Chapter Text
Yancy Becket’s life begins with his brother.
Yancy Becket’s life ends with his brother.
Though he remembers snapshots of his earlier years—a flash of his mother’s laughter, his father smiling down at him, the disorienting feeling of shifting into a labrador-sized dragon for the first time—the first, true, fully-formed memory Yancy has is of the night his parents had brought his brother home. As soon as he’d held the squirming bundle in his arms, the bright blue eyes peering up at him, he’d known. Even as a three year old, he’d known: he was never going to leave his brother’s side.
Another of Yancy’s earliest memories is the day his mother told him he had to hide what he was from Raleigh.
“But Mommy,” he’d argued, all of five years old and whining, “Daddy knows. And you know. Why can’t Raleigh know, too?”
“Because,” she’d explained, eyes glowing softly in the darkness as Raleigh slept on the far side of the bed, whimpering softly, Yancy was sure, because his older brother wasn’t nearby anymore, “if he is not like us, then it is not our place to drag him into this life. Your father knows because he must. Your brother need not ever bear this burden, Yancy, my silver sky.”
A hand had found its way to his cheek, and the five-year-old leaned into its touch almost automatically, the heat from his mother’s palm like a soothing blanket against his skin.
“If the time comes when we must tell him, then we will,” his mother had continued, eyes flashing a dark red for the briefest of moments, “but, until then, it is kinder to simply let him live in blissful ignorance. Do you understand?”
He hadn’t, but he’d nodded anyway.
His mother had trained him on weekends. In the dead of night.
Yancy hated it. Hated that it left Raleigh clutching at the sheets. Hated the sounds his younger brother would make as the warmth of the fabric faded from Yancy’s own body. Hated constantly being tired and yet completely unable to tell anyone why, the question always arising when he would nod off in the middle of Monday’s recess. Most of all, though, he hated the person his mother became during his training.
She was his mother, yes, but she was absolutely ruthless, especially when it came to his control.
“You must never allow others to know what we are,” she would whisper into the night, hammering the words into his mind until he was sure they’d formed an impression on the inside of his skull. “This is for your safety as well as ours. Your brother’s, too.”
And, though Yancy loved her—loved her as his mother and as the only person on the planet with whom he could actually empathize—he grew to hate her for that, even if only just a little. Because she knew. She knew how much his baby brother meant to him. How, even at the tender age of six, he’d already stood up to kids over twice his age to keep Raleigh safe. Not that the kid was ever aware of it.
He’d winced as he stood, bracing himself against a blackened tree trunk, trying to ignore the dull heat of burned flesh knitting itself back together. As he’d tried to put weight on his leg, barely-healed tendons had snapped, the limb twisting beneath him at an unnatural angle and sending him crashing back to the forest floor with a cry. His mom was there in an instant, grim eyes looking only at his leg as she’d twisted it back into place before hauling him to his feel. She’d supported him until even the muscles of his calf had fully regenerated before kneeling down to his level, one hand still on his shoulder, the other moving to cup his jaw almost tenderly.
“Do you understand, bébé?” she’d asked him quietly. “You can never tell anyone. You must never reveal yourself to anyone.”
One hand coming up to wrap plaintively around her wrist, he’d nodded out a soft, “Yes, Mom,” even as bronze scales slowly slid from under her skin.
He could endure this, he’d told himself.
He had to.
For Raleigh.
Yancy’s favorite time of the day had been the evenings. Even if, on some days, his mother would rouse him and burn, beat, and claw him into new and interesting shapes. Simply, the evenings were when Yancy could hold his brother close—or, as was more often the case, be held as Raleigh cuddled into his side—and read to him. Usually just fairy tales and the like, though Yancy had purposefully shied away from those with dragons. At least, until he’d stumbled across one about a dragon that had fallen in love with a princess, and who had kidnapped her simply because he’d been lonely.
“But why did the knight hurt him if all he did was love the princess?” Raleigh had asked as he’d finished, all wide, innocent eyes and curiosity.
“Because,” Yancy explained slowly, “people thought dragons were evil just because they were dragons. They stole princesses and burned towns and stuff, so people hated them.”
“But…he didn’t! He wasn’t evil! All he wanted was a friend. Why’d the people have to be so mean?”
“Some people are just that way, Rals,” the nickname, new and somehow feeling right on his tongue, had simply slipped out as warmth blossomed in Yancy’s chest. “They think one thing and don’t care if things aren’t really that way. They think they’re right, and they don’t care if they aren’t. But,” here he booped his brother’s nose gently with the pad of his pointer finger, “that’s the moral of the story.”
“What’s a more—a moral?”
Yancy couldn’t help the laugh that’d bubbled up within him, closing the book and putting it on the bedside table on his side of their shared bed before he’d pulled Raleigh closer, his brother using his chest like a pillow as Yancy spoke.
“It’s the lesson. It’s the thing the people who wrote the story want you to learn from it. Some stories don’t have some, but most do. Even if they don’t know it.” He’d poked Raleigh in the shoulder to make sure he was paying attention to him, the kid’s breath having already started to even out slightly as he’d drifted towards sleep. “The moral of that one was that not everything is as simple as we think it is. That sometimes there’s more to something than we know.
“It’s saying that there are two sides to every story.”