Fic (Marvel, LD:TOY, & Egyptology!
Three ficlets in chronological order, for comics, orig fic, and a Canadian television show (three versions of something like Remembrance Day, for Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years, Egyptology!, and Marvel). An experiment in present tense, so tell me if anything sounds too clunky.
Montana, 187_ (Clay Mosby):
There are no soldiers' graves for the citizens of Curtis Wells to decorate; this little, muddy town, clinging to existence on the edge of civilization, didn't even exist until after the war had ended.
That's just fine by Clay. He has no graves to decorate anyway, here, or back East. His men were buried in unmarked graves in New York, bodies covered in quicklime to prevent the smallpox from spreading.
Clay has no graves to decorate, and he doesn't know if he could stand walking past the churchyard and being confronted with headstone after headstone wreathed in red, white and blue bunting. It's bad enough that Hannah's grave is there, the woman he loved and never really lost, because you can't lose what isn't yours to begin with.
He doesn't need to be reminded of the woman he did lose, of the home turned to a pile of ashes, of the men he watched die of starvation and disease, of the blue-uniformed guards who beat him and held him down and-- If they were dead, as he'd wished them to be every day for ten years, some widow with a red, white, and blue cockade pinned to her dress would be reverently laying flowers on their graves today.
Most of the year, Colonel Clay Mosby spends every day wishing Curtis Wells were a little more established, a little more refined, a little less obviously a mud-spattered cattle and mining town with nothing decent to drink, nothing resembling refined conversation, and only three streets to its name. On Decoration Day, he's glad to be out on the edges of the earth.
***
Lower Egypt, 1920 (Edward Langford & Quentin Reed):
It's not even noon, and Reed's already drunk.
Mostly people wouldn't be able to tell -- Reed can hold his drink depressingly well, and since he's given to leaning against walls and furnishings and speaking in non sequitors anyway, there's relatively little difference in terms of behavior between Reed slightly drunk and Reed completely sober.
Edward, however, has extensive experience observing Reed in all stages of inebriation, and Reed's slouch against the tumbled remains of the temple's inner wall is just a little more boneless than usual, his laugh when one of the workers says something salacious to him in Arabic just a touch more natural -- Reed rarely laughs when he's sober, and when he does, it always sounds forced.
It's only five past eleven, and the insufferable bastard is drunk.
Typical. There are mounds of fill dirt to be sifted through, now that they've almost uncovered the temple floor, and Reed's got a good eye for picking out the tiniest fragments of pottery or other man-made artifacts from ordinary bits of rock. It's too important a job to trust to one of the workers, not without some level of supervision, and Anne and Zahi are busy supervising the excavation of the statues they found flanking the spot where the inner-most gateway had once been (Zahi is convinced that there ought to be a further set of gates, and that the statues were moved at some point, but thus far the temple layout coincides roughly with the temple of Ptah at Karnak, and if Edward is right and they are dealing with a late new Kingdom site instead of an intermediary one... Anyway, Zahi is wrong and they are digging in the right place).
The entire morning has gone badly -- Edward's knee has been aching since he woke up, some time before dawn, something it normally only does in damp weather, and he's already tripped over a half-buried block of stone, nearly gotten into a shouting match with Zahi over the proper place to start excavating for the remains of the altar (away from the walls), and dropped three shovel-fulls of rubble onto his foot.
And when he finally climbs out of the suffocatingly narrow excavation trench and hands the excavation work over to Zahi (upon Anne's acid-voiced demand that he "get out of there before you hurt yourself. What in creation is wrong with you today?"), he's confronted by an obviously intoxicated Reed who's clearly going to be less than useless for the rest of the day.
Edward's jaw aches; he's grinding his teeth, he realizes, and makes himself stop. "What the devil is wrong with the man?" he mutters to himself, stomping across the dig site -- he refuses to limp -- to inform Reed that if he passes out from heat stroke and dehydration the way he did last season, Edward is most decidedly not carrying him back to camp. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
"What do you think you're doing?" he snaps, as soon as he's within earshot. "You know better than to drink alcohol in this heat."
Reed turns lazily, and offers him a crooked grin. "Langford," he says, sounding entirely unaffected by Edward's tone of voice. "I was just about to come and fetch you." He holds up his wrist and taps a finger against his watch. "Almost time, you know."
Time for what? Lunch? Starting to work on the sifting he should have begun doing an hour ago? Something else that only made sense inside Reed's alcohol-addled head? "Reed," Edward sighs, holding on to his temper through main force, "I don't have time for it."
"Shhh." Reed sets one dusty finger against Edward's lips, and Edward has to fight back the sudden urge to hit him. "You're supposed to be quiet."
Edward grasps Reed by the wrist and firmly moves the other man's hand away from his face. He silently counts to a hundred inside his head, reminding himself that Reed is a good man, brilliant with mechanical things, fluent in Arabic, a deft and accurate hand at sketching hieroglyphs even if he can't decipher them, and that he saved Anne's life last winter.
He's still drinking on Edward's dig site, and even the knowledge that Reed still wakes up screaming at least one night a week is not enough to completely allay Edward's annoyance. Not today, when he's been holding on to his temper by the skin of his teeth since breakfast.
Fighting down the overwhelming impulse to yell at Reed takes over a minute, and then Edward sighs, gives up, and opens his mouth to deliver the same lecture on the dangers of dehydration that he's already delivered a dozen times.
Before he can get more then the first word out, Reed is pulling a silver hip flask out of his pocket. "To the glorious dead," he mutters, and takes a long swallow. Then he hands the flask to Edward, who takes it automatically, lecture freezing on his tongue.
It's over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit out here, less than an hour 'til noon with the desert sun beating down on them, but for a moment, Edward can feel cold fog on his skin, hear the distant rumble of artillery fire.
He never keeps track of the date once the digging season starts, never did before the war, and doesn't now. Reed, obviously, does.
"To the glorious dead," Edward answers, and takes a sip of scotch. Then he hands the flask back, shoves his half-full canteen of water into Reed's hands, and makes him go sit in the shade.
He shifts the excavated dirt for artifacts himself, glad, as always, that the earth in Egypt is dry. When the sand and dust falls away and he's left staring a piece of bone sitting smack in the middle of the sieve, he almost throws up anyway, until he realizes it's from an animal.
He tosses it away and goes back to work, not thinking about the time he turned a corner in a trench at Ypres and saw a human hand sticking out of the wall. He has work to do, and the pieces of broken clay he picks out of the dust don't care what day it is. They're three thousand years old, and all the wars Europe has ever fought are nothing to them.
***
Washington, D.C. 2007 (Steve Rogers):
He has a gravestone in Arlington now.
It's the second one Steve's had, and a warped little part of his mind had imagined the first headstone again, with "1945" crossed out and "2007" chiselled next to it.
The actual tombstone looks nothing like that, of course - they carved him a new one, blank except for his name, a plain Protestant cross, and the dates "July 4, 1920 - March 08, 2007."
It looks exactly like everyone else's, and it makes the entire thing feel more real, somehow.
"It's, um, nice," Steve tells the intimidated-looking infantry sergeant who escorted him out here. "Can I have somebody get rid of it?"
The sergeant blinks, then nods. "Yes, sir. I guess nobody thought..." He trails off, shrugging, the casual gesture at odds with his stiff dress uniform. "People don't usually, um, come back."
"I'm special that way," Steve says dryly. He's not really, though, and he knows it. He's just lucky. There are square, white markers stretching almost to the horizon, carved with the names of people who never got a second chance -- most of them only kids, no older than Bucky had been when he had 'died' -- and Steve had gotten two. Some of the graves have wreaths of flowers on them, or little American flags - Memorial Day was only a week and a half ago.
He'd been so busy fighting Doombots that he'd forgotten it.
As Steve walks away from the grave, he can hear music playing somewhere in the distance. Taking off his hat is automatic.
Somewhere out of sight, they are burying someone. It could be anyone: a young man or woman old enough to vote but not to drink, brought home from Iraq or Afghanistan to be buried here in Robert E. Lee's backyard; an elderly man who'd lived a full life, and taken a few years out of it to serve his country in Korea, or France, or on some tiny island in the Pacific Ocean.
Steve stands still until the short melody is over, until he hears the honor guard fire their rifles in salute. Then he walks back to the car, where Clint and Sam are waiting.
Tony would have come if Steve had asked him to, but Steve had seen the look on his face when he'd mentioned that as long as they were in D.C., he ought to go to Arlington to sort out the unnecessary headstone issue, and so he hadn't asked him. Steve used to come here every Memorial Day to visit Bucky's grave, always with either Tony or Sam by his side, but he's pretty sure Tony is never willingly setting foot through the cemetery's marble gates again at this point.
He really ought to have them take Bucky's headstone down, too. It's just... wrong... for it to still be here so many months after Bucky's return from the dead, especially given that Bucky never really died.
Unlike the party of mourners he can hear in the distance, Steve doesn't have family buried here anymore, but that doesn't mean he didn't have a reason to come here on Memorial Day. If he'd remembered. If he and Tony hadn't been fighting for their lives in New York.
He stops by Jack Monroe's grave on the way out. Unlike the graves on either side of it, Jack's doesn't have a wreath.
Steve pulls his red leather gloves out of his back pocket and leaves them folded across the top of Jack's headstone. When he looks back, he can still see them from yards away, a single spot of bright color against the white stone.
***
Montana, 187_ (Clay Mosby):
There are no soldiers' graves for the citizens of Curtis Wells to decorate; this little, muddy town, clinging to existence on the edge of civilization, didn't even exist until after the war had ended.
That's just fine by Clay. He has no graves to decorate anyway, here, or back East. His men were buried in unmarked graves in New York, bodies covered in quicklime to prevent the smallpox from spreading.
Clay has no graves to decorate, and he doesn't know if he could stand walking past the churchyard and being confronted with headstone after headstone wreathed in red, white and blue bunting. It's bad enough that Hannah's grave is there, the woman he loved and never really lost, because you can't lose what isn't yours to begin with.
He doesn't need to be reminded of the woman he did lose, of the home turned to a pile of ashes, of the men he watched die of starvation and disease, of the blue-uniformed guards who beat him and held him down and-- If they were dead, as he'd wished them to be every day for ten years, some widow with a red, white, and blue cockade pinned to her dress would be reverently laying flowers on their graves today.
Most of the year, Colonel Clay Mosby spends every day wishing Curtis Wells were a little more established, a little more refined, a little less obviously a mud-spattered cattle and mining town with nothing decent to drink, nothing resembling refined conversation, and only three streets to its name. On Decoration Day, he's glad to be out on the edges of the earth.
***
Lower Egypt, 1920 (Edward Langford & Quentin Reed):
It's not even noon, and Reed's already drunk.
Mostly people wouldn't be able to tell -- Reed can hold his drink depressingly well, and since he's given to leaning against walls and furnishings and speaking in non sequitors anyway, there's relatively little difference in terms of behavior between Reed slightly drunk and Reed completely sober.
Edward, however, has extensive experience observing Reed in all stages of inebriation, and Reed's slouch against the tumbled remains of the temple's inner wall is just a little more boneless than usual, his laugh when one of the workers says something salacious to him in Arabic just a touch more natural -- Reed rarely laughs when he's sober, and when he does, it always sounds forced.
It's only five past eleven, and the insufferable bastard is drunk.
Typical. There are mounds of fill dirt to be sifted through, now that they've almost uncovered the temple floor, and Reed's got a good eye for picking out the tiniest fragments of pottery or other man-made artifacts from ordinary bits of rock. It's too important a job to trust to one of the workers, not without some level of supervision, and Anne and Zahi are busy supervising the excavation of the statues they found flanking the spot where the inner-most gateway had once been (Zahi is convinced that there ought to be a further set of gates, and that the statues were moved at some point, but thus far the temple layout coincides roughly with the temple of Ptah at Karnak, and if Edward is right and they are dealing with a late new Kingdom site instead of an intermediary one... Anyway, Zahi is wrong and they are digging in the right place).
The entire morning has gone badly -- Edward's knee has been aching since he woke up, some time before dawn, something it normally only does in damp weather, and he's already tripped over a half-buried block of stone, nearly gotten into a shouting match with Zahi over the proper place to start excavating for the remains of the altar (away from the walls), and dropped three shovel-fulls of rubble onto his foot.
And when he finally climbs out of the suffocatingly narrow excavation trench and hands the excavation work over to Zahi (upon Anne's acid-voiced demand that he "get out of there before you hurt yourself. What in creation is wrong with you today?"), he's confronted by an obviously intoxicated Reed who's clearly going to be less than useless for the rest of the day.
Edward's jaw aches; he's grinding his teeth, he realizes, and makes himself stop. "What the devil is wrong with the man?" he mutters to himself, stomping across the dig site -- he refuses to limp -- to inform Reed that if he passes out from heat stroke and dehydration the way he did last season, Edward is most decidedly not carrying him back to camp. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
"What do you think you're doing?" he snaps, as soon as he's within earshot. "You know better than to drink alcohol in this heat."
Reed turns lazily, and offers him a crooked grin. "Langford," he says, sounding entirely unaffected by Edward's tone of voice. "I was just about to come and fetch you." He holds up his wrist and taps a finger against his watch. "Almost time, you know."
Time for what? Lunch? Starting to work on the sifting he should have begun doing an hour ago? Something else that only made sense inside Reed's alcohol-addled head? "Reed," Edward sighs, holding on to his temper through main force, "I don't have time for it."
"Shhh." Reed sets one dusty finger against Edward's lips, and Edward has to fight back the sudden urge to hit him. "You're supposed to be quiet."
Edward grasps Reed by the wrist and firmly moves the other man's hand away from his face. He silently counts to a hundred inside his head, reminding himself that Reed is a good man, brilliant with mechanical things, fluent in Arabic, a deft and accurate hand at sketching hieroglyphs even if he can't decipher them, and that he saved Anne's life last winter.
He's still drinking on Edward's dig site, and even the knowledge that Reed still wakes up screaming at least one night a week is not enough to completely allay Edward's annoyance. Not today, when he's been holding on to his temper by the skin of his teeth since breakfast.
Fighting down the overwhelming impulse to yell at Reed takes over a minute, and then Edward sighs, gives up, and opens his mouth to deliver the same lecture on the dangers of dehydration that he's already delivered a dozen times.
Before he can get more then the first word out, Reed is pulling a silver hip flask out of his pocket. "To the glorious dead," he mutters, and takes a long swallow. Then he hands the flask to Edward, who takes it automatically, lecture freezing on his tongue.
It's over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit out here, less than an hour 'til noon with the desert sun beating down on them, but for a moment, Edward can feel cold fog on his skin, hear the distant rumble of artillery fire.
He never keeps track of the date once the digging season starts, never did before the war, and doesn't now. Reed, obviously, does.
"To the glorious dead," Edward answers, and takes a sip of scotch. Then he hands the flask back, shoves his half-full canteen of water into Reed's hands, and makes him go sit in the shade.
He shifts the excavated dirt for artifacts himself, glad, as always, that the earth in Egypt is dry. When the sand and dust falls away and he's left staring a piece of bone sitting smack in the middle of the sieve, he almost throws up anyway, until he realizes it's from an animal.
He tosses it away and goes back to work, not thinking about the time he turned a corner in a trench at Ypres and saw a human hand sticking out of the wall. He has work to do, and the pieces of broken clay he picks out of the dust don't care what day it is. They're three thousand years old, and all the wars Europe has ever fought are nothing to them.
***
Washington, D.C. 2007 (Steve Rogers):
He has a gravestone in Arlington now.
It's the second one Steve's had, and a warped little part of his mind had imagined the first headstone again, with "1945" crossed out and "2007" chiselled next to it.
The actual tombstone looks nothing like that, of course - they carved him a new one, blank except for his name, a plain Protestant cross, and the dates "July 4, 1920 - March 08, 2007."
It looks exactly like everyone else's, and it makes the entire thing feel more real, somehow.
"It's, um, nice," Steve tells the intimidated-looking infantry sergeant who escorted him out here. "Can I have somebody get rid of it?"
The sergeant blinks, then nods. "Yes, sir. I guess nobody thought..." He trails off, shrugging, the casual gesture at odds with his stiff dress uniform. "People don't usually, um, come back."
"I'm special that way," Steve says dryly. He's not really, though, and he knows it. He's just lucky. There are square, white markers stretching almost to the horizon, carved with the names of people who never got a second chance -- most of them only kids, no older than Bucky had been when he had 'died' -- and Steve had gotten two. Some of the graves have wreaths of flowers on them, or little American flags - Memorial Day was only a week and a half ago.
He'd been so busy fighting Doombots that he'd forgotten it.
As Steve walks away from the grave, he can hear music playing somewhere in the distance. Taking off his hat is automatic.
Somewhere out of sight, they are burying someone. It could be anyone: a young man or woman old enough to vote but not to drink, brought home from Iraq or Afghanistan to be buried here in Robert E. Lee's backyard; an elderly man who'd lived a full life, and taken a few years out of it to serve his country in Korea, or France, or on some tiny island in the Pacific Ocean.
Steve stands still until the short melody is over, until he hears the honor guard fire their rifles in salute. Then he walks back to the car, where Clint and Sam are waiting.
Tony would have come if Steve had asked him to, but Steve had seen the look on his face when he'd mentioned that as long as they were in D.C., he ought to go to Arlington to sort out the unnecessary headstone issue, and so he hadn't asked him. Steve used to come here every Memorial Day to visit Bucky's grave, always with either Tony or Sam by his side, but he's pretty sure Tony is never willingly setting foot through the cemetery's marble gates again at this point.
He really ought to have them take Bucky's headstone down, too. It's just... wrong... for it to still be here so many months after Bucky's return from the dead, especially given that Bucky never really died.
Unlike the party of mourners he can hear in the distance, Steve doesn't have family buried here anymore, but that doesn't mean he didn't have a reason to come here on Memorial Day. If he'd remembered. If he and Tony hadn't been fighting for their lives in New York.
He stops by Jack Monroe's grave on the way out. Unlike the graves on either side of it, Jack's doesn't have a wreath.
Steve pulls his red leather gloves out of his back pocket and leaves them folded across the top of Jack's headstone. When he looks back, he can still see them from yards away, a single spot of bright color against the white stone.
***