so much older (than I can take) . Pacific Rim . Raleigh/Chuck . One Shot - Part II
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Part I
+
Five days later, Newt spears a piece of peach cobbler (jury’s still out on whether those are real peaches) and points it at Chuck. “Operation Cracker Lacker is a go, by the way.”
“What?”
Behind is dorky glasses, Newt blinks. “Uhm, that thing we talked about? With the...” he makes a hand gesture that might either mean ‘wank off’ or ‘that Pons we’re secretly building in the basement’. The tiny guy is the king of ambivalent gestures.
“What the hell is a Cracker Lacker?” Raleigh asks, confused.
“Good question,” Mako agrees.
Newt shrugs. “It sounded cool. So I used it to name the thing.”
“I think it’s an old slang term,” Hermann supplies, unperturbed by his boyfriend’s shenanigans.
“I think it might be racist,” Chuck adds, brow furrowed. “And also, you’re not allowed to name shit anymore. Hermann, control your boy toy.”
“Hey! I am not Hermann’s...,” frowning, Newt interrupts himself. “Who am I kidding, I am absolutely Hermann’s boy toy. So, we driftin’ or what?”
He makes jazz hands to go with the question. Hermann catches them with his own and puts them in Newt’s lap. It looks like he’s using his nails to force compliance. Chuck approves wholeheartedly. Someone needs to muzzle their resident Kaiju groupie.
“Drifting?” Raleigh asks. It’s kind of adorable, the way he looks when the adults are talking about things he doesn’t understand.
Chuck gives up his pie as a lost cause, shoves to his feet and accepts the crutches Mako hands him, almost without looking.
“Let’s go, bitches,” he tells them.
Surprisingly, they all go.
+
“You... built a Pons. Out of garbage. What for?” Raleigh wants to know, standing in front of a truly... terrifying amalgamation of everything anyone in the ‘dome has ever thrown away.
The only thing Chuck recognizes even vaguely is the set of squid caps dangling over what looks like an upside-down footstool with three legs. It’s screwed onto a piece of drainpipe that spews wires from both ends.
Considering Chuck’s about to attach his brain to that thing, he is not reassured. Still, he puts on a brave face and slaps Raleigh on the back. Hard. “You and me, mate,” he tells the older pilot, “are going to chase a RABIT.”
Before Raleigh can ask any more questions, Mako steps in and does her reasonable and responsible adult face as she explains, “After you told us to forget about your contribution to the list, we talked and realized that Chuck attended your brother’s funeral. He is willing to share the memory with you, if you want. To that end, the doctors have built a Pons for you to use.”
Raleigh looks at Chuck, at the geeks, at Mako, at the Pons, back at Chuck. “You... really?”
If he cries, Chuck’s outta here.
Just sayin’.
“Yeah, dude,” Newt pipes up. “Course we did. Building these things is actually fun. I’m starting to get the hang of it. Didja know you can actually convert sparkplugs into...,” whatever he did to the poor spark plugs will forever remain a mystery because Hermann slaps a hand over his mouth. It’s probably better for Chuck’s sanity to not know.
“Forgive Newton. He gets excited. And yes, Raleigh, really. We agreed, some more voluntarily than others,” he shoots a glare at Newt, but no-one buys that shit anymore, these days, “to see this blasted list through to the end. Your item is part of that list.”
“It’s what friends do,” Mako pipes up, taking the has-been’s hand and squeezing.
Chuck gives the sentimentality in the air a moment to settle before he points one crutch at the hellish contraption at the centre of the room. “So, wanna get our brains fried?”
+
They have both drifted enough times to know how to keep the Drift itself silent and still.
There’s only that strange haze of half-glimpsed memories until Chuck takes a deep breath and lets himself fall backward, away from the dull pain in his leg, from the pressure of the squid cap, the muttering of the scientists calibrating something, the whispers of Mako speaking to Max.
He lets himself fall backwards to six years ago on a fucking freezing afternoon in March, a cemetery in blinding light, too many solemn officials around a hole in the ground.
Raleigh follows after him a second after he slams into his sixteen-year-old body, all gangly limbs and ginger hair. It takes him a moment to orient himself, to remember that he’s not actually that boy, squinting against the sun and hating the world and feeling terrible sad because one of his childhood heroes is being buried without his brother to see him off.
Then he gets a grip on himself and pulls back from his emotions on that day. “Fuck,” he mutters, shaking his head. Next to him, his memory of his father doesn’t even bat an eyelash.
He waves a hand for Raleigh to go ahead, watches the other man step forward, look around. He takes in the faces briefly, then walks straight up to the coffin running a gentle hand over the edge.
He starts talking, low and urgent, all the things he didn’t get to say before, and Chuck forces himself not to hear every word by turning away and walking around the edge of the crowd.
Walking.
On his own two feet, unmangled, unbroken.
Jesus, but he’d almost forgotten already, what that feels like, to have two working legs and take them both for granted.
He sprints, brakes, fucking skips his way around the funeral once, twice, and then gets a damn grip on himself and returns to his proper place in the memory just in time to see Raleigh pick up one of the white roses piled at the foot of the coffin and place it carefully on top.
Chuck’s still not listening in, but there is no way to mistake that shape of the lips for anything other than what it is: “Goodbye.”
He feels it. This is still inside the drift and they are linked, one inside the other’s head and when Raleigh says goodbye to his long dead brother, Chuck feels it.
He hasn’t felt anything like it since Scissure took his mom.
And with that thought, he throws them out of alignment badly enough to slam them back, first into their own minds, and then their bodies.
Raleigh is crying when they bounce back to reality, tears running unchecked down his face, and Mako already has him wrapped in a hug from behind, pressing against him tightly.
Chuck finds himself reaching out, too, then pulls back.
Fucking drift hangover.
He stands and is about to flee as fast as his gimp leg (and doesn’t it hurt twice as bad, now that he remembers being whole again?) will carry him, when Raleigh catches his crutch, stopping him.
“I never got the chance to say goodbye,” he tells Chuck, still crying and still not giving a fuck. “I never thought I would. That was the worst thing. And I...”
Chuck swallows, pulls loose and gets the hell out of there.
+
He hobbles right past his room and toward his father’s office.
“Chuck,” Herc greets, looking and sounding surprised, then doing a double take when he actually looks up and, oh, yeah, Chuck probably doesn’t look too hot. He might be crying, too, just a little.
He felt it.
“I drifted,” he blurts, standing awkwardly in front of the huge desk, staring at Herc. “with Raleigh. He never saw Yancy’s funeral and so the geeks rigged us up a Pons - which, by the way, is truly terrifying, they build those things out of anything - and we went in and watched that fucking funeral again because Rals wasn’ t there and Yancy was buried-“
Alone. Yancy Becket was buried alone and Raleigh never got to say goodbye. But Chuck will turn in his dick if he ever says that out loud.
“I’m sorry, son,” Herc says after a long beat of awkward silence. But then, with them, the silence always is. For once, the title doesn’t make Chuck want to scream.
He waves his old man off, though. “That’s not... it’s fine. Raleigh and Mako are braiding their hair right now and talking about feelings and shit and maybe it’ll do that washed-up has-been good. I just...”
This isn’t working. He screws his eyes shut, hates the way he always relied on the drift to say everything for him and then feels something warm and smooth down his spine.
Raleigh, he realizes after a second of shock. He is ghost drifting with Raleigh Fucking Becket and the older pilot is sending him warm fuzzies. He pushes back, angrily, because he needs all that crappy emotion right now, if he ever wants to get this out right.
“My bucket list said tell dad,” he tries again.
“Tell me what, Chuck?” Herc asks, standing, rounding the desk and stopping way inside Chuck’s personal space.
Chuck laughs. “See, that’s the thing I could never figure out. But...” deep breath.
“Mom,” he finally says. “Mom dying. It wasn’t your fault, Dad.”
With that he turns tail and runs. Herc, god bless the Hansen family’s emotional stuntedness, lets him go.
+
The reprieve is temporary. Since Chuck had to get his doggedness from somewhere, he’s not really too surprised to find the newly minted Marshall waiting for him at his door the next morning.
He claps Chuck on the shoulder too hard, gives him a crooked grin and then leads the way to breakfast. It’s early because Chuck was actually trying to avoid any sort of meaningful human interaction, no matter who with, but apparently, his father knows him, which sucks.
Except for how it doesn’t. Eugh.
They both get trays full of real eggs and bacon and industrial strength tea and Herc carries both their breakfasts while Chuck hobbles along behind him and Max trails after them both.
Alex says that whenever Chuck’s ready, he can try leaving one crutch at home. Chuck is absolutely not going to try that experiment in public, thanks a lot. He’ll practice in his room until he can keep the face-falling to a minimum. So for now, two crutches and no free hands it is.
He sits down first and Herc stares at him for a long moment before shuffling around the table and sitting next to him, instead of across from him. Their shoulders bump. It’s the Hansen version of a thirty-second hug with extra squeezing.
They eat in companionable silence, except for the occasional comment on the sleep deprived techs stumbling in one by one. One of them actually manages to keep his eyes closed all the way through the line and up to his table. It’s impressive.
Chuck applauds when the guy sits without spilling a drop of his coffee. Herc elbows him, but he’s grinning into his ginger stubble, so that’s cool.
And then Raleigh shows up and Chuck cringes because a) he let the guy into his head last night, b) he was in the guy’s head last night, c) he had an embarrassing emotional outbreak caused by the guy and d) he knows Raleigh by now and he knows the man will do something horrible like thank him and actually try to hug him, or something. Chuck shudders at the possibilities.
But all Raleigh does is wave casually, pet Max, and then get some grub. He plops down across from them with a nod to Herc and puts two chocolate puddings down in front of Chuck.
They’re his favourite. They are also usually only available at dinner and rare enough to have become a coveted currency. Chuck has heard whispers of a chocolate pudding black market running out of LOCCENT. He always knew Tendo’s a crafy motherfucker.
So for Raleigh to put not only one, but two of the little cups down in front of Chuck means... something. Thank you, probably.
Chuck blinks at the little cups.
Herc snorts a little laugh and then pretends to be fascinated by his eggs. Good man.
“Seriously?” Chuck asks, eventually, because he has a reputation as a smart-ass to uphold.
Raleigh gives him the eyebrow. “Would you rather hug it out?” He doesn’t add the ‘bitch’ at the end, but it is implied. Raleigh trying to speak Chuck’s language is kind of... frightening. And also embarrassing.
And working.
Let’s not forget the ‘working’.
Chuck scowls, gives him the finger and plucks one of the cups from the table. He gives it a good shake just to be a vindictive asshole and then puts it on Raleigh’s tray, next to his coffee.
They stare at each other. Herc coughs. It sounds a lot like, “Idiots.”
Then Raleigh shrugs and starts shovelling food into his mouth like it’s going out of style. In between forkfuls, he muses, “I think Li has a serious problem with me, although I have no idea why. The guy has been giving me the stink-eye forever. Any ideas why?”
Herc chokes. Hopefully on his mysterious ‘cough’. Chuck digs the heel of his good leg into the man’s instep. Hard.
“Nah, mate,” he finally answers, managing to keep his face straight. “He’s probably just being an asshole. Don’t mind him.”
He makes a mental note to call the grumpy cook off.
+
Hermann draws one of his own items, which at least proves that the man actually contributed. Chuck was starting to doubt it.
But of course the fifth thing coming from the damn hat needs to be Hermann’s because everyone else has had a turn and this is obviously a Mexican telenovela, or something equally idiotic, except that there’s probably not enough sex for that. Telenovelas have lots of ridiculous sex, right?
He’s never watched one, but he thinks everything in those things is ridiculous.
And Chuck’s living in the middle of one. What’s that make him?
So it’s Hermann’s turn to draw and it’s Hermann’s turn to be drawn and everything is cosmic balance and someone’s shitting butterflies at the end of the rainbow.
“A night under the stars,” the doctor reads and Chuck almost gags. He opens his mouth to make a snide comment, but before he can, Mako stomps on his foot none too delicately.
“Bitch,” he mutters under his breath. She smiles at him. Raleigh shoots him a look, but it’s not the glare it would have been before the drift. Chuck kind of hates how Raleigh just looks straight through him now.
Except for when he doesn’t. Hate it, he means. Shit.
Hermann, not quite oblivious to the byplay, gives a flustered shrug. “I was a sickly child,” he explains, “and never allowed outside much. I have always wanted to camp outside and sleep under the stars one night. I did not think I would get the chance.”
He doesn’t need to elaborate on why. Because the world was ending. Because they were all dying. Because the stars were going out in the sky and the world was preparing to just lie down and die.
Until they saved it.
Hey, Chuck just rhymed.
“Here’s to us,” Raleigh suddenly announces, his eyes fixed on Chuck’s face, raising his mug. They’ve broken into the moonshine again.
“I will drink to that,” Mako announces. They clink mugs and take small sips. Cute.
“So, what are we waiting for?” Chuck asks.
He gets incredulous looks from Raleigh and Newt.
“Dude! We need about a million things to do this! Starting with a place to set up camp, because I don’t think there’s many of those is Hong Kong. Although maybe Hannibal would let us use his rooftop terrace...”
“Or maybe,” Hermann suggests archly, “we could not spend the night in the criminal’s literal backyard! Do you want to have your throat slit?”
“Actually,” Newt corrects, “I’m pretty sure Hannibal’s more of a stabby guy.” He mimics stabbing something. “In the nose.”
“We’ll take your word for it,” Mako assures him.
“Has anyone ever actually gone camping?” Raleigh asks into the round. Headshakes from Mako and Hermann, obviously. “Chuck?”
“Nah, mate. City boy, me.”
Newt nods. “My old man tried to make a man out of me.” He swivels his hips, pouts horribly and then snorts. “Didn’t take.”
Raleigh claps him on the shoulder. “Then I suggest we divide and conquer. I’ll get the gear, you get provisions. Mako, can you find us a place? You know the ‘dome best.”
Nods all around. “Great. Regroup here in an hour.”
Apparently, you can take the Ranger out of the military, but you can’t take the military out of the Ranger. Mako actually snaps off a salute on her way out the door and the geeks toddle after her, mumbling about staging a coup in the kitchen to get their hands on some chocolate pudding.
Li is going to send them back in sushi rolls if they try.
But the three little soldiers taking off means that Chuck gets saddled following Raleigh on a trip cross-‘dome in search of all kinds of shit he never knew you needed for a single night outside.
“Why do we need mats and blankets? And don’t you think the sleeping bags are overkill, mate? We’re all damn rangers.” He conveniently forgets about the less trained members of their little idiocy-squad.
“It gets cold at night.”
“It’s June.”
Raleigh grins a little. “It gets cold. Trust me.”
“You know we’re not in goddamn Alaska, right?”
Chuck grimaces as soon as he’s finished talking, expecting that little hurt twitch Raleigh gets every time someone mentions anything even tangentially related to his brother, but all that comes is an easy shrug. “Alaska has summers, okay? And I used to spend about half of those camped outside with Yancy. Trust me.”
“Why?” Chuck immediately asks and there’s that little hurt twitch, so he rolls his eyes and elaborates. “Why’d you spend so much time outside?”
A shrug. “Our parents fought a lot.”
Enough, apparently, to drive two boys out of their own home. Involuntarily, Chuck thinks of his own parents, and the way his Mum would have invaded the Becket home with a broomstick and a twenty minute tirade before taking the Becket boys home with her and stuffing them into the bottom bunk of Chuck’s bed. She probably wouldn’t have given them back, either, because that’s the kind of woman Angela Hansen was.
Chuck still spends most of his time missing her, but it’s times like these that he appreciates that, for ten years, he had her.
He comes out of his little mental detour to find Raleigh trying to stack five sets of blankets, sleeping mats and sleeping bags in a way that lets him carry all of it.
“Gimme some of that,” Chuck demands.
Raleigh looks at him, then down at his crutches. Right. Chuck swings one crutch free, looks around a little for a place to put it and finds one of his father’s aides tottering down the hallway with an armful of requisition forms. He puts his crutch horizontally across the stack of paper, gives her a smarmy grin and orders, “Get that to the Marshall’s office.”
She gives him a wide-eyed look, then nods. Somehow, all the aides are terrified of the Hansen temper. Chuck wonders why, because it sure as shit wasn’t him.
He waits until she’s disappeared into a random office, then holds out his hand for the bundle of sleeping bags. They have straps; he should be fine.
“You sure you can do this?”
“If I face plant, you aren’t allowed to take pictures,” he says, makes a grab for the stuff and starts limping ahead.
+
“I want more blankets,” he announces, hours later. He’s already got his and Raleigh’s bunched around his shoulders, plus his sleeping mat folded twice and stuck under his arse and his sleeping bag wrapped around his waist. Raleigh, the icy fucker, sits next to him, wearing nothing but one of his ugly sweaters, looking like it’s a mild summer’s day, instead of the fucking Arctic on top of the Shatterdome’s highest helipad.
“Told ya,” the smug bastard announces, pulling a spare blanket from out of nowhere and draping it over Chuck’s locked-up gimp leg. Apparently, it doesn’t deal well with cold anymore.
He tucks the blanket in around Chuck’s hips and then actually moves around until he’s sitting along the bad leg and starts rubbing some feeling back into it, careful not to jar the knee joint, which got the brunt of the fucked-up-ness.
“Seriously,” Chuck muses. “How the fuck can anyone want to live in fucking Alaska?”
“Born and bred,” the other pilot points out.
Chuck shudders. “I want some of Hermann’s baby killer shit.” He makes a shooing motion with both hands and then desperately grabs for the blankets sliding off his shoulders.
Raleigh snorts. “Cold and booze don’t mix. You think it makes you warm, but it doesn’t.”
“I’m going to die out here, aren’t I?”
Another snort. Chuck’s elbow him, but he needs both arms to contain heat. “I thought you’re a big, bad ranger?”
“Retired.”
“More like washed-out.”
And that could sting like a mother, except Chuck knows exactly how Raleigh meant that and it has nothing to do with his leg and when did he learn to read between Raleigh bloody Becket’s lines?
“Didn’t you have to do survival training or something?”
“I’m from Australia, mate.”
“Alright, alright, come here.” And suddenly Chuck’s tucked under the older man’s arm, all snug and warm and he’d protest, if it weren’t so damn cosy.
“If you try to get your hands under my skirt, I will murder you.”
“Don’t worry, honey, I don’t grope before the third date.” There’s something off about the way he says it, but Chuck lets it go. He’s awesome like that.
It’s actually kind of nice, up here. Apart from the fact that his balls have retreated into his body. Probably permanently. It’s a cloudless night and there are actually a few stars visible above the city.
It’s kind of sad, but the Kaiju made for clearer skies in most coastal cities. Large portions of the population fled inland and a lot was destroyed.
Light pollution, smog, all that shit’s been cut down drastically.
And isn’t that cute. Here he is, badass jaeger piloting ranger superhero, thinking of the good things the Kaiju brought.
Less pollution above Hong Kong. An appreciation for the smaller things in life. Raleigh fucking Becket, shirtless on a poster Chuck will deny to his dying day belongs to him.
Just... stuff.
Little things here and there, that didn’t seem to matter before. (Not that Chuck really remembers before. He was barely knee high when the world ended.)
Stuff like being alive.
And he is. Alive, he means.
He’s spending a night under the stars with two idiotic doctors arguing over a can of peaches, of all things, a girl he almost called sister once before he started to hate everything, and the most impossible dopey idiot he’s ever met. His leg is a bust, he looks like he survived fifty rounds with a Balrog or something (Shut up, he watched those movies under duress), and he’ll never run with max again.
And it’s okay.
- And now he’s apparently having an epiphany because Mexican telenovela. Fuck his life.
A few feet away, the scientists finally manage to get the can open and promptly dump most of its contents all over the dirty tarmac. Mako watches them with the expression of a displeased mother. Chuck feels for any future children she might one day deign to have.
“Hey,” he says, digging his elbow into Raleigh’s side.
“Mhm?” is the answer he gets. It sounds sleepy. It’s excuse enough for Chuck to just play it off and shut the fuck up.
“You know, the geek made a point the other day.”
“Which one?”
“Not the point,” he grouses.
He can feel Raleigh shift as he takes note of Chuck’s mood. They’re ghosting again. “I thought this was all about points.”
Elbow. In the ribs. He tries not to gasp in pain and Chuck breezily goes on. “So, he said some shit about how not being dead is not the same as being alive. Biologically speaking.”
Newt is now arguing for the three second rule to also be applied to the great outdoors (which they are not in, actually). Hermann threatens to withhold sex if Newt’s mouth gets anywhere near the fallen peaches.
Newt sucks one down just to prove his point.
Chuck should maybe not base this leap of faith of Dr. Newton Geiszler.
Different angle.
“You wrote out all the items on all the lists, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You remember the one about sex?”
Have decent sex.
Fact is, Chuck’s been a little too busy saving the world to find anyone who had time for more than a casual roll in the hay before shift change.
“Yeah?”
“You notice how I got you girly handwriting tattooed on my fucking back?”
“Yeah?”
There’s a long silence where Chuck will deny holding himself very still.
“Are you trying to tell me something, Chuck?”
Goddamn.
“You’ve been in my head. Figure it out, Becket.”
“You mean that head that was filled with trashy posters of me, stats of me and possibly an action figure of me?”
Chuck is going to murder that fucking bastard.
“I am going to fucking murder you.”
Raleigh, the little bitch, just laughs. “Chuck, if you’re trying to tell me something, just tell me.”
That was exactly what he was trying to avoid actually, thanks a lot. (One day, Chuck will get over his issues and he will send the bill to his father without regrets.)
“Look, if you don’t mind that I’m a damn cripple-“
“Stop,” Raleigh order and hello there, command voice. “Stop acting like you’re the consolation prize, Chuck.”
That is... that is so fucking cheesy that Chuck must either commit sepuku with his crutch right now or kiss the stunted asshole stupid.
He goes with number two.
Tongue down throat, teeth in lip, count his teeth, the whole nine yards and back again and he does not get butterflies in his stomach because he doesn’t do that shit.
After a minute, they come up for air. “Jesus, Chuck, I didn’t think you want to try for the decent sex thing right here.”
“We don’t mind,” Newt chimes in from where he’s sitting, holding a hand over Mako’s eyes and staring at them avidly. “Please carry on.”
Hermann gets him with the cane. Chuck might need lessons. “Newton, stop your racket. And take your hand down. Mako wins the bet whether she sees the outcome or not.”
“Bet?”
And Raleigh dives back in, one hand gently resting on Chuck’s gimp leg, the other trailing up his back until it comes to rest right on top of the ink there.
If he thinks about it, Chuck sort of got a Raleigh Becket tramp stamp.
So he decides not to think about it.
+
They strike the decent sex thing from the list, eventually.
But not until they’ve traumatised half the ‘dome’s leftover inhabitants and christened most flat surfaces. (He’s pretty sure Newt it making a pretty penny selling grainy CCTV footage of them getting it on on ebay.)
Chuck still has no fucking idea what to make of the fact that he’s survived.
But he’s here and alive and for now, that’s enough.
Fucking Mexican telenovela.
+
+
(He never does call off Li.)
+
+
Part I
+
Five days later, Newt spears a piece of peach cobbler (jury’s still out on whether those are real peaches) and points it at Chuck. “Operation Cracker Lacker is a go, by the way.”
“What?”
Behind is dorky glasses, Newt blinks. “Uhm, that thing we talked about? With the...” he makes a hand gesture that might either mean ‘wank off’ or ‘that Pons we’re secretly building in the basement’. The tiny guy is the king of ambivalent gestures.
“What the hell is a Cracker Lacker?” Raleigh asks, confused.
“Good question,” Mako agrees.
Newt shrugs. “It sounded cool. So I used it to name the thing.”
“I think it’s an old slang term,” Hermann supplies, unperturbed by his boyfriend’s shenanigans.
“I think it might be racist,” Chuck adds, brow furrowed. “And also, you’re not allowed to name shit anymore. Hermann, control your boy toy.”
“Hey! I am not Hermann’s...,” frowning, Newt interrupts himself. “Who am I kidding, I am absolutely Hermann’s boy toy. So, we driftin’ or what?”
He makes jazz hands to go with the question. Hermann catches them with his own and puts them in Newt’s lap. It looks like he’s using his nails to force compliance. Chuck approves wholeheartedly. Someone needs to muzzle their resident Kaiju groupie.
“Drifting?” Raleigh asks. It’s kind of adorable, the way he looks when the adults are talking about things he doesn’t understand.
Chuck gives up his pie as a lost cause, shoves to his feet and accepts the crutches Mako hands him, almost without looking.
“Let’s go, bitches,” he tells them.
Surprisingly, they all go.
+
“You... built a Pons. Out of garbage. What for?” Raleigh wants to know, standing in front of a truly... terrifying amalgamation of everything anyone in the ‘dome has ever thrown away.
The only thing Chuck recognizes even vaguely is the set of squid caps dangling over what looks like an upside-down footstool with three legs. It’s screwed onto a piece of drainpipe that spews wires from both ends.
Considering Chuck’s about to attach his brain to that thing, he is not reassured. Still, he puts on a brave face and slaps Raleigh on the back. Hard. “You and me, mate,” he tells the older pilot, “are going to chase a RABIT.”
Before Raleigh can ask any more questions, Mako steps in and does her reasonable and responsible adult face as she explains, “After you told us to forget about your contribution to the list, we talked and realized that Chuck attended your brother’s funeral. He is willing to share the memory with you, if you want. To that end, the doctors have built a Pons for you to use.”
Raleigh looks at Chuck, at the geeks, at Mako, at the Pons, back at Chuck. “You... really?”
If he cries, Chuck’s outta here.
Just sayin’.
“Yeah, dude,” Newt pipes up. “Course we did. Building these things is actually fun. I’m starting to get the hang of it. Didja know you can actually convert sparkplugs into...,” whatever he did to the poor spark plugs will forever remain a mystery because Hermann slaps a hand over his mouth. It’s probably better for Chuck’s sanity to not know.
“Forgive Newton. He gets excited. And yes, Raleigh, really. We agreed, some more voluntarily than others,” he shoots a glare at Newt, but no-one buys that shit anymore, these days, “to see this blasted list through to the end. Your item is part of that list.”
“It’s what friends do,” Mako pipes up, taking the has-been’s hand and squeezing.
Chuck gives the sentimentality in the air a moment to settle before he points one crutch at the hellish contraption at the centre of the room. “So, wanna get our brains fried?”
+
They have both drifted enough times to know how to keep the Drift itself silent and still.
There’s only that strange haze of half-glimpsed memories until Chuck takes a deep breath and lets himself fall backward, away from the dull pain in his leg, from the pressure of the squid cap, the muttering of the scientists calibrating something, the whispers of Mako speaking to Max.
He lets himself fall backwards to six years ago on a fucking freezing afternoon in March, a cemetery in blinding light, too many solemn officials around a hole in the ground.
Raleigh follows after him a second after he slams into his sixteen-year-old body, all gangly limbs and ginger hair. It takes him a moment to orient himself, to remember that he’s not actually that boy, squinting against the sun and hating the world and feeling terrible sad because one of his childhood heroes is being buried without his brother to see him off.
Then he gets a grip on himself and pulls back from his emotions on that day. “Fuck,” he mutters, shaking his head. Next to him, his memory of his father doesn’t even bat an eyelash.
He waves a hand for Raleigh to go ahead, watches the other man step forward, look around. He takes in the faces briefly, then walks straight up to the coffin running a gentle hand over the edge.
He starts talking, low and urgent, all the things he didn’t get to say before, and Chuck forces himself not to hear every word by turning away and walking around the edge of the crowd.
Walking.
On his own two feet, unmangled, unbroken.
Jesus, but he’d almost forgotten already, what that feels like, to have two working legs and take them both for granted.
He sprints, brakes, fucking skips his way around the funeral once, twice, and then gets a damn grip on himself and returns to his proper place in the memory just in time to see Raleigh pick up one of the white roses piled at the foot of the coffin and place it carefully on top.
Chuck’s still not listening in, but there is no way to mistake that shape of the lips for anything other than what it is: “Goodbye.”
He feels it. This is still inside the drift and they are linked, one inside the other’s head and when Raleigh says goodbye to his long dead brother, Chuck feels it.
He hasn’t felt anything like it since Scissure took his mom.
And with that thought, he throws them out of alignment badly enough to slam them back, first into their own minds, and then their bodies.
Raleigh is crying when they bounce back to reality, tears running unchecked down his face, and Mako already has him wrapped in a hug from behind, pressing against him tightly.
Chuck finds himself reaching out, too, then pulls back.
Fucking drift hangover.
He stands and is about to flee as fast as his gimp leg (and doesn’t it hurt twice as bad, now that he remembers being whole again?) will carry him, when Raleigh catches his crutch, stopping him.
“I never got the chance to say goodbye,” he tells Chuck, still crying and still not giving a fuck. “I never thought I would. That was the worst thing. And I...”
Chuck swallows, pulls loose and gets the hell out of there.
+
He hobbles right past his room and toward his father’s office.
“Chuck,” Herc greets, looking and sounding surprised, then doing a double take when he actually looks up and, oh, yeah, Chuck probably doesn’t look too hot. He might be crying, too, just a little.
He felt it.
“I drifted,” he blurts, standing awkwardly in front of the huge desk, staring at Herc. “with Raleigh. He never saw Yancy’s funeral and so the geeks rigged us up a Pons - which, by the way, is truly terrifying, they build those things out of anything - and we went in and watched that fucking funeral again because Rals wasn’ t there and Yancy was buried-“
Alone. Yancy Becket was buried alone and Raleigh never got to say goodbye. But Chuck will turn in his dick if he ever says that out loud.
“I’m sorry, son,” Herc says after a long beat of awkward silence. But then, with them, the silence always is. For once, the title doesn’t make Chuck want to scream.
He waves his old man off, though. “That’s not... it’s fine. Raleigh and Mako are braiding their hair right now and talking about feelings and shit and maybe it’ll do that washed-up has-been good. I just...”
This isn’t working. He screws his eyes shut, hates the way he always relied on the drift to say everything for him and then feels something warm and smooth down his spine.
Raleigh, he realizes after a second of shock. He is ghost drifting with Raleigh Fucking Becket and the older pilot is sending him warm fuzzies. He pushes back, angrily, because he needs all that crappy emotion right now, if he ever wants to get this out right.
“My bucket list said tell dad,” he tries again.
“Tell me what, Chuck?” Herc asks, standing, rounding the desk and stopping way inside Chuck’s personal space.
Chuck laughs. “See, that’s the thing I could never figure out. But...” deep breath.
“Mom,” he finally says. “Mom dying. It wasn’t your fault, Dad.”
With that he turns tail and runs. Herc, god bless the Hansen family’s emotional stuntedness, lets him go.
+
The reprieve is temporary. Since Chuck had to get his doggedness from somewhere, he’s not really too surprised to find the newly minted Marshall waiting for him at his door the next morning.
He claps Chuck on the shoulder too hard, gives him a crooked grin and then leads the way to breakfast. It’s early because Chuck was actually trying to avoid any sort of meaningful human interaction, no matter who with, but apparently, his father knows him, which sucks.
Except for how it doesn’t. Eugh.
They both get trays full of real eggs and bacon and industrial strength tea and Herc carries both their breakfasts while Chuck hobbles along behind him and Max trails after them both.
Alex says that whenever Chuck’s ready, he can try leaving one crutch at home. Chuck is absolutely not going to try that experiment in public, thanks a lot. He’ll practice in his room until he can keep the face-falling to a minimum. So for now, two crutches and no free hands it is.
He sits down first and Herc stares at him for a long moment before shuffling around the table and sitting next to him, instead of across from him. Their shoulders bump. It’s the Hansen version of a thirty-second hug with extra squeezing.
They eat in companionable silence, except for the occasional comment on the sleep deprived techs stumbling in one by one. One of them actually manages to keep his eyes closed all the way through the line and up to his table. It’s impressive.
Chuck applauds when the guy sits without spilling a drop of his coffee. Herc elbows him, but he’s grinning into his ginger stubble, so that’s cool.
And then Raleigh shows up and Chuck cringes because a) he let the guy into his head last night, b) he was in the guy’s head last night, c) he had an embarrassing emotional outbreak caused by the guy and d) he knows Raleigh by now and he knows the man will do something horrible like thank him and actually try to hug him, or something. Chuck shudders at the possibilities.
But all Raleigh does is wave casually, pet Max, and then get some grub. He plops down across from them with a nod to Herc and puts two chocolate puddings down in front of Chuck.
They’re his favourite. They are also usually only available at dinner and rare enough to have become a coveted currency. Chuck has heard whispers of a chocolate pudding black market running out of LOCCENT. He always knew Tendo’s a crafy motherfucker.
So for Raleigh to put not only one, but two of the little cups down in front of Chuck means... something. Thank you, probably.
Chuck blinks at the little cups.
Herc snorts a little laugh and then pretends to be fascinated by his eggs. Good man.
“Seriously?” Chuck asks, eventually, because he has a reputation as a smart-ass to uphold.
Raleigh gives him the eyebrow. “Would you rather hug it out?” He doesn’t add the ‘bitch’ at the end, but it is implied. Raleigh trying to speak Chuck’s language is kind of... frightening. And also embarrassing.
And working.
Let’s not forget the ‘working’.
Chuck scowls, gives him the finger and plucks one of the cups from the table. He gives it a good shake just to be a vindictive asshole and then puts it on Raleigh’s tray, next to his coffee.
They stare at each other. Herc coughs. It sounds a lot like, “Idiots.”
Then Raleigh shrugs and starts shovelling food into his mouth like it’s going out of style. In between forkfuls, he muses, “I think Li has a serious problem with me, although I have no idea why. The guy has been giving me the stink-eye forever. Any ideas why?”
Herc chokes. Hopefully on his mysterious ‘cough’. Chuck digs the heel of his good leg into the man’s instep. Hard.
“Nah, mate,” he finally answers, managing to keep his face straight. “He’s probably just being an asshole. Don’t mind him.”
He makes a mental note to call the grumpy cook off.
+
Hermann draws one of his own items, which at least proves that the man actually contributed. Chuck was starting to doubt it.
But of course the fifth thing coming from the damn hat needs to be Hermann’s because everyone else has had a turn and this is obviously a Mexican telenovela, or something equally idiotic, except that there’s probably not enough sex for that. Telenovelas have lots of ridiculous sex, right?
He’s never watched one, but he thinks everything in those things is ridiculous.
And Chuck’s living in the middle of one. What’s that make him?
So it’s Hermann’s turn to draw and it’s Hermann’s turn to be drawn and everything is cosmic balance and someone’s shitting butterflies at the end of the rainbow.
“A night under the stars,” the doctor reads and Chuck almost gags. He opens his mouth to make a snide comment, but before he can, Mako stomps on his foot none too delicately.
“Bitch,” he mutters under his breath. She smiles at him. Raleigh shoots him a look, but it’s not the glare it would have been before the drift. Chuck kind of hates how Raleigh just looks straight through him now.
Except for when he doesn’t. Hate it, he means. Shit.
Hermann, not quite oblivious to the byplay, gives a flustered shrug. “I was a sickly child,” he explains, “and never allowed outside much. I have always wanted to camp outside and sleep under the stars one night. I did not think I would get the chance.”
He doesn’t need to elaborate on why. Because the world was ending. Because they were all dying. Because the stars were going out in the sky and the world was preparing to just lie down and die.
Until they saved it.
Hey, Chuck just rhymed.
“Here’s to us,” Raleigh suddenly announces, his eyes fixed on Chuck’s face, raising his mug. They’ve broken into the moonshine again.
“I will drink to that,” Mako announces. They clink mugs and take small sips. Cute.
“So, what are we waiting for?” Chuck asks.
He gets incredulous looks from Raleigh and Newt.
“Dude! We need about a million things to do this! Starting with a place to set up camp, because I don’t think there’s many of those is Hong Kong. Although maybe Hannibal would let us use his rooftop terrace...”
“Or maybe,” Hermann suggests archly, “we could not spend the night in the criminal’s literal backyard! Do you want to have your throat slit?”
“Actually,” Newt corrects, “I’m pretty sure Hannibal’s more of a stabby guy.” He mimics stabbing something. “In the nose.”
“We’ll take your word for it,” Mako assures him.
“Has anyone ever actually gone camping?” Raleigh asks into the round. Headshakes from Mako and Hermann, obviously. “Chuck?”
“Nah, mate. City boy, me.”
Newt nods. “My old man tried to make a man out of me.” He swivels his hips, pouts horribly and then snorts. “Didn’t take.”
Raleigh claps him on the shoulder. “Then I suggest we divide and conquer. I’ll get the gear, you get provisions. Mako, can you find us a place? You know the ‘dome best.”
Nods all around. “Great. Regroup here in an hour.”
Apparently, you can take the Ranger out of the military, but you can’t take the military out of the Ranger. Mako actually snaps off a salute on her way out the door and the geeks toddle after her, mumbling about staging a coup in the kitchen to get their hands on some chocolate pudding.
Li is going to send them back in sushi rolls if they try.
But the three little soldiers taking off means that Chuck gets saddled following Raleigh on a trip cross-‘dome in search of all kinds of shit he never knew you needed for a single night outside.
“Why do we need mats and blankets? And don’t you think the sleeping bags are overkill, mate? We’re all damn rangers.” He conveniently forgets about the less trained members of their little idiocy-squad.
“It gets cold at night.”
“It’s June.”
Raleigh grins a little. “It gets cold. Trust me.”
“You know we’re not in goddamn Alaska, right?”
Chuck grimaces as soon as he’s finished talking, expecting that little hurt twitch Raleigh gets every time someone mentions anything even tangentially related to his brother, but all that comes is an easy shrug. “Alaska has summers, okay? And I used to spend about half of those camped outside with Yancy. Trust me.”
“Why?” Chuck immediately asks and there’s that little hurt twitch, so he rolls his eyes and elaborates. “Why’d you spend so much time outside?”
A shrug. “Our parents fought a lot.”
Enough, apparently, to drive two boys out of their own home. Involuntarily, Chuck thinks of his own parents, and the way his Mum would have invaded the Becket home with a broomstick and a twenty minute tirade before taking the Becket boys home with her and stuffing them into the bottom bunk of Chuck’s bed. She probably wouldn’t have given them back, either, because that’s the kind of woman Angela Hansen was.
Chuck still spends most of his time missing her, but it’s times like these that he appreciates that, for ten years, he had her.
He comes out of his little mental detour to find Raleigh trying to stack five sets of blankets, sleeping mats and sleeping bags in a way that lets him carry all of it.
“Gimme some of that,” Chuck demands.
Raleigh looks at him, then down at his crutches. Right. Chuck swings one crutch free, looks around a little for a place to put it and finds one of his father’s aides tottering down the hallway with an armful of requisition forms. He puts his crutch horizontally across the stack of paper, gives her a smarmy grin and orders, “Get that to the Marshall’s office.”
She gives him a wide-eyed look, then nods. Somehow, all the aides are terrified of the Hansen temper. Chuck wonders why, because it sure as shit wasn’t him.
He waits until she’s disappeared into a random office, then holds out his hand for the bundle of sleeping bags. They have straps; he should be fine.
“You sure you can do this?”
“If I face plant, you aren’t allowed to take pictures,” he says, makes a grab for the stuff and starts limping ahead.
+
“I want more blankets,” he announces, hours later. He’s already got his and Raleigh’s bunched around his shoulders, plus his sleeping mat folded twice and stuck under his arse and his sleeping bag wrapped around his waist. Raleigh, the icy fucker, sits next to him, wearing nothing but one of his ugly sweaters, looking like it’s a mild summer’s day, instead of the fucking Arctic on top of the Shatterdome’s highest helipad.
“Told ya,” the smug bastard announces, pulling a spare blanket from out of nowhere and draping it over Chuck’s locked-up gimp leg. Apparently, it doesn’t deal well with cold anymore.
He tucks the blanket in around Chuck’s hips and then actually moves around until he’s sitting along the bad leg and starts rubbing some feeling back into it, careful not to jar the knee joint, which got the brunt of the fucked-up-ness.
“Seriously,” Chuck muses. “How the fuck can anyone want to live in fucking Alaska?”
“Born and bred,” the other pilot points out.
Chuck shudders. “I want some of Hermann’s baby killer shit.” He makes a shooing motion with both hands and then desperately grabs for the blankets sliding off his shoulders.
Raleigh snorts. “Cold and booze don’t mix. You think it makes you warm, but it doesn’t.”
“I’m going to die out here, aren’t I?”
Another snort. Chuck’s elbow him, but he needs both arms to contain heat. “I thought you’re a big, bad ranger?”
“Retired.”
“More like washed-out.”
And that could sting like a mother, except Chuck knows exactly how Raleigh meant that and it has nothing to do with his leg and when did he learn to read between Raleigh bloody Becket’s lines?
“Didn’t you have to do survival training or something?”
“I’m from Australia, mate.”
“Alright, alright, come here.” And suddenly Chuck’s tucked under the older man’s arm, all snug and warm and he’d protest, if it weren’t so damn cosy.
“If you try to get your hands under my skirt, I will murder you.”
“Don’t worry, honey, I don’t grope before the third date.” There’s something off about the way he says it, but Chuck lets it go. He’s awesome like that.
It’s actually kind of nice, up here. Apart from the fact that his balls have retreated into his body. Probably permanently. It’s a cloudless night and there are actually a few stars visible above the city.
It’s kind of sad, but the Kaiju made for clearer skies in most coastal cities. Large portions of the population fled inland and a lot was destroyed.
Light pollution, smog, all that shit’s been cut down drastically.
And isn’t that cute. Here he is, badass jaeger piloting ranger superhero, thinking of the good things the Kaiju brought.
Less pollution above Hong Kong. An appreciation for the smaller things in life. Raleigh fucking Becket, shirtless on a poster Chuck will deny to his dying day belongs to him.
Just... stuff.
Little things here and there, that didn’t seem to matter before. (Not that Chuck really remembers before. He was barely knee high when the world ended.)
Stuff like being alive.
And he is. Alive, he means.
He’s spending a night under the stars with two idiotic doctors arguing over a can of peaches, of all things, a girl he almost called sister once before he started to hate everything, and the most impossible dopey idiot he’s ever met. His leg is a bust, he looks like he survived fifty rounds with a Balrog or something (Shut up, he watched those movies under duress), and he’ll never run with max again.
And it’s okay.
- And now he’s apparently having an epiphany because Mexican telenovela. Fuck his life.
A few feet away, the scientists finally manage to get the can open and promptly dump most of its contents all over the dirty tarmac. Mako watches them with the expression of a displeased mother. Chuck feels for any future children she might one day deign to have.
“Hey,” he says, digging his elbow into Raleigh’s side.
“Mhm?” is the answer he gets. It sounds sleepy. It’s excuse enough for Chuck to just play it off and shut the fuck up.
“You know, the geek made a point the other day.”
“Which one?”
“Not the point,” he grouses.
He can feel Raleigh shift as he takes note of Chuck’s mood. They’re ghosting again. “I thought this was all about points.”
Elbow. In the ribs. He tries not to gasp in pain and Chuck breezily goes on. “So, he said some shit about how not being dead is not the same as being alive. Biologically speaking.”
Newt is now arguing for the three second rule to also be applied to the great outdoors (which they are not in, actually). Hermann threatens to withhold sex if Newt’s mouth gets anywhere near the fallen peaches.
Newt sucks one down just to prove his point.
Chuck should maybe not base this leap of faith of Dr. Newton Geiszler.
Different angle.
“You wrote out all the items on all the lists, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You remember the one about sex?”
Have decent sex.
Fact is, Chuck’s been a little too busy saving the world to find anyone who had time for more than a casual roll in the hay before shift change.
“Yeah?”
“You notice how I got you girly handwriting tattooed on my fucking back?”
“Yeah?”
There’s a long silence where Chuck will deny holding himself very still.
“Are you trying to tell me something, Chuck?”
Goddamn.
“You’ve been in my head. Figure it out, Becket.”
“You mean that head that was filled with trashy posters of me, stats of me and possibly an action figure of me?”
Chuck is going to murder that fucking bastard.
“I am going to fucking murder you.”
Raleigh, the little bitch, just laughs. “Chuck, if you’re trying to tell me something, just tell me.”
That was exactly what he was trying to avoid actually, thanks a lot. (One day, Chuck will get over his issues and he will send the bill to his father without regrets.)
“Look, if you don’t mind that I’m a damn cripple-“
“Stop,” Raleigh order and hello there, command voice. “Stop acting like you’re the consolation prize, Chuck.”
That is... that is so fucking cheesy that Chuck must either commit sepuku with his crutch right now or kiss the stunted asshole stupid.
He goes with number two.
Tongue down throat, teeth in lip, count his teeth, the whole nine yards and back again and he does not get butterflies in his stomach because he doesn’t do that shit.
After a minute, they come up for air. “Jesus, Chuck, I didn’t think you want to try for the decent sex thing right here.”
“We don’t mind,” Newt chimes in from where he’s sitting, holding a hand over Mako’s eyes and staring at them avidly. “Please carry on.”
Hermann gets him with the cane. Chuck might need lessons. “Newton, stop your racket. And take your hand down. Mako wins the bet whether she sees the outcome or not.”
“Bet?”
And Raleigh dives back in, one hand gently resting on Chuck’s gimp leg, the other trailing up his back until it comes to rest right on top of the ink there.
If he thinks about it, Chuck sort of got a Raleigh Becket tramp stamp.
So he decides not to think about it.
+
They strike the decent sex thing from the list, eventually.
But not until they’ve traumatised half the ‘dome’s leftover inhabitants and christened most flat surfaces. (He’s pretty sure Newt it making a pretty penny selling grainy CCTV footage of them getting it on on ebay.)
Chuck still has no fucking idea what to make of the fact that he’s survived.
But he’s here and alive and for now, that’s enough.
Fucking Mexican telenovela.
+
+
(He never does call off Li.)
+
+