Archive of Our Own ^beta

Raleigh Becket turned a page of his book with a slow and calm appreciation, determinedly ignoring the clangour of shouts and rattling chains nearing his cell. His relaxed pose - one hand behind his head, the other supporting the book resting on his stomach, one leg bent, the other lying flat on the mint-green bedsheets - remained unchanging, despite the emphatic river of curses flowing through the barred door. 

The sound of another page turning was lost beneath the metallic slam of the door against the wall, and as Raleigh hummed at a particularly interesting sentence, two guards shoved someone in with evident relief. 

Said someone then threw himself bodily against the swiftly-shut door, shouting obscenities which would’ve made Samuel L. Jackson blush. 

Remaining set on obliviousness, Raleigh turned the next page. However, as his new cellmate’s anger remained unabated - impossibly, it seemed to actually be worsening - Raleigh’s determination wavered. After what had happened with his last cellmate, he hadn’t wanted to get involved, preferring to keep his head down; but this man seemed to have no idea how a prison sentence worked.

He sighed, quietly. Sitting up, he set the book aside, and turned to put his feet on the ground.

‘That isn’t going to help you,’ Raleigh said.

The man whipped around, narrowing dark blue eyes in a heated scowl. ‘Why the fuck is it any of your business, mate?’ he snapped.

Raleigh had never heard a term of friendship used with such aggressiveness. It would’ve been impressive, if it hadn’t been so unwarranted.

‘I’m sorry, I was under the impression that you wouldn’t want to spend the next ten years in this place,’ Raleigh replied, iron starting to creep into his tone. ‘My mistake.’

Sure, he wanted to help the guy out, but not if he was gonna be an absolute bitch about it.

While Raleigh had been, admittedly, stewing a little, his cellmate had been chewing this over, judging from the movement of his stubble-scruffed jawline. It was a nice jawline, but it was attached to an unrepentant asshole, so Raleigh preferred not to dwell on it.

‘What do you mean?’ Nice Jawline asked eventually. The burning anger appeared to have cooled for the moment, though to call his tone “amicable” would still be pushing it. He had a strong accent, almost to a cartoonish point - Australian, maybe?

Raleigh braced his forearms on his thighs and tilted his head. ‘I mean that if you want an extended prison sentence, pissing off the guards is a fantastic start.’

Nice Jawline glowered. Raleigh raised his eyebrows.

Once it became clear that Nice Jawline wasn’t dropping the glare any time soon, Raleigh made one last effort.

‘Look,’ he sighed, scratching at his temple. ‘How long’s your sentence?’

Nice Jawline’s mouth twisted, and he folded his arms. ‘Two years. One without the possibility of parole.’

‘You are aware that one pretty important condition of allowing parole is good behaviour?’

The only reply was a sullenly stubborn expression. Raleigh sighed again. With this cellmate, he had the feeling that sighing was going to be a common occurrence.

‘All I’m saying is, if you want to get out of here any time soon, you might want to try keeping your head down.’

To be honest, that was a little hypocritical of him to say, after what’d happened last month. On the other hand, the event had served as a good warning, and a reminder to follow his own advice.

‘Fine,’ Nice Jawline said. Begrudgingly, but still - Raleigh was taken aback enough to blink wordlessly for a moment.

Nodding, he replied: ‘Good.’ 

Here’s hoping that they’d both stick to it.

:::

He wasn’t sticking to it. At all.

Chuck Hansen, as Nice Jawline had reluctantly admitted his name to be, was already stirring up trouble. For God’s sake, it hadn’t even been three hours.

Raleigh blew a sigh down into his vaguely greenish meatloaf. It was a struggle to resist the urge to rub at his forehead, and he eventually gave in. At least it temporarily blocked the view of his apparently mentally challenged cellmate giving lip to the biggest psycho on the block. The man was called Knifehead for a reason, and it wasn’t his skill at paring onions. His pack of cronies - nicknamed the Kaiju - weren’t exactly Mother Teresas, either.

‘Looks like we’ll be seeing blood today,’ Tendo Choi said cheerfully. While making friends in prison wasn’t exactly recommendable, Tendo was at least marginally sane. He’d been incarcerated for hacking a military site - accidentally, or so he claimed.

‘He’s insane,’ Raleigh muttered, wincing as Hansen flipped Knifehead off with relish. ‘Completely goddamn insane.’

‘I’m not going disagree with you there, Becket.’

Two of Knifehead’s meathead goons - Slattern and Leatherback - shot to their feet with a rattle of nylon-plastic cutlery, and suddenly Raleigh had never missed alcohol more.

‘Can’t let him die,’ he told himself under his breath, and stood. Tendo dropped his spoon. 

By the time Raleigh made it over to his idiot cellmate, there was actually a literal shank glinting in Knifehead’s meaty paw, Hansen was about an inch away from punching Slattern, and four more Kaiju were crowding in. Raleigh unceremoniously grabbed Hansen by the collar and yanked him back like a puppy on a leash.

‘Keep your mouth shut,’ he hissed, as he shoved Hansen behind him. He then turned back to the Kaiju and folded his arms, pasting on an unruffled visage.

‘Becket,’ Knifehead smiled. His voice was unnaturally deep, and the old slash across his throat made him sound like he habitually gargled gravel. He was extremely pale, with small, widely-set eyes, a beaky nose, and large teeth, which combined to make him look undeniably similar to a goblin shark.

‘Knifehead,’ Raleigh replied.

‘Fresh Meat’s testing my patience,’ Knifehead said, transferring his reptilian smile to Hansen. 

‘He’s my cellmate,’ Raleigh replied quickly. Hansen, his planned retort thwarted, closed his mouth with a scowl. Raleigh was beginning to suspect that his face was actually stuck like that.

‘We both know that doesn’t mean much when it comes to you,’ Knifehead said. ‘In fact, considering your history, it’s more of a threat to him than it is to me - wouldn’t you say?’

Ignoring Hansen’s burning glower, Raleigh raised his eyebrows fractionally. ‘It isn’t a threat. Just a statement. It wouldn’t be too profitable to cause trouble here.’

He tilted his head towards a nearby guard, whose fingers were, luckily enough, lying on his taser at that very moment. Knifehead followed his eyes, his mouth closing tightly over his sharp teeth. While the Kaiju had bribed one or two individual guards, the Prison Warden was an incorruptible hardass called Stacker Pentecost. He had thrown Kaiju in solitary before, and would not hesitate to do so again.

‘Take your pet away, then,’ Knifehead said with a dismissive flick of his hand. Beady eyes glinting with malice, he gave the final, parting shot: ‘He seems a little moody - maybe consider a spaying? It could save you both a lot of trouble.’

Grimly, Raleigh yanked Hansen away before he had a chance to verbalise the rage turning his ears crimson. He manhandled him past Tendo, who looked on the edge of cackling, to an empty table near the bins. There he sat Hansen down and dropped to a seat across from him. For once, he matched the idiot scowl for scowl.

‘What the hell were you thinking?’ he whisper-snarled. The temptation to actually shout was alluring, but he had a reputation to uphold.

Hansen opened his mouth to respond, but Raleigh decided that he was too pissed to let him speak. ‘My mistake. You weren’t.’ He slammed a fist onto the table, quietly. ‘Picking a fight with the most shank-happy psychopath on your first day? Jesus Christ, Hansen, how have you even survived this long? My twelve-year-old sister had more sense than you!’ He ran a hand through his hair, before hitting the table again - this time with his palm. ‘I don’t want to treat you like a child, or a really stupid dog, but by this point I’m fairly sure that you’d deserve it. Jesus. Does the phrase “shanked and left to die” mean nothing to you?’

Finally Raleigh stopped, breathing heavily. He had to blow out a sharp sigh and rub at his forehead before being able to even look at Hansen without being set off again.

And the man was glaring.

Typical. Goddamn typical. It had only been three hours and six minutes and Raleigh was pretty sure he knew ninety per cent of Hansen’s personality. Was irritable dickhead his one and only trait?

‘Whatever, man,’ Raleigh said, shaking his head. ‘Good luck.’ 

He stood, and went back to Tendo.

What a stupid, arrogant child.

:::

Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown.

Raleigh crossed one ankle over the other where he lay, quietly content. It was evening; he had his favourite book in hand; no riots were going on; dinner had actually been edible; and Chuck Hansen was, uncharacteristically enough, not yelling. In fact, he was brooding silently on his bed. It was quite impressive, really. Raleigh himself would’ve become bored after the first fifteen minutes of wordless sulking, but Hansen had stuck it out for forty-two and counting.

‘Y’know, dystopian fiction’s decent, but horror fiction is better.’

Raleigh’s eyebrows contrived to hide his shock under a facade of mild interest, and raised themselves fractionally. He looked over to Hansen. For the last three-quarters of an hour or so, he’d been hunched over and cross-legged, glaring at the cell door. Now he was sitting back to the wall, long legs stretched out, hands resting on his thighs. He almost looked…relaxed, which was unnatural as hell. He was barely even frowning.

‘Oh?’ was all Raleigh could think to say.

‘Yeah,’ Hansen replied, and for a moment Raleigh thought the weirdness would end right then and there in an awkward silence. He was wrong. ‘Stoker and Shelley are good. Lovecraft’s the best by miles, though. True blue legend, mate.’

Wow. The word hadn’t even been passive aggressive, that time.

‘You like Lovecraft?’ Raleigh asked somewhat inanely, the use of his vocal chords beginning to return to him. He sat up, setting 1984 aside.

‘’Course,’ Hansen replied, following Raleigh’s movement with his eyes. ‘Mountains of Madness is a classic piece of literature. Can’t tell me you haven’t heard of old mate Cthulu, either.’

This was not meshing with Raleigh’s understanding of Chuck Hansen at all. He felt a little like he’d accidentally tumbled into the Twilight Zone, with Rod Serling lurking just around the corner. 

‘I have,’ he admitted. He could only hope his slight amount of wary hesitation wasn’t too obvious. ‘But you can’t say that Animal Farm is any less influential.’

‘I bloody well can,’ Hansen said, tone distinctly contrary. However, it seemed more good-natured, somehow. Raleigh didn’t even want to strangle him a little bit.

‘What planet are you on, Hansen?’ he asked, beginning to engage with the debate. ‘Animal Farm is hands-down one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Its political commentary-’

‘Political commentary? Mate, this isn’t the presidential debate,’ Hansen interrupted shamelessly. ‘At the Mountains of Madness created the most original creatures of the entire century.’

Raleigh folded his arms, unconsciously mimicking Chuck’s pose against the wall as he did so. ‘Oh, it did? I think you’re missing a pretty large elephant in the room.’

This was greeted by a loud snort. ‘Not likely, you drongo.’

Okay, Raleigh was going to ignore that one - mostly because he had no idea what it meant. ‘A little something called Lord of the Rings, Chuck.’

‘You’re off your meds, Ray.’

‘Orcs? Elves? Ents? Balrogs? Ringing any bells?’

‘I’m stuck in this cell with a massive bloody nerd, aren’t I?’

‘Pot, kettle.’

Chuck rolled his eyes and looked away, shaking his head, but there was the slightest hint of a dimple etched into his cheek. Raleigh realised that he himself was actually smiling, instead of sighing in exasperation, which was…unexpected.

‘How’d you even get yourself landed in this place, Ray? You seem pretty well…’ Chuck shrugged a little, shifting a little where he sat. ‘Balanced.’

Raleigh looked away. Unconsciously, he began rubbing at his left palm with his right thumb, an old uncomfortable habit.

‘Not that you have to spill all,’ Chuck added. ‘You can give me the Cliff Notes version, if you want.’

‘Nah, it’s alright,’ Raleigh said, looking back. He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. Why, exactly, he was sharing his life story with a man he’d thought to have a mental age of ten exactly ten minutes before, he wasn’t entirely sure. Maybe it’d been too long since he’d been able to properly talk to someone. ‘My brother and I…we both got injured in Syria, but he had the worst of it. He was hit in the spine, through the shoulder. Severe spinal chord injury, as well as nerve damage to his arm.’ Way to keep it cheerful, Becket. Raleigh cleared his throat and moved on. ‘Anyway. We came back, and I managed to scrape a job at a fancy hotel. Yancy didn’t do so well, though; and he couldn’t really work, either. He was never angry, just - sad. We were out shopping, once, and I left him for a moment to go look at bread or milk or some shit.’ Raleigh sighed silently. ‘Some anti-military nut caught sight of his dog-tags and got violent. Yance, being in a wheelchair, couldn’t defend himself too well. I got back to see him on the ground with this big bald guy kicking him and shouting. I beat the living shit out of him,’ he said frankly. ‘Then I was arrested, and wound up here with a sentence of three years. Eighteen months without parole.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Jeeeee-sus, Ray,’ Chuck said. ‘Fucking unfair bummer if I ever heard one. You should be performing the Cell Block Tango right now, mate.’

Raleigh was startled into a laugh by the unorthodox response. ‘Whatever you say, Chuck.’ He settled more comfortably back against the wall and tilted his head. ‘What about you? How’d you end up here?’

Predictably enough, Raleigh soon learned that it’d been Chuck’s red-hot temper which had resulted in incarceration. Chuck, who had been in the US on his first trip out of Australia, had become blind drunk in a pub. Upon being kicked out by staff, he’d started swearing at them with an impressive plethora of insults. The police had been called, and - according to Chuck - had “provoked” him in some indeterminate manner, so he’d punched one in the face.

‘Seems warranted,’ Raleigh replied, struggling to keep a straight face. Jesus, Chuck had a ridiculously massive temper. In response, Chuck scowled at him. Shocker.

‘Shut your face, Ray,’ he replied, inelegantly.

Raleigh huffed a laugh. ‘You’re such a child.’

‘I am not,’ Chuck scoffed, proving Raleigh completely correct. After a moment, he asked: ‘What was all that shit Knifehead said earlier? About your “history?”’ He accompanied that with the most sardonic air-quotes Raleigh had ever witnessed.

‘It was about what happened to my previous roommate,’ Raleigh replied, sobering a little. The reminder of how close he’d come to losing all chance of parole wasn’t exactly a happy one.

‘Y’know, I’m actually not sure I want to know this,’ Chuck said. ‘Should I be worried, mate?’

The brief grey cloud lifted, and Raleigh smirked at him. ‘Maybe. Let it serve as a cautionary tale, Hansen. Piss me off and you’ll get sent to the hospital.’ 

‘You got him landed in hospital?’

‘Yep,’ Raleigh said. ‘The only reason I didn’t lose the possibility of parole is that he refused to tell the guards who did it.’

‘Crikey.’ Chuck leaned back with a low whistle. ‘And you lectured me for my temper, you filthy hypocrite. What’d he do?’

‘He was a Kaiju,’ Raleigh began, before seeing Chuck’s frown and elaborating. ‘One of Knifehead’s cronies. In here for an assault and a couple rapes.’

Chuck paled. ‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, it was tolerable for a couple months. I dealt with it. Made it clear that I wouldn’t be his doormat, but that I didn’t want trouble. Then he set his sights on this new guy - kid, really. Barely eighteen. Tried something in the showers. Luckily, I was there.’

‘And you beat the living shit outta the fucker?’ 

‘And I beat the living shit outta the fucker,’ Raleigh agreed, with a slow nod.

Chuck set his jaw. ‘Good.’

As the night wore on, the conversation continued, meandering between a number of topics. It began light-hearted enough: they discussed the pros and cons of Star Wars, whether it was better than Star Trek, and whether the reboot was a success. Then they moved on to their home towns, Raleigh describing Alaska (to Chuck’s overdramatic disgust), Chuck his suburb in Sydney. From his description, it was fairly easy to derive that he’d had a difficult childhood in a dangerous area. 

They moved onto schooling - Raleigh had never gone to university, instead joining the army straight out of high school; Chuck, it transpired, had dropped out of high school. He’d worked as a mechanic in some shabby garage. Eventually, Raleigh managed to wrangle out an admission of Chuck’s true passion, which was astrophysics. In return, Raleigh admitted that he’d always dreamed of a mechanical engineering degree.  

Night became morning, and they were still talking. That magical quality of the early morning which makes humans inexplicably spill their souls came into effect. Raleigh found himself talking about his PTSD, which he was still mostly in denial about. Chuck told him about his broken family - his absent father and his alcoholic mother, the home he’d left at sixteen, how his mother had died when a building she was in collapsed. Raleigh spoke of his own mother, his months in the hospital as she wasted away to nothing, and the car crash which had claimed his sister.

During a moment of silence, where Raleigh was staring peacefully at the ceiling and humming You Are My Sunshine beneath his breath, Chuck spoke up.

‘I lied earlier,’ he said.

Raleigh looked down with a frown. ‘About what?’

‘How I wound up here.’ Seeing the look on Raleigh’s face, he shook his head slightly. ‘Not like that - I did punch a cop. Just…muddled the circumstances around it a little.’ 

Subsiding, Raleigh decided to suspend judgement for the moment. Chuck seemed uncharacteristically hesitant, almost nervous.

‘I wasn’t at a normal bar, and I didn’t even get that drunk. I was at, uh, a gay bar,’ he said, the words tumbling over each other. He stopped for a moment, shrugging uncomfortably. ‘America can be all right about that sorta stuff - at least gay marriage is legalised here - but there’s still the odd mongrel, y’know. Couple’a them happen to wear police badges. They were hanging around the exit, and when I came out, they went bloody nuts. Just verbal shit, but I wasn’t gonna stand for it.’ Chuck shrugged again, jerkily, as if trying to throw something off. He gave Raleigh a wary look from the corner of his eyes. ‘You ain’t gonna tell anyone, are ya?’

‘’Course not,’ Raleigh replied quietly.

‘And you aren’t judging?’

Raleigh ran his tongue along his teeth. If Chuck could do it…

‘That’d be a tad hypocritical of me, Chuck.’

Chuck blinked at him, obviously taken aback. ‘You’re - ’

As he trailed off, it was left to Raleigh to fill in the gap. ‘Bisexual.’

‘Oh,’ Chuck replied, then: ‘Fair dinkum.’

Raleigh couldn’t help but laugh loudly at that. ‘God, you’re such a stereotype,’ he chuckled, shaking his head. ‘Jesus. Who talks like that?’

‘Fuck off! Australians do, you wanker.’

But he was grinning back, two dimples on full display, and Raleigh thought shit, he’s beautiful.

God, Raleigh was a sap.

:::

Jesus, he’s such a sap.

It was the first time Raleigh had seen Chuck without a sheet of perspex between them in two months. And of course the idiot was holding a box of chocolates of ridiculous size, along with an actual goddamn heart-shaped balloon, on which was spelt “CONGRATULATIONS ON GETTING OUT OF JAIL” in pink cursive. Raleigh was just glad that the prison carpark was virtually empty, and there was nobody to witness his shame.

Yancy pushed at him, and Raleigh finally let up his attempt to break all of his brother’s bones with the tightest hug ever. Sue him, he’d missed Yancy. A lot. His brother had definitely missed him too, despite his denials and his evidently awesome new girlfriend.

Mako Mori was one of Chuck’s few childhood friends with whom he’d actually bothered to stay in touch with. After Chuck’s release two months ago, he’d quickly met with Raleigh’s brother, at Yancy’s insistence. Apparently Yance had wanted to, quote, ‘meet my little brother’s prison bestie’. Every time Raleigh had been allowed a call, Chuck and Yancy had met up for it. Eventually, at Raleigh’s request, Chuck had brought Mako along. He’d heard so much about her, and wanted to talk to her himself. According to Chuck, Yancy had fallen in love in the grand space of eleven minutes.

Raleigh was so goddamn happy for him. He’d felt terrible leaving Yance alone while he was in jail; it was clear to see that Mako had helped immensely with the loneliness.

And now, Raleigh was finally out.

He gave Mako a quick hug and an enthusiastic kiss to the cheek. He was pretty sure that she was going to be his sister in the future, after all. He’d already squealed with Yancy for a good few minutes, so all that was left was Chuck.

‘Idiot,’ Raleigh said, as a greeting. He shook his head and stared at the balloon, before grinning crookedly at Chuck.

‘Drongo,’ Chuck replied with ease. ‘Look who finally isn’t stuck in jail.’

Raleigh’s grin became a smirk. ‘Look who actually didn’t pull a tantrum and get denied parole. Really, it’s a shocker.’

‘Shut it!’ Chuck cuffed him around the head. Raleigh snickered and ducked away from a second hit. Mako and Yancy were already making their way towards Yancy’s special van. He was even allowing her to push his wheelchair, which he hadn’t let Raleigh do after the first three weeks. 

As Raleigh watched, Yancy turned and winked, before nodding significantly towards Chuck.

The two brothers didn’t really tend to keep secrets.

Turning back to Chuck, Raleigh caught the barest tail-end of an uncharacteristically soft smile directed at him. Continued the trend of unprecedented actions, Chuck actually reddened with something other than anger, his freckles standing out sharply.

His mouth curving, Raleigh stepped closer.

Chuck cleared his throat and flushed darker. ‘I brought you a balloon,’ he pointed out.

‘It’s terrible,’ Raleigh replied, and kissed him.

Later, Chuck realised that he’d accidentally let go of the balloon’s string, and that it was nowhere to be seen. Raleigh couldn’t really say that he was sad about it, but demanded a kiss to make up for the loss anyway.

As he slid his hand into Chuck’s hair and sighed into his mouth, Raleigh realised that he was undeniably, unapologetically happy.

“What better is there to sigh for than happiness, yesterday’s or tomorrow’s.” - Ben Hecht