Chapter Text
It’s 1AM in Tokyo. Raleigh Becket wakes up sick.
It’s how he always wakes up now, his brain seized with drift ghost flashes. He prays to a God Yancy believed in to make them go away, but medically speaking, it’s going to be a while before the synaptic paths in his brain stop burning, firing the memory of his brother’s death through his nerve endings until every inch of him is convinced of the sheeting rain, knife-cold, the screaming dark, his spine bending, his shoulders dislocating, his bones splintering inside him, ohgodplease – and he wakes up in his own skin.
Raleigh sits up, rolls over off his sleeping mat and presses his cheek into the hardwood floor, shaking, naked, skin sticky with panic and pain.
“Yancy.” He presses his palms into his face, lets his shoulders seize up, shakes jerking through him in a way he knows is bad, but he lets it take him, saying his big brother’s name over and over into the creases of his hands until the syllables become a mantra. There is saline on his tongue, bile in the back of his throat. “Yancy… Yancy… Yancy…”
He’s not praying to God, Raleigh knows.
It’s a long time before he finds the willpower to stand up and find his clothes in the dark, fingers rifling over the dusty creases of his fatigues, his dog-tags jangling quietly from its chain around his neck. He stops dressing a couple times to breathe, fumbles for his duffle and blindly pops two pills for the pain that’s only partially his. Then he sits on his knees and waits for his body to stop recollecting his brother’s death.
When the aches in his bones are his own, finally, he pulls on his pants, finds a shirt, his jacket, his wallet, his boots by the door. Then he locks the door behind him and descends the narrow staircase to the street outside. It smells like the ocean, dirt, and fish. A couple miles out the ragged skyline of the anti-Kaiju wall blocks out the horizon toward the sea. In the morning, a bus will come to the ramshackle collection of harbor hostels and motels out here and pick up the muddy throng of day workers for the wall.
Night work pays triple. This is because the death rate is also triple at night.
Raleigh is going to work nights. He has decided this, but every night when the bus comes for the evening crew, it comes, then goes without him. He doesn’t know why. Sometimes he thinks it’s because there’s too much of Yancy burned into his skull, holding his little brother back from this ledge he keeps edging toward. Raleigh closes his eyes and thinks what he’d give to have Yancy back, what non-vital limbs he would amputate to hold his brother again and fucking let that Knifehead bastard kill them both like it was supposed to.
The bars never close by the Wall.
Raleigh finds his way to the cheapest sake and gin joint just outside the docking yards – ignores a white-painted shrine-like structure near the water. The wall brings people from all over the world so which iteration of crazy this gaggle might be is nothing Raleigh cares to figure. They come in all flavors, ethnicities, classes, and backgrounds but their unifying factor is that they think the Kaiju are harbingers of God’s holy wrath.
He supposes they aren’t really wrong about the harbingers of doom part, Raleigh just isn’t convinced God has anything to do with it.
The bar’s crowded. Elbow to elbow welders and Wall-jockeys. Raleigh is considering another bar when a large German fellow spots him in the door and signals him over. Raleigh doesn’t know the man’s name, but he rents the room at the end of the hall and, one time, Raleigh helped him out in a bar fight. He gives Raleigh his seat at the bar, thumps him on the shoulder leaves him to it. The affection Raleigh feels for this stranger is stronger than it should be. He’s not sure how to thank someone for leaving him the fuck alone in such a nice way.
Raleigh’s Japanese is pretty terrible. He orders a small bottle of sake and fucks up his numeric counters when he also orders shots of what tastes like turpentine. He’s seven shots in and closing his tab when the bartender places a glass of Fireball in front of him.
“This isn’t mine,” he says.
“That’s because it’s on me.”
Raleigh looks over his shoulder. He doesn’t know the man who’s bought him the drink, but the man who’s bought the drink seems to know him – it’s in the way he studies Raleigh’s face when he turns around, in the lean of his smile. He’s a white dude, not Japanese, about Raleigh’s height and dressed in jeans and a dirty work jacket. Looks like he’s just come off the wall.
“Sorry, who are you?”
“Name’s Marco.” He’s got an American accent. “I work the same section of Wall as you do. See you in here a lot.”
Raleigh rolls that line over in his head, feels the weight of it. Doesn’t feel like a lie. That said, he’s never seen this guy before. Also, it’s been so long since he’s had a conversation with anyone, Raleigh isn’t sure how to respond to someone looking for a drinking buddy so he just picks up the Fireball, tips it at Marco, and downs it.
“Thanks.” He offers his hand. “I’m Raleigh.”
Marco shakes his hand. It’s soft and he holds on for about two seconds too long. “Nice to meet you.”
“What do you want?”
“Pardon?”
Raleigh turns back to the bar and rifles through his wallet for the appropriate amount of yen. “You’re not a fucking Wall worker, Marco.” He places the bills under the glass of Fireball and nods to the barkeep, turns around to square off with the other man. He’s too tired and drunk for this. “So what do you want?”
“To talk.”
“No. I’m not here to talk to people I’m here to work. So leave me alone.”
“Mr. Becket, I just want a moment of your time.”
Raleigh’s skin prickles, his teeth set. “Get away from me.” He shoulders past Marco, out the door, feels the man follow him. “I said back off. Keep following me and see what happens, Kaiju-fucker. I’m not fucking talking to you.”
“You’re a Ranger, Raleigh Becket.” Marco has abandoned his pretense of friendliness, assumed the hostility of both a man embarrassed by his screw up and one with a mission. The latter part is what worries Raleigh. “All Rangers will have to answer to God one day.”
“Well, then that’s between me and God, isn’t it. Stop following me.”
“You’ve been touched by God, Becket.”
“Jesus Christ…”
“The Kaiju are here to punish our arrogance and none are more so than the Pan Pacific Defense Corps and its Rangers.” Marco has developed a kind of earnest mania now. Raleigh is far too drunk for this Kaiju groupie bullshit. He’d been sure no one in Tokyo would recognize a disgraced American Jaeger pilot, much less the Ice Box washout from Anchorage. Raleigh turns up the collar of his jacket, stuffs his hands in his pockets and turns down an alley, aiming for the main thoroughfare toward the hostel shantytown. It’s starting to rain. “Your kind is paying for their hubris. Three more Jaegers have fallen.”
Raleigh keeps walking.
“Your brother is in hell, Becket, for his sins.”
Raleigh stops walking.
Marco, pleased, continues, “You and your brother were the first of many. All the Jaegers will fall. All they are doing is further damning humanity.” Raleigh turns around. “It is not too late.” Raleigh walks back toward Marco. “You can repent.” Raleigh is in arm’s reach. “That’s why I’m here. If you would just –”
Raleigh punches the man in the throat and half collapses his windpipe. He doesn’t say anything. There aren’t words for the kinetic holocaust that lights up his head when Marco mentioned his brother so he just stands there and watches Marco fall over and fail to breathe, then makes no move whatsoever to help. He just stands there while the rain sheets down from the roof, dumping water on his shoulders until he’s soaked. He’s in mud boiling up to his ankles. His eyes are hot.
“Don’t…” he says. “Don’t ever… you…”
He sways. Startled, Raleigh corrects his balance, blinks and stands still. Marco is still clutching his throat on the ground. Raleigh’s body pulls to the left and his right shoulder thumps into the wall. His tongue feels numb, his whole face. Punching Marco, a very light and controlled strike actually, has suddenly stripped him of every ounce of energy in his body. He shoves away from the wall, immediately starts down the alley toward the main street. He is not this drunk.
Drugged me. He fucking drugged me.
Raleigh doesn’t have time to be appalled because he’s trying to focus on putting one foot in front of the other when he can no longer feel his extremities. It’s raining so hard the water runs in his mouth, in his eyes. He can’t feel his hand on the wall. Panic rises through him, from his balls to the back of his throat because if he does not get to the main street…
He’ll kill you. It’s Yancy’s voice. They’ll kill you like the team in Brazil. You need to get out of here, little brother.
Raleigh staggers, swears. Jesus fuck, he can’t feel his fucking legs. He looks over his shoulder. There are people coming up the alley. One of them is helping Marco to his feet. The others start running down the alley. Raleigh shoves away from the wall and breaks into a sprint, clips a trash bin, knocks over a rack of shovels, and nearly falls on his face, hands sinking in the mud. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck…
RUN, RALEIGH!
A hand closes on his jacket. He yanks out of it and keeps running. Someone hits him, hard, tackles him at the waist into the mud. Raleigh twists, snaps the heel of his hand into his attacker’s face and feels their nose splinter. They scream and he knees them off. Rolls onto his belly, can’t stand up. There’s blood on his hands. Yancy is in his head, screaming at him to get up and run. There are men standing over him, then their boots slamming into his ribs, his back, his head and shoulders. He throws his arms overs his head, tries to yell, gets kicked in the gut and loses his wind.
Yancy.
They’re going to kill him. He’s going to die in a fucking alley in Tokyo. Someone kicks him so hard, he slams into the foot of wall and his vision whites out. They grab him by the forearms, by the hair, yank him up right. Someone grabs his dog tags and rips them off his throat, vices a hand over his mouth and nose. He can’t breathe. Four men pin him up against the wall, arms against the siding. The man smothering him has one hand on his shoulder, the other over his face, his knee in Raleigh’s crotch, crushing him to the wall.
Yancy, I’m sorry.
The man smothering him is very calm. “Shh,” he says.
Raleigh jerks, tries to bite through the bastard’s glove, gets a mouthful of mud.
“Shhhh.”
His eyes are burning. Rainwater running into his face. His lungs are bursting in his chest, his throat rupturing, his veins laced with battery acid. He can’t breathe. He can’t move.
Yancy…
He blacks out.
---
Someone throws water in his face. Raleigh jolts, the ice water hitting his skin like liquid electricity, shocking his system awake and that first gasp of air is so free it’s orgasmic. Oxygen dowsing his system. He can’t see anything. There’s something over his face, a strip of cloth knotted so tight it’s pressing into the lids of his eyes. He’s lying on a mat and he’s immediately aware that someone has cuffed his wrists and ankles. Panic seizes every inch of him, flaying Raleigh’s calm to nothing before he forces himself to lie still and breathe. Just breathe, inhale, exhale, focus on his lungs in his chest rising and falling.
“Are you going to kill me?”
He figures he’ll just ask.
No one says anything. He can hear people walking around him, feet on hardwood floors, eyes on him. He’s on his back, his arms cuffed behind him up in the small of his back. He tugs experimentally, trying to curl his legs, finds resistance. He relaxes. He’s barefoot, still soaked, it’s not been very long then. The room is humid and sounds big, his voice dissipating into a larger space – someone’s house? If he screams will someone hear him?
No, they’d have gagged him if that was the case.
He moves his legs again, hears the faint jangle of chain links and the metal bites into his ankles until he lays still again. He can still feel people in the room, hear them breathing.
“What do you want?”
“I am sorry.” He doesn’t recognize the voice. They have an accent he can’t identify. A man. “For what Marco said about your brother.”
“Fuck you. If you’re going to kill me, then just fucking do it. The Kaiju will kill you like everyone else, buddy. Don’t talk about my brother.”
A woman speaks this time, from his right. “We aren’t here to kill you, Ranger.”
Oh no.
“Let me go.”
“No.”
“What do you want?”
No answer. Then he hears someone step off the hardwood onto the mat with him. Raleigh doesn’t move, just lies there, feeling the air shift as another person moves to kneel beside him. He feels them raise their hand, senses the heat of their arm in the dead air right before they lay their hand on his bicep, pushing his sleeve up… running their fingers over the scars there – three in a line, like claw marks.
“I didn’t get those from the Kaiju.” Raleigh’s voice is calmer than he actually is. He’s fucking terrified. He keeps his tone flat. “I got those from the Jaeger crash. Your monster-god-bullshit never touched me.”
The person touching him ignores him. Fingertips touch his cheek.
“I’ve got friends. They’ll be looking for me.” It’s a lie. They don’t even acknowledge him. The person touching his face reaches down and grasps the waistband of his fatigues, unsnaps the top. “No.” Someone else walks onto the mat and grabs his pants at the knees while the first person grabs his shoulders and pins Raleigh down. “NO!”
The second person pulls, the waist of his pants jerks down to the middle of his hips, then his thighs. Raleigh bucks up, squeezes his knees together, trying to keep them from undressing him, do something to stop them. No. God, no, no. His pants are around his ankles, his boxers around his knees and Raleigh thinks, no matter what they say, they are going to kill him after this.
“I’m just a fucking Jaeger pilot. I’m not… God…fuck… I’m not whatever you think…” He’s breathing too fast, hyperventilating. “Listen to me. Please, just listen to me for a minute.”
Naked from the waist down, Raleigh allows himself to fucking panic – the cyanide burn of terror boiling up through his guts, locking every muscle in his body. The second person, the one who undressed him, is gone. The person still holding him down also lets go of him and walks off the mat. He can hear a couple of them speaking in a language that isn’t Japanese. He lies there on his back, breathing too fast, the air cooling sweat on his bare legs and all he can think is that they’re going to torture him and he tries to think of a way to convince them to just kill him quickly.
His mouth is dry.
He tries to swallow, coughs.
“Do you need water?” The woman’s voice. “Answer me, pilot.”
“Yeah.” He licks his lips, feels the skin split and bleed. “Yeah I feel kinda sick.”
“We will not uncuff you.”
“No, that’s fine. Just… I’m thirsty okay?” Don’t start. Whatever you’re going to do, don’t start. “Okay?”
There’s no answer. Somewhere, faintly, he hears a faucet turn on and tries to think straight. Yancy would be better at this. He could always think, always, even when he was about to die, he was trying to talk to Raleigh, tell him something and in that moment all Raleigh can think of how fucking alone he is – he’s going to die on this fucking warehouse floor and no one is going to find him and bury him. Not Mom or Dad or Yancy or Jazmine. They are all dead and no one will come looking for him. For a moment, he allows the terrible fucking crush of that to just unravel inside him, poison him entirely.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathes. “Jesus Christ…”
Someone steps onto the mat again, kneels by his head.
“Sit up.”
Raleigh pushes himself into a sitting position, hunching forward, his chin over his knees. Fingertips brush his chin, tipping his face up, the edge of a glass gently laid against his lower lip. The water is cold, tastes slightly sour, desalinated. He drinks the whole glass, aware of his captor’s breathing, how her fingers stay pressed against the underside of his jaw. When the glass is empty, she swipes her thumb across his lower lip and he feels sick again.
“Are you ready?”
“For what?”
“To begin.”
“I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know what you want me to do.”
“Do nothing.”
“I will fight you. If you touch me I’m going to fight you.”
“That is expected. It makes no difference.”
“Why are you doing this?” She stands ups and walks away. “Why the fuck are you doing this to me?”
“Scream if you want, pilot.” Someone else steps onto the mat, steps over him. “No one will hear.”
Yancy. Big brother, please… if you’re in there somewhere. Please…
They grab his arms and haul him up, dragging his ass off the mat then throwing him face down, pinning his shoulders to the floor as someone kicks his knees apart. He shouts in every language he knows, curses devolving into animal sounds of hatred underlain with panic and he screams when someone kneels between his knees and runs two gel-slick fingers down the cleft of his ass. They slide down from the base of his spine to the back of his balls, reaching down between his legs. The urge to vomit raced up through his body and Raleigh slams his forehead into the floor, trying to keep silent. He’d do anything to keep them from hearing him. He’d do anything to be unconscious. Someone grasps a fistful of his hair, still military crew, slightly grown out and shoves his face into the mat. The woman, he’s sure it’s the woman now, grasps Raleigh gently in her hand, then starts to stroke him from base to tip and he fractures a little.
“Why?” His own voice sounds wrong, like he’s in high school. “Why are you doing this?”
He thrashes like animal caught in a trap, hoping to hurt himself, to stop this, but they hold him fast. He breathes through his teeth, tries not to scream again as his rapist squeezes him tighter, quickening her pace, biting back a nauseous moan as blood rushes to his groin. He wants to die. He wants to die. He wants them to stop touching him. He’s terrified of what’s coming next.
“Stop. Please, I’m just a fucking pilot. I’m just a pilot.”
Are they even listening? He doesn’t even know what they think they’re doing. He squeezes his eyes shut behind the blindfold and pray for his brother’s voice in his head, anyone, anything, something to focus on other than these people making him into a ritual. He can feel himself starting to come, the orgasm gathering in his belly. He’s unbelievably hard and that’s the worst part of it; he knows it’s been almost year since anyone touched him, since some girl in Anchorage and it’s not because he wants it…
He bites his tongue until he tastes blood. Climaxes. Gasps as the hand between his legs continues to stroke him, again and again into the aftershocks.
Please. Please, someone…
The woman is running her fingers, wet from his orgasm, up into his ass again, fingertips stopping at his rectum. He tries to find the strength to struggle but he can’t fathom stopping them now. He just swallows blood and silently screams, hips jerking up as two fingers slide inside him, his whole lower body seizing with pain, a stabbing pulse from his prostate to the end of his dick. He tries not to throw up. Raleigh twitches, knees jerking as the fingers inside him press up, hard, hit something and another rush of blood to his groin makes him writhe against the mat, panting.
“Yancy.” He grits his teeth, his erection heavy and painful. “Yancy… God… please I can’t…”
Just try to focus on my voice.
“It really hurts. Help me, please. Please…”
I am, Raleigh. I’m here, just focus. You can do this. Just block it out, you can get through this.
“Okay. Okay.” One of the man is taking the woman’s place at his back, their thumb against his asshole, squeezing his right buttock. “Please don’t… don’t leave…”
I won’t. I’m right here. You’re not alone, okay? I’m looking out for you.
Raleigh screams this time. He can’t help it. They pin him down as the man at his back leans into him, thrusts once, twice, sodomizes him slowly. He bites back the sound, swallows it and holds it in his throat as a low, inaudible tone, shaking through his bones. Someone gently strokes his hair from his temple and Raleigh feels himself drifting, finally, sliding out of his fucking skin into neural limbo, into silence. He’s ten years old and Yancy is holding his hand, walking him through the train terminal and he doesn’t know why, but his brother’s hand in his is reason enough. He has faith like one puts in God in his brother and that was before they were co-pilots. He drifts. He’s fifteen, summer, new grass, eating an apple. Yancy is tossing a baseball up and down next to him. He’s sixteen and doing twenty-five over. Yancy is yelling at him to slow the fuck down. He’s twenty-two and he’s collapsing in the snow, bleeding out through his soul and through his suit, Gispy Danger smoking dead above him, the skull of her Conn-Pod torn open.
“No… no… god…”
I’m here, Rals. I’m still here. I’m not leaving.
The man on top of him spasms, comes inside Raleigh. It runs down the back of his legs, drips on the floor and his whole body hurts. His insides burn when his assailant pulls out and he can’t think. He can’t even react when another man moves to replace the first, grabbing him by the hips and dragging him off the mat.
“Yance, please…”
Focus. Just drift, Raleigh.
He drifts. He’s twelve. Birthday cake. He’s thirteen. First kiss. He’s eighteen. First car accident. He’s twenty-three and he’s being fucked on the floor of a warehouse trying to imagine enough of his dead brother to make believe he’s not alone. He does not scream. He forces himself to blank out, drifts again until he’s seventeen lying in the shallows of a lake, staring up, listening to Yancy hum to himself as he skips rocks. It’s summer again and they have all summer to spend doing whatever they want. Anything they want.
He wakes up as someone rolls him onto his back.
“He’s still alive.”
“Think he’ll make it to a hospital?”
His hands are uncuffed. Someone tosses his jacket on top of him, his boots hitting the mat next to his head.
“That’s up to him.”
He drifts.
---
“Can you see yourself going to college, Yance?”
“Nope. You?”
“Know what I can see us doing?” Yancy laughs. The sun is directly overhead, blinding. Raleigh has to hold up a hand to blot it out, see his brother on the edge of his sun-swarmed vision. “I can see us saving the world. Punching Kaiju in the face, living forever.”
“You still have senior year, doofus.”
“Yeah, but we’ll do it right? We’ll try out for the Ranger Academy and if we wash out, you go back to college and I’ll start up.”
“That’s your big plan?”
“That’s my big plan, but I can’t do it without you. So don’t puss out on me.”
“I won’t puss out on you, Rals.” Yancy kicks water at him. “I’ll be there.”
---
It’s 5AM in Hong Kong. Mako Mori wakes up sick.
tbc