#becketcest

Your eyes open to dawn, to the feeling of the bed tilting empty. To the sounds of feet padding across the thin carpet and a the slide of wood-on-wood. You blink, arm stretching over the expanse of cotton to your right and fingers curling to catch at the sheets as your other hand knuckles the sleep from your eye. 

“Shit, sorry Rals.” You blink again, gaze tracking the word to its source in the faint light. “Didn’t mean to wake you, kiddo.”

“Y-Y-Yancy,” his name is cut to pieces by a yawn, “wh’ time’s it?”

You don’t wait for an answer though, roll over through the still-cooling sweat spots on the bed. Grunt when you prop your head up on the same arm you’re using to rub at your eyes and bear down a little too hard, squinting to read the dim numbers on the clock. You’ve been meaning to replace its batteries for probably three months now. That or get a wired one. 

“Six thirty?” You roll back, arching your shoulders as you do and popping your back. The action makes something lower throb lightly, and you can’t help but shiver in a way that isn’t entirely unpleasant. “What’re...you’re never up this early, Yance. Why--”

“Rals,” The bed dips the way it should when Yancy’s knee meets the mattress, the weight of it finally right in your mind as he sits, “you know why.”

You reach out to him without thinking, eyes closed once again. Your fingertips skate through the dusting of red-blond hair on his arm, and you follow it up, up, up, until you reach his bare shoulder. You trace lines between the freckles you know are there without even having to look, can feel his skin rising into goosebumps. Can feel something deep in your gut rising with it, both of you shivering at the same time. 

“Yance,” you mumble as you throw your free arm arm over your eyes, trying to keep out the sunlight that’s still beneath the horizon. As if doing so could prevent it from crawling up over the mountains at all. The want, the need, to make this moment last, to stretch it like a rubber band until it’s on the verge of snapping, throbs in your chest - pulsing in time with your heart. “c’mon, come back to--”

“We can’t do this, Rals.”

 The rhythm in your chest turns cold. Drops into your stomach.

“I don’t c--”

“Raleigh, please.”

There’s something in Yancy’s voice. Something you don’t want to think about. Your mind doesn’t care what you want, though, and your arm drops as your eyes crack open again. In the near-dark, it’s hard to make out your brother, but his eyes are impossible to miss. The same pleading, the same begging, that’s in Yancy’s voice is buried deep within those twin pools. 

“Please don’t let a mistake screw up the one good thing you already have.”

Yancy shifts until the hand you have on his shoulder falls to the sheets. The cold in your stomach freezes. Sharpens. You swallow reflexively. It doesn’t help. 

“Yance, please don’t--”

“You have Chuck.”

“But--”

“No, Raleigh. We’re not doing this. We can’t.”

He turns his back on you and stands, the bed righting itself. Everything suddenly feels wrong, wrong, wrong, and fear roars in your ears. 

“Yance, c’mon--”

You cut yourself off this time, eyes coming fully open as you sit up. The sheets tangle around your legs as you try to free yourself. A pressure wells in your chest, burning its way up your throat and threatening to spill out, and you only just barely manage to hold it back. 

“Yancy. Please,” the word breaks whatever wall you’d been trying to build, the pressure finally winning, and a single sob rips its way out of you. “This doesn’t have to be hard, or weird, or,” you trail off, trying to think of the right words to say, the words to get your brother back in your arms where he’d felt so right. Where nothing had felt complicated, nothing had felt out of place--everything had, for the first time, felt like it’d belonged. 

“Please,” you whisper. “Please, just stay.”

“I can’t.” He says it like a fact. Like it’s something immutable and unchangeable, as simple as one plus one equaling two. His posture shifts, though, drawing in on itself, his shoulders hunching. “This was a mistake. You don’t want this.”

“But I do, Yance. I do. I have, for years, just--you gotta believe me Yance, please--”

Yancy’s entire back stiffens, his shoulders flying up to near his ears. You can see a flush creeping up his neck and into his ears--

(And, oh, doesn’t that just remind you of the firsthand knowledge you now have of exactly how far down that red tinge really goes)

--before he’s whirling back to you, his eyes--

His eyes. 

You’ve known your brother all twenty-two years of your life, were practically put through high school by him when your genetic donor--you refuse to think of that walking pile of horse shit as your father--walked out on the pair of you. You’ve learned how to read him. Have gained such an intuitive awareness of him that even now, years after he moved out to “give you your own space, kiddo,” you can still feel his presence like an extension of your own arm. Can tell where he is from the soft sounds he makes when he walks, when he thinks, when he sleeps. Can tell what he’s thinking from the tilt of his hips, the part of his lips, the swirling currents behind his eyes. 

Deep within your brother’s eyes, there’s more than just pleading. There’s pain. Agony. And, so quickly you almost miss it, the worst possible thing.

Hope. 

Hope that you watch Yancy snuff out with a small shake of his own head.

“You don’t want this, Rals.”

He says your name like he’s begging. Like it’s a prayer. His hands move toward your shoulders, and you can feel the warmth radiating from his palms brushing against your skin before he seems to realize what he’s doing and drops his face forward into his hands.

“You can’t want this. Please kiddo, go be happy with Chuck. Don’t,” there’s a hitch in his voice then, and it splits your chest wide open, “don’t become me, Rals. I-I couldn’t live with myself if--”

Blood roars in your ears--not in anger, but the same way it had when Chuck’d taken you skydiving for your second date. 

“You don’t get to decide that for me,” your voice sounds steadier than you feel, your arms and spine the consistency of jello even as you somehow manage to remain upright, “because I already decided for myself.”

But Yancy is still shaking his head, because, you realize with a start, he doesn’t get it. 

“I told Chuck.”

Yancy’s eyes are on you with a suddenness that makes a kernel of fear in your guts pulse coolly. When he speaks, his voice is strained. 

“What?”

You have to swallow past the lump in your throat. One of your hands reaches out to grasp at his wrist where it’s hanging limply at his side. You manage to your fingers behind the gentle curve where hand and arm meet, curling them to keep your grip; you can feel Yancy’s pulse racing through the contact.

“I told Chuck how I feel about you. How I’ve felt about you my whole life. And,” another swallow, your eyes darting away from your brother’s face before you force them back, “and he doesn’t mind.”

The denial is clear in Yancy’s face, mouth opening to make it real, so you continue speaking as if you hadn’t noticed. 

“He said he won’t make me choose if you won’t. And, I love Chuck, I do, but,” you squeeze Yancy’s wrist lightly, the fear in your gut writhing like a living thing, “but I love you too. I don’t regret what we did last night. I’ve wanted it for so long, wanted it so much, I don’t know how I’ve survived the past few years. I--”

Your voice cracks at the edges, and you couldn’t stop it even if you wanted to. 

“I just know I won’t--I can’t, I--I don’t want this to be the last time. I can’t do this without you, Yance.”

There is resolve in Yancy’s eyes. You watch it--the need to sacrifice of himself to do what he thinks is right for both of you, and especially for you, his little brother--war with your words. Watch it war with the hope that refuses to be crushed, the same hope you feel fighting the fear deep in your belly. 

“I know it won’t be easy,” you whisper, “I know it’ll be hard, and that sometimes it’ll suck, but we can get through it the way we have everything. Mom dying, Richard leaving, all of it. We got through it together. So, please Yance.” 

You tug at his arm lightly. Can feel his pulse zip. 

“Just...stay. Please.”

Through the haze of tears gathering at the bottom of your lids, you watch the resolve in his eyes crumble. His head bows, eyes closing, and you feel something cool and wet land on the back of your hand. When he speaks, it sounds like a little like relief, a lot like love, and, maybe, just a little bit like the future.