Chapter Text
There is nothing—has never been anything—Yancy won't do for his little brothers.
-
The day Raleigh comes home, Yancy still just three years old, he looks directly into those bright, blue eyes, and, in that moment, knows that this is it, this is the reason he is alive. It’s with a certainty that only toddlers can muster that he proclaims that Raleigh is his little brother and he isn't sharing, much to the amusement of his parents. Then, just under a year later—two days after Yancy's fourth birthday, in fact—another small life is placed in his arms: Jamieson, or, as they would come to call him, Jamie. And, just like that, at the sight of those blue-gray eyes, so like Raleigh's, so much like his own, the small bubble that Yancy had built around his life, the tiny blip in the cosmos that had only held him and Raleigh within its invisible walls, is expanded by the space of another life. They are three. And nothing is ever going to change that.
-
Yancy dotes on his brothers, helps take care of them, calms them when they cry, even sings to them when they’re upset and his parents are at the end of their collective rope. He’d learned to change diapers for Raleigh—had thought nothing of it, because that's what big brother's were supposed to do, right?—and exercises those skills again with Jamie. Kisses away their hurts when they inevitably do something where he can’t save them. Helps hold their arms up for their first steps.
Raleigh and Jamie, for their part, get along well enough. Play together, somehow managing to keep their squabbling for certain toys to a minimum. They babble back and forth before they both start really speaking. When Raleigh says his first word, Jamie mimics it immediately, a huge smile on his round face; Yancy can claim that his name had been the first thing both of his brothers had ever said. Well, not his name, exactly, but as close as they could likely get under the circumstances.
-
When he’s five—about to turn six—and has to start going to school, Yancy nearly runs back to the house when Raleigh and Jamie, both in their mother's arms, burst out crying, two pairs of arms reaching for him, two voices repeating his name over and over. Only his father's grip on his shoulder keeps him going. That and the fact that he’s already buckled into the seat of the car. The two of them are nearly inconsolable when he returns that evening, and Yancy spends nearly an hour just holding them close, whispering promises that he won’t going anywhere, that he was right there. Later, after they were all supposed to be in bed, Yancy sneaks out of their room and into his parents'. He argues with both of them that he should wait another year to go, wait until Raleigh and Jamie are old enough to understand.
"You have to go to school, Yancy," his father grumbles. "They'll understand that eventually. That's all there is to it. You can't baby them forever."
Their father's word are final, no matter how much Yancy might want to scream that they are still babies, they’re his baby brothers. He knows, though, that it won’t accomplish anything, and the way Richard Becket has rolled away from his son until his back is facing the door only serves to reinforce the point. The next morning is a more subdued repeat of the previous day, though Yancy does go to Raleigh and Jamie individually and give them a kiss on the forehead, reiterating his promise that he‘s not leaving for good and adding one that he’ll be back soon.
-
The day Raleigh joins Yancy in school is worse than when Yancy started on his own. For the first time since a few days after Yancy had started school, he worries about his brother being at home without him. Their mom is still there, sure, but Jamie is without either him or Raleigh for the first time. He finds Raleigh in the cafeteria, the two of them carving out their own spot at one of the tables, Raleigh practically clinging to his side and glancing around at the other kids with a kind of wide-eyed terror and suspicion. Yancy hadn't ever really sat with anyone for lunch before, so having Raleigh there to talk is...different. He likes it. Excepting, of course, that all either of them seem to be able to talk about is Jamie.
"Do you think he's lonely?" Raleigh finally asks, voicing the question Yancy knows both of them are thinking. Yancy pulls Raleigh into his side, letting Raleigh lean his head on his shoulder as he answers.
"I hope not."
-
Jamie isn't okay, as it turns out. According to their mom, he’d spent the whole day crying and asking why they left him all alone. The only solution had come when their mom had sat him down and started reading to him. He'd apparently asked to start reading himself, and hadn't put the book down until he'd finished it.
After that, it’s a downhill spiral. Jamie had discovered books, and they never let him go. It becomes a common occurrence for Yancy to go find his brother to tell him dinner is ready, only to find Jamie buried in the copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone their parents had gotten for him, working through it paragraph by paragraph even though he'd finished it at least three times already. His smile when Yancy tells him to come downstairs, that they’re waiting for him, though, is still exactly the same. And maybe Yancy cherishes that smile, just a little, happy that he still has that part of his baby brother at the very least.
It isn’t that Jamie’s stopped playing with Raleigh and Yancy, or stopped talking to them entirely. It’s more that the time he spends reading is definitely felt by the two older brothers as an absence, as if something they hadn't known they possessed is abruptly...not gone, but hidden through a fog.
Even so, Yancy, for his part, is grateful that their brother has discovered something to get him through the day. He even lets Jamie read his books for school, which the kid tears through like they’re nothing. On one memorable occasion—the first—Yancy brings home a printed out reading assignment from his teacher—a packet of ten pages of photocopies—with instructions to read three pages that evening. When he hands it over to Jamie, his scribbled answers to the question the teacher had assigned tucked back into his backpack, the kid has finished reading all ten pages within twenty minutes.
For a singular moment, Yancy feels jealousy towards his baby brother. Jealousy that the kid seems to be able to just…pick things up and understand them. Could get through ten pages the same amount of time it’d taken Yancy to get through three. It isn’t fair.
The jealousy, however, disappears as quickly as it comes. Vanishes into nothing at the sight of Jamie’s beaming face, the way the kid is looking at him hopefully, pages clutched in his hand, almost as if nervous. As if he might’ve done something he wasn’t supposed to.
“Wow, Jamie,” Yancy smiles, taking the stapled-together papers from where his brother is holding them out, Raleigh watching them from the kitchen table where he’s practicing his addition, “you finished already? That’s awesome, buddy.”
Pulls his brother to him. Plants a chaste kiss on Jamie’s forehead. Squeezed the kid tight.
“Can I have more, Yancy?” The voice is muffled slightly where Jamie is pressing himself against Yancy’s chest, and he finds himself nodding even though the kid can’t see him.
“‘Course you can. Anything you want.”
-
When Jamie joins them in school the next year, his teachers have him for all of two days before they are all called in for a parent-teacher conference. Their mom and dad don’t let them listen in, have the three of them sit in the hallway outside the principal’s office, but when they come out it’s to announce that Jamie is going to be in Raleigh’s year.
Yancy’s brothers, of course, are ecstatic.
-
Ten years pass.
The brothers change: grow closer in some ways, and fall apart in others.
-
Jamie and Raleigh start a rivalry that Yancy reminds them repeatedly is stupid, since the main prize seems to be his attention. They compete in grades, in couch space, and in games. However, despite that, the two of them become inseparable. One year, several kids in their year get it in their heads that, since Jamie is younger than them, he’s an easy target. It’s the first time Yancy knows about that Raleigh has punched someone, and, despite the stern lecture their parents give him afterwards, he hugs his brothers close to him later that night, telling them what an awesome job they’d done looking out for one another.
Jamie grows up into the bookworm they always knew he’d be, almost scarily smart. Raleigh picks up sports when the two of them start high school, lacrosse in particular, and, of course, is instantly popular. And, because Jamie can’t let Raleigh get away with doing something he can’t, he joins track—long distance in particular. Yancy doesn’t join a sport, per se, although he does take up going for runs with Jamie in the morning before they leave for school. Which, then, turns into the three of them going for a run in the morning once Raleigh finds out.
Yancy comes out when he’s a freshman in high school, pulling his entire family aside to tell them that he’s gay. Jamie, of course, asks the practically requisite question wondering what it means when someone is “gay”.
“It means your brother loves other boys instead of girls,” their mom explains, “that instead of having a wife like your father has, one day he’ll have a husband.”
And if Yancy starts crying at those words, smiling so widely through the tears that he’s sure his face is going to rip in half? Well. Who could blame him, really?
-
Senior year finds Yancy applying to colleges. It also finds their mother receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis three months before she finally dies. Her death serves only to draw the brothers closer together. Raleigh and Jamie—or Jay, as they usually call him now—might share a room while Yancy has his own down the hall, but all three of them bundle up together in Yancy’s bed that night, holding one another close, refusing to let go, holding each other and being held as they cry themselves to sleep. They keep on like that for almost a month before their dad, drunk, walks in on them one night and tells them to stop, that it isn’t normal. The word “freak” may get thrown around somewhere in there, which is the moment Yancy slams the door in their father’s face. They stop the night after, though Yancy doesn’t manage to sleep that night. It gives him time to think, though, and ponder the ache he feels in his chest, an ache that has nothing to do with the emptiness of their house—the presence of their mom fading a little bit more every day—and everything to do with his empty room, the spot on his sheets where Raleigh and Jamie had slept, curled around him and one another, feeling oddly vacant without them both there.
Yancy loves his brothers. Loves them more than anyone else in the entire world. Had helped raise them, had changed their fucking diapers. He had been there for them for their first steps, their first words, their first time losing a tooth…he’d been there for everything. Knows everything about his brothers. Knows things they didn’t even know about themselves, like the way Raleigh’s ears turn red when he’s lying, or how Jamie mouths along to the dialogue of the books he reads when he gets really into it. Yancy loves his brothers completely, unconditionally. They’re his brothers—they’re family—and what else do they really have, in the end?
-
On a Saturday evening in the following summer, their father quietly packs his things in the middle of the night and leaves. No note. No explanation.
Yancy does the only sensible thing. He withdraws from his college, finds a job, and starts raising his brothers on his own.
Less than two weeks later, a monster emerges from the Pacific Ocean and destroys San Francisco, signaling the end of the world. Beyond the novelty, though, the three Beckets hardly feel it. Their world had begun ending a long time ago.
-
They take to sleeping in their parents’ old room. Yancy can never remember which of them actually starts it or even suggests it, just that one night they all find themselves curled together on the queen-size bed, trying to get impossibly closer to one another as Jamie cries that he misses mom, asking why dad left them, and Yancy holds him close as Raleigh moulds himself to their youngest brother’s back.
That same night, as he takes in the sight of his brothers curled around him, Yancy is struck by how beautiful Raleigh and Jamie both are. Finds himself wondering when the hell that had happened, when their boyish features had become replaced with hard planes and jawlines that would make any person with half a brain weak in the knees; when his scrawny little brothers had been replaced by these two near-perfect beings that were, somehow, still related to him. And, yet, neither of them have ever held steady girlfriends. It isn’t, he knows, as if they couldn’t have any girl—or boy, he thinks to himself, trying to be egalitarian about it—they might want, what with their looks and how much like overgrown puppies they can be. They simply…haven’t really dated. Then again, he reasons, they’re only in eleventh grade. Nothing says they have to have tried dating yet…isn’t like Yancy’s had more than a single boyfriend, anyway, so he’s to judge?
He resolves himself to not think about it any further, choosing instead to sink into the warmth his brothers radiate like miniature furnaces. A small thrill goes through him when Raleigh sighs happily and snuggles closer while Jamie makes a small noise of his own, and Yancy falls asleep to the sound of his brothers’ heartbeats.
-
They don’t talk about it. They don’t question it. It’s just something they do.
Time continues to move. The Becket brothers continue to live, keeping themselves going as best as they can. Yancy continues to ignore the cloud of…something that hovers above him, always over his shoulder, brighter and more insistent whenever Raleigh or Jamie are around.
The world keeps turning, spinning madly through space, and Yancy holds his brothers close to him as he tries to keep them anchored to the surface.
