feet. Yeah, he’ll take his dog over kids any day.
Raleigh laughs it off. “Wait until she’s tall enough to start reaching things. That’s when the real fun starts.”
He sounds like he’s speaking from experience.
“I didn’t know you had children, Mr. Becket,” the female Gottlieb (the adult one) says. Hermann looks interested, too, all of a sudden. As does everyone else within earshot.
Raleigh smiles in that crooked aw-shucks way of his that absolutely doesn’t do anything for Chuck and says, “I don’t.”
The lie’s decent enough, straight-faced and all, but his hand rises and briefly touches on his left side, right where the second tattoo is and Chuck feels a rush of vertigo as he understands.
The Gottliebs thank them for stopping their toddling menace from falling into the harbour and then wander off, leaving the three pilots alone. Herc makes some noises about getting back to work, but Chuck isn’t paying attention to his old man.
“You had a son,” he says, abruptly. “You had a son and his name was Abel.”
Herc locks his jaw and Raleigh’s eyes flash with... something. Grief and rage and hate and the need to punch someone (Chuck) in the face, probably. It’s blinding and looking at it hurts.
Great going there, Hansen.
But Raleigh shakes it off and gives a brief, bitter bark of laughter. He grabs Chuck by the scruff of his neck and instead of the fist he expects, Chuck gets a face full of pilot when Raleigh bumps their foreheads together. Hard. His fingers dig into the top of Chuck’s back with enough force to leave bruises.
“You’re a fucking asshole, Hansen,” he says, almost conversationally.
Then he takes off.
Chuck has a feeling he’ll find the older man up on top of the fake Gipsy’s shoulders, smoking up a storm.
He doesn’t go looking for him.
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4
“Have you seen Becket?” he asks Mako two days later. The man’s been avoiding him and he thinks he may owe him another apology, goddamn.
His fellow pilot gives him a long look, like she’s considering whether or not he’s worth the information. Or probably if she should punch him for hurting her precious Raleigh-poo.
“You asked Raleigh about his son,” she finally says, instead of anything else.
Of course he told her. Of fucking course.
Uncomfortable with admitting that he was really just thinking out loud (and a bit smug over figuring it out), he shrugs.
“Raleigh does not like being reminded of his life before the PPDC,” Mako tells him. Yeah, thanks. He figured that out, what with the hidden tattoos, the weird behaviour and the things he never speaks about.
It’s like Raleigh fucking Becket was born the day he signed up to be a pilot.
“No shit,” he mutters. And then, because he knows the man himself won’t tell him, he asks, “The kid died, right?”
The look that gets him lets him know he’s being an asshole again. What else is new? But then Miss Mori must see something because she purses her lips briefly and then waves him into her room, shutting the door behind them.
Chuck wants to make a crack about wanting dinner and a movie first, but he doesn’t want her to kill him with her sneaky ninja ways.
She motions for him to sit. Unwillingly, he does.
After a long silence to sort out her thoughts, she speaks. “Abel and his stepmother died shortly before Abel’s fourth birthday.”
The way she says it reminds Chuck that they’ve Drifted. Raleigh’s memories are Mako’s. That means his loss is hers, too. She’s probably mourning the kid like he was her own, the same way both Chuck and Herc mourned Angela all over again after their first Drift.
Chuck mourned his mother like one would a wife and Herc his wife like one would a mother.
No wonder they’re all fucked up.
“Kaiju?” he asks.
She nods. “Indirectly. Kaiju Blue in the water. It killed them both.”
So that’s why Raleigh joined up. It’s a common enough story. All of them have one, a lost wife, mother, brother. But a three-year-old kid. Jesus fuck.
He takes a breath, lets it out.
“I have told you this in confidence, Ranger Hansen,” Mako goes on. “And only so you would stop asking Ja- Raleigh about things that hurt him. His past is not a happy place for him to be.”
Warning received, loud and clear.
“Thanks, Mori,” he says, and lets himself out, Max following dutifully after.
He wonders what name she was going to call Raleigh, there, at the end.
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5
“Should we start calling you the Mori Siblings?” Tendo asks during lunch one day, taking in the way Mako and Raleigh have tangled themselves into each other on the narrow cafeteria bench. Since Herc and Chuck are sitting close enough to touch from ankle to shoulder, Chuck is keeping the snarky commentary down to a minimum.
Raleigh fires one of his chips at the other man. “Don’t even. You’re the one who started that whole Becket Brothers shit.”
Tendo returns fire. “Nah, man. Not my fault the PR people picked it up and ran with it.”
Chuck blinks. “Wait? What’s there to run with?”
The Becket Brothers are the Becket Brothers, right?
Raleigh grimaces. “Yancy wasn’t my biological brother. We kept calling each other brother though, in the early days. Tendo made a crack about how I should just change my name and some press asshole was around to hear it. They made up this whole schtick about us being related.” His face smoothes out into a self-deprecating grin. “Guess giving me a fake past that fit Yance’s was better than anyone digging up my real past.”
“It was the early days of the programme,” Mako offers, “The PPDC needed all the good PR they could get.”
“It’s why I cover up my ink,” Raleigh agrees, without really agreeing.
The two all-American Beckets were just that. An easy sell, good PR, something to parade for the desperate, frightened masses.
And yeah, Chuck has figured out by now that some of Raleigh’s past is fudged, seeing as how no picture shows his ink and no CV ever mentions his kid and the mother who presumably went with it. But to hear that it was all fake?
He’d say there goes his childhood crush, but he’d be lying. And his old man is side-eying him like he knows exactly what’s going on in Chuck’s head. In revenge, Chuck steals the last of his broccoli. He hates the stuff, but Herc loves it.
He chews and swallows as dickishly as he can, grinning at his father the whole time, while Tendo asks, “So that’s a no on Mr. and Ms. Mori?”
They both nod. “Definitely.”
And Chuck wants to know, “So what’s you actual last name, if Becket’s fake?”
Mako and Raleigh prove that ghost drifting exists by acting like one person. Again. Raleigh sticks out his right arm, Mako pushes up the sleeve, Raleigh turns it and Mako says, “Teller.”
John Teller. That’s the name on the gravestone Chuck couldn’t read the one and only time he’s seen it before.
Herc points at it with his fork. “Your father?”
“Yeah.”
And Chuck remembers “Ja-Raleigh” and wonders if he’s named after his father. John Teller Jr.? Or just J. Teller?
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+1 (the one time someone finally spells it out for Chuck)
Press conferences are every bit as bad as kissing hands and shaking babies, minus the added advantage of there being a crowd to get lost in. Instead they’re all neatly strung up behind a table, each with their own mike, answering questions like well-trained monkeys.
And the old man wouldn’t even let Chuck bring Max.
Being famous sucks balls.
So Chuck tries to entertain himself by making up shit about the reporters, like who slept with whom and who’s wearing sexy underwear and has ink or piercings hidden somewhere. Useless stuff, but marginally entertaining. And with the added bonus of Herc not skinning him alive afterwards because he said something dumb. Again.
(Yay. )
So at first, when the question comes, Chuck isn’t actually sure he heard correctly. It takes a full five seconds for him to parse the words because it’s so ridiculous.
Herc says something about answering one more relevant question and a guy in the last row raises his hand and asks, “Raleigh?” (Chuck hates how these people always call them by their first names, like they’re old friends.) “Is it true that you used to be a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang?”
Which, what?
Is that...? Really?
And then Raleigh is already leaning into his mike, saying, “I thought Marshal Hansen said ‘relevant questions’?” He tags his smarmiest grin onto it and everyone giggles a little and swoons a lot and then it’s over.
They’re all in a little anteroom and Chuck wants to say something like, “How ridiculous can you get?”, when Herc turns his do-not-fuck-with-me gaze on Becket and asks, “Do you know where he could have gotten that information from?”
And Raleigh shrugs like it’s no big deal and says, “Not from my hometown.”
“Are you sure?”
He gives Herc his own version of that look, which is, admittedly, more impressive, because he’s usually all puppy-dog eagerness and smiles. Shit, Raleigh Becket is scary. “My people run that town. The info didn’t come from there.”
He has people? What the fuck?
He doesn’t realize he’s actually said that out loud until Mako quietly excuses herself and Herc rolls his eyes and follows her, muttering about damage control and fuck Stacks for leaving him with this whole mess. Within seconds, it’s only Chuck and apparently-a-former-outlaw-biker Raleigh Becket.
“What the fuck?” he repeats, just to make sure the sentiment gets across. “You were a gangbanger?”
“MC member,” Raleigh corrects, edge in his voice. Right. Gangbangers probably don’t like being called gangbangers.
“What the fuck?!”
And that gets him a sigh and suddenly Raleigh spins on his heel and for a moment Chuck thinks he’s walking out, but then he pulls his shitty sweater (less lumpy than usual, admittedly, because of the conference) over his head and bares his back and -
- Chuck’s brain stalls a little because there is another tattoo, the one he only glimpsed in the cafeteria that day and it’s... big.
That’s his first thought. Big and black and kind of old school. A reaper covers most of the pilot’s back, scythe at the ready. Above and below in bold letters Sons of Anarchy - California.
Sh-eeeeeet.
Chuck would really like to say something right now, but his blood kind of left his upstairs brain and he’s... shit but that’s hot.
“Guh,” he says and doesn’t pick his jaw up off the floor until Raleigh’s got his clothes back on and is laughing at his face.
“That’s...,” Hot. Sexy. Deadly. Fucking gorgeous. “big,” he finishes, lamely.
Then, grasping for something to say, he asks, “How’d you go from that to this?”
Because that ink tells of dedication and he can’t really imagine the man in front of him on a bike. The cognitive dissonance between goody-two-shoes and outlaw-biker is too big for him to wrap his brain around, especially what with the diverted blood flow.
Raleigh rubs a hand over his face in a gesture Chuck suddenly recognizes as belonging to the other person, the one who has ink and smokes too much. He fumbles for a pack of cigarettes that’s not there, then slumps into a nearby chair, fingers tapping a rhythm on his thighs.
“Abel and Tara,” he says and Chuck files the second name away for later. “They were the last straw. Before that... I was fucking tired of the life. The blood, the violence, the drugs, the fucking gunrunning. After the funeral, I left my cut and my bike at the clubhouse and got the fuck out of there.”
He even talks differently, that person. Slower, dirtier. But then, Raleigh’s mouth has been progressively getting filthier lately.
And what the fuck is a cut?
“You going back now?” His family is avenged and, well, Chuck can’t help but think that what he’s been watching these past few weeks has been a ... merging, of sorts, of has-been and is-now.
The older man shrugs. “Dunno. I’d like to, some days, but the Sons are a one-percenter. They don’t take kindly to runners.”
“One-percenter?”
Banging his head against the wall and staring at the ceiling, Raleigh explains, “Some asshole once said that ninety-nine percent of all motorcycle clubs in America are law-abiding.”
He leaves the rest unsaid for Chuck to figure it out himself.
He does.
Along with a few other things, like a gravestone tattooed on an arm and a reaper along the entirety of a man’s back, of throwaway comments about gunrunning and drugs, of how Raleigh’s fighting style is the kind of vicious, dirty dog-style that no military in the world teaches and of the anger management issues that sometimes show through and the fact that the PPDC has tried to make all of it disappear.
And he realizes that, along with being a former gangbanger, Chuck’s childhood hero is also, most likely, a criminal and a murderer and fuck knows what else.
He gropes around for an appropriate reaction (horror would be good, he thinks, or disgust, or something), but he really just wants an answer to his fucking question. “So are you going back?”
Laughter.
Raleigh slouches further down in his seat and laughs, the kind of loud, free laugh only Mako and Max usually get out of him and then he’s suddenly rolling to his feet, all smooth grace and swaggering (swaggering!) over to Chuck.
He grabs him by the neck again, bumps their foreheads together and, laughter still clear in his voice, he says, “Nah, I don’t think so. At least not permanently. Charming’s not home anymore.”
He sounds sad, even through his amusement, but not in a bad way. Not in the gutted way he spoke about Yancy a few weeks ago, before their last drop. (Kind of like the way Chuck talks about his mother, these days, and Mako about her family. He thinks the word for that is healed.)
He reels Chuck in, tucks him under one arm and presses a sloppy kiss against his temple, still smiling.
“No need to worry your pretty head, baby Hansen,” he mutters against the younger pilot’s hair, fondly. Chuck can feel the grin against his scalp.
He lets himself stay there for a moment, all wrapped up in Raleigh’s stupidly attractive arms and horrible sweater and then mutters, “Fuck you.”
Because getting the last words in is sort of what he does.
“Yeah,” Raleigh chuckles, “sure.”
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So, that was my first time in either fandom. Concrit, please?!
Title: Spy Games
Summary: In which Chuck isn’t really subtle. Or: five times Chuck suspected Raleigh Becket was more than he seemed, and one time he actually figured it out. - AKA a sort of fill for a PR Kinkmeme prompt.
Warnings: General spoilers for both, show and movie, a little slash, language and Chuck's inner monologue, which is a little cracktastic. I think the fact that I wrote this in under an hour deserves a warning, too. Unbeta-ed.
Rating: R for language
Words: 4k+
Disclaimer: I'm a poor teacher who owns nothing. Respective creators/owners do.
A/N: So, this isn’t actually a fill for the prompt, unless you count “SoA/PC fusion fic” as a fill, because I took that bit and ran with it. And this is the result. So here, have the five plus one fic no-one asked for but I wrote anyway.
I hope I didn't miss the characters by too big a margin, and that the OP has at least a little fun with this.
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Spy Games
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1
Ra-h-leigh doesn’t take his shirt off.
Which is not to say that Chuck wants that washed-up has-been to strip, or anything, but it’s kind of something he notices. It’s hot inside the Shatterdome on principle because there are no windows and a whole damn lot of giant machines and everyone runs around in t-shirts or tanks.
Except for Pentecost, but that man’s a cyborg anyway.
And Becket, who wears his ugly, lumpy sweaters like he’s on a fishing boat in fucking Alaska, and not inside a giant metal structure with shitty AC.
Chuck gets hot just watching the guy. (Shut up, not like that.)
The one time the asshole actually strips down to a t-shirt is in the Kwoon. His left arm is criss-crossed with scar tissue from his drivesuit and at first Chuck thinks the little girl is just self-conscious because he’s not pretty anymore. Then he notices that Becket’s entire right forearm is taped up.
It’s not to stabilize anything because it’s only a single layer, neatly wound round and round, but it’s still there. Covering something. Something that’s not a scar, because Becket wears his scars openly. Well, at least right now.
Chuck draws the only possible conclusions: Either Becket is a cutter, or he’s got his momma’s name inked on his arm, or something equally dumb. Drunk tattooed, probably. It’s the kind of thing a washed-up has-been would do.
Now Chuck absolutely has to know what’s under there. Has to, has to, has to. (And no, that’s not childish at all. He’s 21 years old, he’s a grown ass-man. It’s not childish.)
So he plans. And briefly gets distracted by the way the has-been wipes the floor with all his drift-potentials, almost blows up the Shatterdome and then saves Hong Kong (and Chuck’s ass), followed by the whole world.
It’s understandable that, somewhere in all the panic of dying-not-dying, blowing up the Breach, and saving the fucking world, Raleigh Becket’s embarrassing ink takes a backseat.
But then the world is saved, his broken bones heal and Becket is still there and still walks around in lumpy sweaters like it’s the fucking Arctic.
So Chuck does what anyone would do.
He pours a cup of scalding coffee over the man during a late breakfast one day.
Raleigh yowls, grabs his sweater and rips it off at record speeds, holding it far, far away from himself. It drips sadly and steams a little. Possibly, Chuck should have at least put milk in there to cool it off a little.
“What the fuck, Chuck?!” he hollers, pissed-off as hell.
Herc, who is well aware of Chuck’s little project (fuck the Drift, no secrets in it), doesn’t look very pleased, either.
Chuck shrugs. “Sorry man, tripped.”
He’s not even trying to make it sound sincere because he’s more or less transfixed by what he’s seeing.
It is ink that’s got Raleigh hiding all the time. And not just a little heart with a dagger through it. It’s a giant-ass grey scale of a gravestone, with the words In memory of written above it and a name on the marker. The details are pretty good, Chuck thinks, but can’t really appreciate them from across the table. Also, he’s distracted by the other tat Raleigh sports, right above his heart.
“Who the fuck is Abel?” he asks, brain-mouth filter shot by the fact that Becket is actually hot as fuck. All pilots are fit, but damn.
The look his question gets him is… he’d call it terrifying, but he’s had Kaiju trying to eat him, and that’s not it. Vicious is maybe a better word. Becket stands, throws his soaking sweater over his shoulders like a fucking cape and stalks out of the cafeteria like a man on the warpath.
Herc takes step closer and cuffs Chuck upside the head none too gently.
“You’re an asshole, son,” he says. but they’re both watching the other pilot leave and Chuck doesn’t think he’s the only one noticing the hints of more ink spilling out from beneath the edge of Raleigh’s sweater-cape.
+
2
“Hey, Becket?” Chuck asks, carefully, because the look in the older man’s eyes earlier was… well, murder, and he’s too young to die so tragically.
Raleigh is sitting with his back against one of Gipsy’s epaulettes, legs drawn up to his chest, feet wedged against a ridge to keep him in place. His beloved Jaeger is lost forever, but the techs are working overtime on creating a dummy version of her from spare parts. Not functional, but good enough for a museum. The Jaeger that saved the world. If they could, they’d dunk her pilots in amber and put them on exhibit, too.
It’s not the real Gipsy, but it’s close enough for Raleigh, Chuck guesses.
He’s smoking.
Chuck, who has followed the famous Becket Brothers’ life through magazine spreads, interviews and videos since he was a little kid, knows for a fact that Raleigh does not smoke.
The other pilot rubs a hand over his face, glowing butt between his fingers and it’s really unfair that someone gave a man who already looks like sex on legs a damn cigarette.
Chuck’s buttons are pushed.
He swallows and rips his gaze away from the smoke now dangling from those perfect lips and… meets the frigid gaze of the man he assaulted with scalding coffee only a few hours ago.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts. It was an accident, he means to add, but what comes out instead is, “I just wanted to see your ink.”
And in doing so, obviously fucked something up. Spectacularly. But hey, he was raised by a giant robot and the most emotionally constipated man to ever walk the earth. They didn’t even manage to hug before a suicide run. It’s a pretty good excuse for how Chuck turned out.
Raleigh takes another drag, exhales noisily and then guns the butt against the wall behind Gipsy, where it drops a dozen storeys and probably fizzles out on the cement floor. He closes his eyes. “You could have fucking asked, Hansen.”
Ouch. They were on a first name basis this morning.
“I’m sorry.”
One eye opens, half amused at the way Chuck can barely open his mouth enough to say it. “Come again?”
He glowers. “You heard me.”
“Yeah, I did. And I wanna hear it again, kid.” Getting ordered around by Raleigh fucking Becket should not be turning Chuck on.
Nothing about that washed-up loser should be turning him on. It’s the story of Chuck’s fucking life.
“Sorry.”
This one earns him a chuckle as Raleigh’s hands start wandering down to his pockets, pulling out a pack of smokes and a lighter. He lights up almost without conscious thought, goes right back to smoking like he didn’t just finish.
Chuck takes not being kicked off of Gipsy’s scaffolding as permission to take a few steps closer and sit down. “Since when are you a fucking chain smoker?”
Raleigh laughs, twirls the cancer stick between his fingers, studies it briefly. “Since I was fourteen,” he finally admits. He takes a long drag and Chuck can actually hear the paper crinkle and burn. Then the half finished cigarette gets fired into oblivion, the same way the last one did. “Stopped though, almost ten years ago.”
Roughly around the time he signed up, then.
Chuck leans his head back against a beam, remembers the one and only time Herc caught him smoking. He was sixteen and a man. His father sat him down and made him smoke the whole pack until he was sick as a dog and wanted to die.
“My dad almost killed me when I tried,” he admits, after a lengthy pause, where Raleigh keeps turning the pack of cigarettes over and over in his hands like he really, really wants another.
A laugh. “Hell, mine taught me how.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
That… doesn’t fit with anything Chuck thought he knew about the man next to him. But then, neither do the tattoos.
They stay up there for a good long while.
+
3
Chuck hates kissing hands and shaking babies. Or whatever. He’s not good with people and everyone knows it. He’s worse with kids.
So usually, when the saviours of the world go out to rub elbows with the peasants, he hides himself away somewhere with Max and no-one calls him on it. It’s a working system.
Which is why it’s supremely unfair that there is suddenly a kid toddling around the ‘dome on two wobbly feet, adorable grin on her miniature face. And she’s coming right at him. Her pudgy hands are outstretched and she’s babbling in a language that he’s too terrified to analyze. And then -
(He’s not panicking. But it’s a close thing.)
- she smacks into his calves, holds on and gives him a toothy grin.
Automatically, Chuck’s arms rise high in the air, away from her, and he might stop breathing. Possibly. Who knows where that kid has been?
“Get that off me!” he demands (whimpers).
On either side of him, Herc and Raleigh are laughing their asses off.
Fucking assholes.
The sprog starts trying to climb him and he’s seriously considering kicking her off, because tiny person climbing him, when Raleigh takes pity on him and grabs her under the arms, hauling her up. He sets her on his hip in one practiced move, one hand going under her diapered bum, the other behind her back to support her. She immediately zeroes in on his dogtags and he laughs, dips her backwards away from him and then back up.
The kid screeches with laughter, sufficiently distracted from the shiny, and he asks, “And who do you belong to, sweetheart?”
She babbles something in answer.
“Ah,” Herc says, watching the tableau with something close to the shock Chuck knows his own face is showing. Of course Raleigh fucking Becket handles toddlers like a pro. “That’s German.”
“Oh,” Raleigh beams. “That means you’re probably Hermann’s little princess, right? Johanna?”
She bobs her tiny head hard enough to make it almost fly off and then starts to struggle suddenly. The pilot doesn’t even flinch as she starts flailing her limbs, just does some complicated manoeuvring with his hands that ends with her sitting backwards on his forearm, her back to his chest, his free arm belted across her stomach.
She’s effectively flailing at nothing now while he looks around for the source of her agitation and finds it limping closer with his cane on one side and his wife on his other.
Raleigh hoists the kid a little higher, “That yours?” he asks, and when the woman - Vanessa - nods, he sets the kid down and lets her go with a swat to her cushioned bum.
She smacks right into her mother the same way she smacked into Chuck, only Vanessa does as Raleigh did and raises her up immediately.
“Sorry,” she greets as soon as they’re close enough. “she’s constantly running off lately.”
Chuck bites his tongue and does not suggest a leash. He looks down at Max, sitting docilely at Herc’s feet. Yeah, he’ll take his dog over kids any day.
Raleigh laughs it off. “Wait until she’s tall enough to start reaching things. That’s when the real fun starts.”
He sounds like he’s speaking from experience.
“I didn’t know you had children, Mr. Becket,” the female Gottlieb (the adult one) says. Hermann looks interested, too, all of a sudden. As does everyone else within earshot.
Raleigh smiles in that crooked aw-shucks way of his that absolutely doesn’t do anything for Chuck and says, “I don’t.”
The lie’s decent enough, straight-faced and all, but his hand rises and briefly touches on his left side, right where the second tattoo is and Chuck feels a rush of vertigo as he understands.
The Gottliebs thank them for stopping their toddling menace from falling into the harbour and then wander off, leaving the three pilots alone. Herc makes some noises about getting back to work, but Chuck isn’t paying attention to his old man.
“You had a son,” he says, abruptly. “You had a son and his name was Abel.”
Herc locks his jaw and Raleigh’s eyes flash with... something. Grief and rage and hate and the need to punch someone (Chuck) in the face, probably. It’s blinding and looking at it hurts.
Great going there, Hansen.
But Raleigh shakes it off and gives a brief, bitter bark of laughter. He grabs Chuck by the scruff of his neck and instead of the fist he expects, Chuck gets a face full of pilot when Raleigh bumps their foreheads together. Hard. His fingers dig into the top of Chuck’s back with enough force to leave bruises.
“You’re a fucking asshole, Hansen,” he says, almost conversationally.
Then he takes off.
Chuck has a feeling he’ll find the older man up on top of the fake Gipsy’s shoulders, smoking up a storm.
He doesn’t go looking for him.
+
4
“Have you seen Becket?” he asks Mako two days later. The man’s been avoiding him and he thinks he may owe him another apology, goddamn.
His fellow pilot gives him a long look, like she’s considering whether or not he’s worth the information. Or probably if she should punch him for hurting her precious Raleigh-poo.
“You asked Raleigh about his son,” she finally says, instead of anything else.
Of course he told her. Of fucking course.
Uncomfortable with admitting that he was really just thinking out loud (and a bit smug over figuring it out), he shrugs.
“Raleigh does not like being reminded of his life before the PPDC,” Mako tells him. Yeah, thanks. He figured that out, what with the hidden tattoos, the weird behaviour and the things he never speaks about.
It’s like Raleigh fucking Becket was born the day he signed up to be a pilot.
“No shit,” he mutters. And then, because he knows the man himself won’t tell him, he asks, “The kid died, right?”
The look that gets him lets him know he’s being an asshole again. What else is new? But then Miss Mori must see something because she purses her lips briefly and then waves him into her room, shutting the door behind them.
Chuck wants to make a crack about wanting dinner and a movie first, but he doesn’t want her to kill him with her sneaky ninja ways.
She motions for him to sit. Unwillingly, he does.
After a long silence to sort out her thoughts, she speaks. “Abel and his stepmother died shortly before Abel’s fourth birthday.”
The way she says it reminds Chuck that they’ve Drifted. Raleigh’s memories are Mako’s. That means his loss is hers, too. She’s probably mourning the kid like he was her own, the same way both Chuck and Herc mourned Angela all over again after their first Drift.
Chuck mourned his mother like one would a wife and Herc his wife like one would a mother.
No wonder they’re all fucked up.
“Kaiju?” he asks.
She nods. “Indirectly. Kaiju Blue in the water. It killed them both.”
So that’s why Raleigh joined up. It’s a common enough story. All of them have one, a lost wife, mother, brother. But a three-year-old kid. Jesus fuck.
He takes a breath, lets it out.
“I have told you this in confidence, Ranger Hansen,” Mako goes on. “And only so you would stop asking Ja- Raleigh about things that hurt him. His past is not a happy place for him to be.”
Warning received, loud and clear.
“Thanks, Mori,” he says, and lets himself out, Max following dutifully after.
He wonders what name she was going to call Raleigh, there, at the end.
+
5
“Should we start calling you the Mori Siblings?” Tendo asks during lunch one day, taking in the way Mako and Raleigh have tangled themselves into each other on the narrow cafeteria bench. Since Herc and Chuck are sitting close enough to touch from ankle to shoulder, Chuck is keeping the snarky commentary down to a minimum.
Raleigh fires one of his chips at the other man. “Don’t even. You’re the one who started that whole Becket Brothers shit.”
Tendo returns fire. “Nah, man. Not my fault the PR people picked it up and ran with it.”
Chuck blinks. “Wait? What’s there to run with?”
The Becket Brothers are the Becket Brothers, right?
Raleigh grimaces. “Yancy wasn’t my biological brother. We kept calling each other brother though, in the early days. Tendo made a crack about how I should just change my name and some press asshole was around to hear it. They made up this whole schtick about us being related.” His face smoothes out into a self-deprecating grin. “Guess giving me a fake past that fit Yance’s was better than anyone digging up my real past.”
“It was the early days of the programme,” Mako offers, “The PPDC needed all the good PR they could get.”
“It’s why I cover up my ink,” Raleigh agrees, without really agreeing.
The two all-American Beckets were just that. An easy sell, good PR, something to parade for the desperate, frightened masses.
And yeah, Chuck has figured out by now that some of Raleigh’s past is fudged, seeing as how no picture shows his ink and no CV ever mentions his kid and the mother who presumably went with it. But to hear that it was all fake?
He’d say there goes his childhood crush, but he’d be lying. And his old man is side-eying him like he knows exactly what’s going on in Chuck’s head. In revenge, Chuck steals the last of his broccoli. He hates the stuff, but Herc loves it.
He chews and swallows as dickishly as he can, grinning at his father the whole time, while Tendo asks, “So that’s a no on Mr. and Ms. Mori?”
They both nod. “Definitely.”
And Chuck wants to know, “So what’s you actual last name, if Becket’s fake?”
Mako and Raleigh prove that ghost drifting exists by acting like one person. Again. Raleigh sticks out his right arm, Mako pushes up the sleeve, Raleigh turns it and Mako says, “Teller.”
John Teller. That’s the name on the gravestone Chuck couldn’t read the one and only time he’s seen it before.
Herc points at it with his fork. “Your father?”
“Yeah.”
And Chuck remembers “Ja-Raleigh” and wonders if he’s named after his father. John Teller Jr.? Or just J. Teller?
+
+1 (the one time someone finally spells it out for Chuck)
Press conferences are every bit as bad as kissing hands and shaking babies, minus the added advantage of there being a crowd to get lost in. Instead they’re all neatly strung up behind a table, each with their own mike, answering questions like well-trained monkeys.
And the old man wouldn’t even let Chuck bring Max.
Being famous sucks balls.
So Chuck tries to entertain himself by making up shit about the reporters, like who slept with whom and who’s wearing sexy underwear and has ink or piercings hidden somewhere. Useless stuff, but marginally entertaining. And with the added bonus of Herc not skinning him alive afterwards because he said something dumb. Again.
(Yay. )
So at first, when the question comes, Chuck isn’t actually sure he heard correctly. It takes a full five seconds for him to parse the words because it’s so ridiculous.
Herc says something about answering one more relevant question and a guy in the last row raises his hand and asks, “Raleigh?” (Chuck hates how these people always call them by their first names, like they’re old friends.) “Is it true that you used to be a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang?”
Which, what?
Is that...? Really?
And then Raleigh is already leaning into his mike, saying, “I thought Marshal Hansen said ‘relevant questions’?” He tags his smarmiest grin onto it and everyone giggles a little and swoons a lot and then it’s over.
They’re all in a little anteroom and Chuck wants to say something like, “How ridiculous can you get?”, when Herc turns his do-not-fuck-with-me gaze on Becket and asks, “Do you know where he could have gotten that information from?”
And Raleigh shrugs like it’s no big deal and says, “Not from my hometown.”
“Are you sure?”
He gives Herc his own version of that look, which is, admittedly, more impressive, because he’s usually all puppy-dog eagerness and smiles. Shit, Raleigh Becket is scary. “My people run that town. The info didn’t come from there.”
He has people? What the fuck?
He doesn’t realize he’s actually said that out loud until Mako quietly excuses herself and Herc rolls his eyes and follows her, muttering about damage control and fuck Stacks for leaving him with this whole mess. Within seconds, it’s only Chuck and apparently-a-former-outlaw-biker Raleigh Becket.
“What the fuck?” he repeats, just to make sure the sentiment gets across. “You were a gangbanger?”
“MC member,” Raleigh corrects, edge in his voice. Right. Gangbangers probably don’t like being called gangbangers.
“What the fuck?!”
And that gets him a sigh and suddenly Raleigh spins on his heel and for a moment Chuck thinks he’s walking out, but then he pulls his shitty sweater (less lumpy than usual, admittedly, because of the conference) over his head and bares his back and -
- Chuck’s brain stalls a little because there is another tattoo, the one he only glimpsed in the cafeteria that day and it’s... big.
That’s his first thought. Big and black and kind of old school. A reaper covers most of the pilot’s back, scythe at the ready. Above and below in bold letters Sons of Anarchy - California.
Sh-eeeeeet.
Chuck would really like to say something right now, but his blood kind of left his upstairs brain and he’s... shit but that’s hot.
“Guh,” he says and doesn’t pick his jaw up off the floor until Raleigh’s got his clothes back on and is laughing at his face.
“That’s...,” Hot. Sexy. Deadly. Fucking gorgeous. “big,” he finishes, lamely.
Then, grasping for something to say, he asks, “How’d you go from that to this?”
Because that ink tells of dedication and he can’t really imagine the man in front of him on a bike. The cognitive dissonance between goody-two-shoes and outlaw-biker is too big for him to wrap his brain around, especially what with the diverted blood flow.
Raleigh rubs a hand over his face in a gesture Chuck suddenly recognizes as belonging to the other person, the one who has ink and smokes too much. He fumbles for a pack of cigarettes that’s not there, then slumps into a nearby chair, fingers tapping a rhythm on his thighs.
“Abel and Tara,” he says and Chuck files the second name away for later. “They were the last straw. Before that... I was fucking tired of the life. The blood, the violence, the drugs, the fucking gunrunning. After the funeral, I left my cut and my bike at the clubhouse and got the fuck out of there.”
He even talks differently, that person. Slower, dirtier. But then, Raleigh’s mouth has been progressively getting filthier lately.
And what the fuck is a cut?
“You going back now?” His family is avenged and, well, Chuck can’t help but think that what he’s been watching these past few weeks has been a ... merging, of sorts, of has-been and is-now.
The older man shrugs. “Dunno. I’d like to, some days, but the Sons are a one-percenter. They don’t take kindly to runners.”
“One-percenter?”
Banging his head against the wall and staring at the ceiling, Raleigh explains, “Some asshole once said that ninety-nine percent of all motorcycle clubs in America are law-abiding.”
He leaves the rest unsaid for Chuck to figure it out himself.
He does.
Along with a few other things, like a gravestone tattooed on an arm and a reaper along the entirety of a man’s back, of throwaway comments about gunrunning and drugs, of how Raleigh’s fighting style is the kind of vicious, dirty dog-style that no military in the world teaches and of the anger management issues that sometimes show through and the fact that the PPDC has tried to make all of it disappear.
And he realizes that, along with being a former gangbanger, Chuck’s childhood hero is also, most likely, a criminal and a murderer and fuck knows what else.
He gropes around for an appropriate reaction (horror would be good, he thinks, or disgust, or something), but he really just wants an answer to his fucking question. “So are you going back?”
Laughter.
Raleigh slouches further down in his seat and laughs, the kind of loud, free laugh only Mako and Max usually get out of him and then he’s suddenly rolling to his feet, all smooth grace and swaggering (swaggering!) over to Chuck.
He grabs him by the neck again, bumps their foreheads together and, laughter still clear in his voice, he says, “Nah, I don’t think so. At least not permanently. Charming’s not home anymore.”
He sounds sad, even through his amusement, but not in a bad way. Not in the gutted way he spoke about Yancy a few weeks ago, before their last drop. (Kind of like the way Chuck talks about his mother, these days, and Mako about her family. He thinks the word for that is healed.)
He reels Chuck in, tucks him under one arm and presses a sloppy kiss against his temple, still smiling.
“No need to worry your pretty head, baby Hansen,” he mutters against the younger pilot’s hair, fondly. Chuck can feel the grin against his scalp.
He lets himself stay there for a moment, all wrapped up in Raleigh’s stupidly attractive arms and horrible sweater and then mutters, “Fuck you.”
Because getting the last words in is sort of what he does.
“Yeah,” Raleigh chuckles, “sure.”
+
+
+
So, that was my first time in either fandom. Concrit, please?!