Fic: 16 Proofs of Love, #13 Turning your ring: stay faithful to me
Title: With No Direction Home (Like a Complete Unknown)
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: It's Vietnam 1966 and Major Evan Lorne has to learn what the road to hell is paved with.
A/N: Righty-o, this might be a rather difficult chapter because it deals with racism among soldiers and not so good ways to deal with it from their (white) superiors. It was difficult to write (seeing as I am not an American and had to learn about this from research and talking to my wonderful beta mackenziesmomma) and I'm genuinely afraid that I might have done it wrong and this ends up on fanficrants or something so if you think there would have been better ways to write it, please don't hesitate to tell me. I am always open to constructive criticism and I value it very highly.
PS.: If anyone would like to know if Sergeant Meyers is African-American in the "canon" Protect and Survive 'verse, the answer is yes, he is. I didn't change his skin tone just for effects for this story. And yes, I'm considering another story from his point of view, I'll just have to think it through before going about writing it.
PPS.: You can see the other finished stories here.
( Kennedy Made Him Believe (We Could Do Much More) )
( We'll Dance Until Morning ('Til There's Just You And Me) )
With No Direction Home (Like a Complete Unknown)
“How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?”
Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”
“So… why exactly is Lorne’s crew calling you “Crackers” now, Lieutenant?” She grins, trying to look enigmatical but probably failing spectacularly and ending up with maniacal or something.
“That, sir, is between Major Lorne’s crew and me.” Sheppard snorts.
“Yeah, well, at least you fit right in… with Squeaky and Fortune Cookie.” That, in turn makes her snort and Sheppard’s gives her another grin, one of those that has half the female population on post in vapors every time they see him do it. She’s been wondering for a while now if it’s just her or if he’s doing it exponentially often around her when Evan is in the vicinity, knowing full well that straight-and-narrow Evan Lorne has a decidedly jealous streak.
In fact, when Evan heard that she’d be flying with Sheppard today because he’s on call and Sheppard just took over transporting medical supplies to her newest assignment of interviewing GIs at some firebase upcountry…
“…stay the hell away from my sergeant.” Huh, what… Evan?
“I ain’t gonna do shit, you little hippie motherfucker.” Whoa. Whoa, who is that kid with the Southern drawl and why does he think he can actually…
“I think that’s still Major Little Hippie Motherfucker, sir, to you, Baker.” And that was… Meyers? She blinks, tries to take in the scene in front of her. They’re at the back of one of the tool sheds at the heliport and in the shadows that the big lights throw she can see Evan and his medic and some kid she doesn’t know with a decidedly hillbilly drawl and… is that what she thinks it is?
She turns to Sheppard but he just shakes his head, carefully trying not to draw attention to them and she tries to concentrate on the scene again when she suddenly hears Hillbilly say, “You shut your stinking nigger trap. Just wait until we get to…” and suddenly all hell breaks loose.
Later she will never be fully able to reconstruct what exactly happened but all of a sudden, Evan has Hillbilly shoved against the wall of the tool shed, his fist grabbing the front of Hillbilly’s shirt and pinning the guy to the wall and he’s scowling and she has never heard a more frightening tone from anyone ever when Evan practically hisses, “I will never, never see, hear or hear about you harassing any of my crew ever again or I will kill you. Do you understand?” Transfixed by the fact that he looks and sounds so different that he’s actually a whole different person, it takes her all until she hears him repeat, “Do you understand, you little piece of racist, bigoted…” to actually react.
By then, both Sheppard and Meyers seem to have gotten over their momentary paralysis as well and react instantly; Meyers prying Evan away from Hillbilly and Sheppard reacting fast enough to catch Hillbilly before he can plant retaliation on Evan’s face.
Hillbilly keeps screaming obscenities - interesting how he manages to lose control so easily in front of a “lady” when those Southeners usually like to demonstrate their chivalry at every turn - at Evan and Meyers until Sheppard puts his foot down and tells the guy, “If you don’t stop that right fucking now, I promise you every dust-off chopper in the entire country will be busy when you and your sorry ass racist friends need another extraction. Your choice, Sergeant.”
When Hillbilly doesn’t stop right away - apparently, he wants to make a point and demonstrate just how stupid a guy can be - Sheppard gives him a good shake himself and then pushes him away, practically spitting out, “Get lost, Baker.”
To her amazement, Hillbilly actually takes Sheppard’s advice and stumbles away, mumbling something about going to “the LT” with that but the guys have already stopped paying attention to him. There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence in which Evan finally starts to look like himself again, Meyers looks decidedly unhappy and Sheppard shakes his head. “Goddammit, Lorne.”
The man she’s sleeping with for two and a half months now shakes his head himself and helplessly shrugs. “I just… I…”
There’s a dejected and very confused look on his face and if anyone ever asks her why she did what she’s about to do, she’ll tell them the truth. She’ll tell them that seeing him like that just gave her heart a very real, very painful squeeze. One of those she’d painstakingly tried to avoid when she’d set her boots on the ground eight months ago. She clears her throat. “Sir… I think I’ll better take care of this.”
Now they’re all looking at her and probably for the first time in her entire life, she feels terribly self-conscious. “Lieutenant, I don’t think…”
Self-conscious. Not intimidated. She nearly scowls. “I said I will take care of this, sir.”
After another moment of indecision, Sheppard finally throws his hands up and stalks away after telling Evan, “I’ll deal with it if he really goes to his CO but this isn’t over, Major. We’ll talk about this. ASAP.”
Evan just mutely nods and she takes a tentative step towards him. He doesn’t react and she diverts her gaze to Meyers, trying to gauge his stand in all of this. And yeah, it’s what she was afraid of. The expression on his face… she’s not sure if she’s ever seen a more disappointed man than Master Sergeant Will Meyers in this moment. Evan must have seen it, too. “Sergeant…”
“If you don’t mind, sir, I’d prefer to fight my own battles in the future.” Well. That was probably the worst set down in the history of set downs, and the worst thing about it is that it’s pretty much deserved, too. She swallows, and Meyers looks like he wants to add something but in the end, he just nods at her with a “Ma’am,” and then turns to go, as well.
It takes Evan all until Meyers is gone to move again, walking over to the wall of the shed he just pushed Hillbilly against and slumping against it, sliding down until he’s sitting on the ground, his elbows on his knees and grinding the heels of his hands in his eyes. Her heart aching, she walks over to him and slides down next to him, angling her legs the same way.
They sit there, in silence with their shoulders almost touching, he fiddling with his Academy ring, turning it on his finger, making her insane, for at least a few minutes until she says quietly, “He was right, you know.”
His only reaction, at first, is to tip his head back and lean it against the wall, his eyes closed. Sighing silently, she takes a scrunched and well-worn packet of Lucky Strikes and the accompanying Zippo - a gift from her father upon graduating OCS - out of her breast pockets, fumbles out one of her last cigs and lights it up and yep… there he goes again.
If she didn’t secretly love how attuned they’re to each other by now, she’d probably actually hit him square in the face every time he simply takes the cig out of her hand without ever waiting for her approval. Today… well. His head is still tipped back and his eyes are still closed when he exhales audibly and then drawls, “Damn, still no dope.”
Oh good God. She actually moves to punch him in the arm and forcefully snatches the cig out of his fingers, ignoring his protests and practically growling, “Listen, Puff, if you wanna go back to your Land of Lies, how about you ask the damn Army Nurses?”
“Fuck, Laura, I wasn’t…” God, she’s so done with it, with everything from ‘Nam to men who always try to deflect her and in a fit of rage, she tries to jump up, only to feel his hand clamp down on your shoulder firm enough to make her sit back down.
She doesn’t look at him, though because honestly, she’s had it with the “Cadman and dope are made for each other” jokes she gets to hear all over ‘Nam and she’s just so fed up with hearing it from him, of all people. She shakes her head and takes a deep drag herself. “Honestly, Lorne… what the fuck is wrong with you?”
Next to her, she feels him move again and when she sees him reaching for her cig from the corner of her eye, she’s tempted to stab the damn thing into his hand and be done with it but she’s not that far gone, yet. She lets him have it, in the end. He’s silent again, taking one drag, then another and another and just when she thinks he’ll probably just keep sitting there, smoking and being an ass, he says, in a weirdly detached voice, “Have you ever seen a man slowly bleed out and die?”
Oh.
Oh God.
She struggles with something to say but in the end, she doesn’t get to do it, anyway because he just plows on in that odd flat voice. “Charlie didn’t look so bad when we found them. He had a couple bullet wounds, nothing too tragic. Meyers patched him up. Had a bit of trouble with the VC but otherwise, things were fine.”
“Evan…”
He shakes his head, not looking at her and practically hanging on to that cig for dear life. “Then, suddenly, couple hours or so later, he starts wheezing, says “Hey, I think something’s wrong…” and Meyers takes another look at him. Lifts his shirt and whoa, he’s got a bruise the size of… Florida or something, all over his chest.”
And all the time, he sounds as if he’s talking about some random GI, not his goddamn brother-in-law. It’s scaring the living daylights out of her.
“It took him another hour to die. All the time, he made this sound, when he breathed in and out and in and out…” He makes a terrible wheezing sound to demonstrate and she wants to gag him, hit him until he’s unconscious, anything to make him shut the hell up. “He said… his last words… he said that if I still wanted to him for coming here, I should do it now and then he just… he…” He coughs, the nearly done cig shaking violently between his fingers. “He drowned in his own blood.”
There’s nothing she can reply to that that won’t sound tacky or trite or useless. So all she does is gently take the cigarette away from his hand and put it out in the dirt next to her. As she does so, she notices that it wasn’t the cough that made the cig shake in his hand and she quietly takes the empty hand in her own, to lace her fingers through his and hold his hand between them. She can feel him holding on for dear life.
And yet the only thing she does find worth saying is, “He was still right.”
The laugh he gives her sounds desperate but he keeps holding her hand, actually moving it to his mouth and putting a surprisingly soft kiss on her fingers. “What was I supposed to do, Crackers? Let that little… piece of shit and his shitty little friends keep on harassing my crew member?” The way he says crew member, it sounds more like “one of my family”.
She refrains from sighing, simply leans in a little closer, so that their knees are touching and that every inch further to her right would have her sit in his lap. “No, of course not. But…”
“Did you know that there’s KKK on this base?” Well… no, she didn’t, actually. Which worries her. She’s a reporter, she’s supposed to know such things, isn’t she? “I don’t have any substantial proof but Baker’s almost sure as hell part of that. Am I supposed to wait for burning crosses in front of the NCO quarters before I react?”
She rubs a hand over her eyes, feeling so damn tired again, right out of the blue. It happened less ever since he’s back. If she felt tired in the last month, it was usually because she didn’t spend most of her nights sleeping, or at least not sleeping alone. Unable to keep holding on to him, she pries her hand lose from his and hugs herself briefly. She keeps leaning in, though. “Evan… I know that you meant well but… what do you think is gonna happen to him in the barracks now?”
It’s not that she has ever actually seen anything she’s insinuating now, at least not with male soldiers, but she’s seen her fair share of nasty things going on in women’s barracks during OCS and her first station in the US. She has seen what a herd of furies did to a black female NCO after her white superior dared standing up for her to them. She doesn’t even know if the NCO is still serving after that. She has no illusions about men being any better at handling what Evan just did.
He’s leaning forward, dropping his forehead on his knees, his hands folded in his neck and she’s tempted to reach out to him and rub his back soothingly but for some reason she’d rather leave him alone right now. It’s probably the wrong decision, seeing as she left him alone about his brother-in-law’s death, too and look what came out of that but for some reason all she can is watch him struggling through everything that happened, ever since that day at the heliport.
After a minute or maybe ten spent in that position, he leans back against the wall, with his hands still behind his head. Suddenly, he looks as if he just aged five years. “I really, really messed up, didn’t I?”
She just nods and leans her head on his shoulder, somehow insanely glad that she feels him putting an arm around her shoulder, squeezing very lightly. Carefully, she puts a kiss on his jaw before putting her head on his shoulder again. “All the way to FUBAR, Cookie.”
There’s a strange… jerking motion from him, as if he just gave a laugh. Or sobbed. She feels him put his other arm around her as well, draw her closer to him, so that she can bury her face in the crook of his neck and snake her arms around his waist, draw in the scent she’s become so intimately familiar with over the last couple months. Machine oil and aftershave and the smoke from her cigarettes all rolled into one, and she feels the beads of his dog tags’ chain dig into her cheek and the damp cotton of his regulation shirt under her hands, before she sneaks the one on his back under the shirt to feel equally damp, hot skin and a scar from a training accident years ago.
His arms around her tighten and his mouth wanders from the kiss he put against the top of her head down towards her ear and into the crook of her neck before he whispers in a broken voice, “I’m lost, Laura. Ever since Charlie died, I’m lost and I have no fucking idea how to get home.”
At least he finally admitted it. At least he finally confirmed her suspicions about what was causing out of character behavior like his outburst against Sergeant Hillbilly an hour or so ago. It doesn’t make anything better and she hopes to God he won’t lose another friend, another member of his family, due to the idiocy of thinking he could shut away his grief and guilt in a locker, never to open it again. But at least he opened that locker. Maybe they’re not completely fucked yet.
She reaches up one hand to bury it in his hair, like she did on that first night at the heliport. She buries it deep and holds him close and she tells him, “We’re gonna find a way back, Cookie and we’re gonna find it together,” because she has no idea how else to tell him not to lose faith in himself, in her, in the universe.
“Just don’t let me go off the deep end ever again,” he rasps and she wishes she could promise him she won’t, wishes she had that power to take away all his pain and despair and grief and replace it with nothing but the deep, all-encompassing feeling of belonging she feels when she’s with him, the feeling of a warm blanket around her shoulders and a cup of hot cocoa when the winds are raging across frozen Lake Michigan, the feeling of being home.
Just barely managing not to sob, she shakes her head. “I can’t promise you that.” She wishes she wouldn’t have had to say that. She wishes this war wouldn’t have taught her how to be so brutally honest. “But if you ever do go off the deep end again, I’ll be there to set you straight.” It’s the least she can do for him, the least she can tell him. Anything further and she’d have to use those three words. She’s not ready for those yet, and maybe she’ll never be but she’ll always be ready to stand by what she just told him.
He takes a moment, a moment to mess up the last semblance of regulation pinned up hair she still had left after a harrowing supply flight with Sheppard by cradling the back of her neck with his hand, the feeling of his sweaty, calloused palm against the base of her head giving her decidedly out of place goose bumps of arousal. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
She snorts, even gives a hollow laugh. “Yeah, you better.”
Amazingly, she feels him echo that laugh, mostly sure it isn’t another dry sob.
Somehow, that also seems to break the spell and slowly, he disentangles himself from their embrace, leaning his back against the wall but keeping his arm around her shoulders and for some indeterminable reason, the urge to light a cigarette is strong enough that she actually sacrifices another one of her precious last bits, taking a far too long drag nestled against his shoulder.
For a while, there’s nothing but the sound of choppers landing and taking off, the distant din from Le Van Loc and the occasional dirty joke and guffawing laughter from around the tool shed floating through the night air. At some point, she does crawl into his lap, settles down with her back to his chest, between his legs and he hugs her around her shoulders, occasionally letting go with one hand to take a drag himself. By now, she’s seriously considering to stop smoking altogether just so she won’t keep on corrupting him like that.
Then again, it’s his choice and if he keeps doing that, maybe she’s just gonna start charging him or something.
Through all that, neither of them talks and she knows she just should let it go but something tells her that this isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. She sighs soundlessly. “You still gotta talk to your Sergeant, you know.”
“I know, Laura,” he says and nuzzles her neck, “God knows I do.” He leans his head against hers and the heaviness in his voice when he says, “As soon as I find a way out of this clusterfuck…” makes her reach up and behind her to mess around with hair and draw him further down and kiss him.
He complies and she’s glad to taste him again, like every time. In the short time they’re actually in this relationship, she has come to associate this taste of coffee and toothpaste and smoke with being in an embrace like the current one, nestled firmly against him in a little cocoon that sometimes not even the sounds of war can penetrate. She can only hope that he feels even a fraction of that whenever they kiss.
When they break the kiss, she uses the opportunity and cranes her neck enough to be able to look him into the eye and tell him, “As soon as we can find a way out of this clusterfuck. We’re in this together, Cookie. You’re not gonna get rid of me so easily.”
That makes him laugh, a real, genuine laugh without that terrible sadness and hollowness attached to it that his laugh had ever since his brother-in-law died and he squeezes her shoulders and puts a kiss to her temple, telling her, “And thank God for that.”
She has to laugh herself at that and leans back against him, actually relaxing for the first time today, maybe even in a long time and she knows that today things just got a lot more complicated and a lot worse than what they already were. But sometimes, sometimes things need to get a lot worse before they can better. Maybe this is one of them. Maybe now that it got really worse, he can start getting better and make it better this time around and possibly even unfuck the mess he made about Meyers and Sergeant Hillbilly.
He has to because damn, that was just stupid but she’s still here and she’ll stick around for as long as he wants her to and she’ll help him with everything she has to get back whatever he lost when he felt his brother-in-law slip away in his arms. What else is there to do when you love someone, after all?
~*~
TBC in So I Came in Here (And Your Long-Time Curse Hurts).
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: It's Vietnam 1966 and Major Evan Lorne has to learn what the road to hell is paved with.
A/N: Righty-o, this might be a rather difficult chapter because it deals with racism among soldiers and not so good ways to deal with it from their (white) superiors. It was difficult to write (seeing as I am not an American and had to learn about this from research and talking to my wonderful beta mackenziesmomma) and I'm genuinely afraid that I might have done it wrong and this ends up on fanficrants or something so if you think there would have been better ways to write it, please don't hesitate to tell me. I am always open to constructive criticism and I value it very highly.
PS.: If anyone would like to know if Sergeant Meyers is African-American in the "canon" Protect and Survive 'verse, the answer is yes, he is. I didn't change his skin tone just for effects for this story. And yes, I'm considering another story from his point of view, I'll just have to think it through before going about writing it.
PPS.: You can see the other finished stories here.
( Kennedy Made Him Believe (We Could Do Much More) )
( We'll Dance Until Morning ('Til There's Just You And Me) )
With No Direction Home (Like a Complete Unknown)
“How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?”
Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”
“So… why exactly is Lorne’s crew calling you “Crackers” now, Lieutenant?” She grins, trying to look enigmatical but probably failing spectacularly and ending up with maniacal or something.
“That, sir, is between Major Lorne’s crew and me.” Sheppard snorts.
“Yeah, well, at least you fit right in… with Squeaky and Fortune Cookie.” That, in turn makes her snort and Sheppard’s gives her another grin, one of those that has half the female population on post in vapors every time they see him do it. She’s been wondering for a while now if it’s just her or if he’s doing it exponentially often around her when Evan is in the vicinity, knowing full well that straight-and-narrow Evan Lorne has a decidedly jealous streak.
In fact, when Evan heard that she’d be flying with Sheppard today because he’s on call and Sheppard just took over transporting medical supplies to her newest assignment of interviewing GIs at some firebase upcountry…
“…stay the hell away from my sergeant.” Huh, what… Evan?
“I ain’t gonna do shit, you little hippie motherfucker.” Whoa. Whoa, who is that kid with the Southern drawl and why does he think he can actually…
“I think that’s still Major Little Hippie Motherfucker, sir, to you, Baker.” And that was… Meyers? She blinks, tries to take in the scene in front of her. They’re at the back of one of the tool sheds at the heliport and in the shadows that the big lights throw she can see Evan and his medic and some kid she doesn’t know with a decidedly hillbilly drawl and… is that what she thinks it is?
She turns to Sheppard but he just shakes his head, carefully trying not to draw attention to them and she tries to concentrate on the scene again when she suddenly hears Hillbilly say, “You shut your stinking nigger trap. Just wait until we get to…” and suddenly all hell breaks loose.
Later she will never be fully able to reconstruct what exactly happened but all of a sudden, Evan has Hillbilly shoved against the wall of the tool shed, his fist grabbing the front of Hillbilly’s shirt and pinning the guy to the wall and he’s scowling and she has never heard a more frightening tone from anyone ever when Evan practically hisses, “I will never, never see, hear or hear about you harassing any of my crew ever again or I will kill you. Do you understand?” Transfixed by the fact that he looks and sounds so different that he’s actually a whole different person, it takes her all until she hears him repeat, “Do you understand, you little piece of racist, bigoted…” to actually react.
By then, both Sheppard and Meyers seem to have gotten over their momentary paralysis as well and react instantly; Meyers prying Evan away from Hillbilly and Sheppard reacting fast enough to catch Hillbilly before he can plant retaliation on Evan’s face.
Hillbilly keeps screaming obscenities - interesting how he manages to lose control so easily in front of a “lady” when those Southeners usually like to demonstrate their chivalry at every turn - at Evan and Meyers until Sheppard puts his foot down and tells the guy, “If you don’t stop that right fucking now, I promise you every dust-off chopper in the entire country will be busy when you and your sorry ass racist friends need another extraction. Your choice, Sergeant.”
When Hillbilly doesn’t stop right away - apparently, he wants to make a point and demonstrate just how stupid a guy can be - Sheppard gives him a good shake himself and then pushes him away, practically spitting out, “Get lost, Baker.”
To her amazement, Hillbilly actually takes Sheppard’s advice and stumbles away, mumbling something about going to “the LT” with that but the guys have already stopped paying attention to him. There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence in which Evan finally starts to look like himself again, Meyers looks decidedly unhappy and Sheppard shakes his head. “Goddammit, Lorne.”
The man she’s sleeping with for two and a half months now shakes his head himself and helplessly shrugs. “I just… I…”
There’s a dejected and very confused look on his face and if anyone ever asks her why she did what she’s about to do, she’ll tell them the truth. She’ll tell them that seeing him like that just gave her heart a very real, very painful squeeze. One of those she’d painstakingly tried to avoid when she’d set her boots on the ground eight months ago. She clears her throat. “Sir… I think I’ll better take care of this.”
Now they’re all looking at her and probably for the first time in her entire life, she feels terribly self-conscious. “Lieutenant, I don’t think…”
Self-conscious. Not intimidated. She nearly scowls. “I said I will take care of this, sir.”
After another moment of indecision, Sheppard finally throws his hands up and stalks away after telling Evan, “I’ll deal with it if he really goes to his CO but this isn’t over, Major. We’ll talk about this. ASAP.”
Evan just mutely nods and she takes a tentative step towards him. He doesn’t react and she diverts her gaze to Meyers, trying to gauge his stand in all of this. And yeah, it’s what she was afraid of. The expression on his face… she’s not sure if she’s ever seen a more disappointed man than Master Sergeant Will Meyers in this moment. Evan must have seen it, too. “Sergeant…”
“If you don’t mind, sir, I’d prefer to fight my own battles in the future.” Well. That was probably the worst set down in the history of set downs, and the worst thing about it is that it’s pretty much deserved, too. She swallows, and Meyers looks like he wants to add something but in the end, he just nods at her with a “Ma’am,” and then turns to go, as well.
It takes Evan all until Meyers is gone to move again, walking over to the wall of the shed he just pushed Hillbilly against and slumping against it, sliding down until he’s sitting on the ground, his elbows on his knees and grinding the heels of his hands in his eyes. Her heart aching, she walks over to him and slides down next to him, angling her legs the same way.
They sit there, in silence with their shoulders almost touching, he fiddling with his Academy ring, turning it on his finger, making her insane, for at least a few minutes until she says quietly, “He was right, you know.”
His only reaction, at first, is to tip his head back and lean it against the wall, his eyes closed. Sighing silently, she takes a scrunched and well-worn packet of Lucky Strikes and the accompanying Zippo - a gift from her father upon graduating OCS - out of her breast pockets, fumbles out one of her last cigs and lights it up and yep… there he goes again.
If she didn’t secretly love how attuned they’re to each other by now, she’d probably actually hit him square in the face every time he simply takes the cig out of her hand without ever waiting for her approval. Today… well. His head is still tipped back and his eyes are still closed when he exhales audibly and then drawls, “Damn, still no dope.”
Oh good God. She actually moves to punch him in the arm and forcefully snatches the cig out of his fingers, ignoring his protests and practically growling, “Listen, Puff, if you wanna go back to your Land of Lies, how about you ask the damn Army Nurses?”
“Fuck, Laura, I wasn’t…” God, she’s so done with it, with everything from ‘Nam to men who always try to deflect her and in a fit of rage, she tries to jump up, only to feel his hand clamp down on your shoulder firm enough to make her sit back down.
She doesn’t look at him, though because honestly, she’s had it with the “Cadman and dope are made for each other” jokes she gets to hear all over ‘Nam and she’s just so fed up with hearing it from him, of all people. She shakes her head and takes a deep drag herself. “Honestly, Lorne… what the fuck is wrong with you?”
Next to her, she feels him move again and when she sees him reaching for her cig from the corner of her eye, she’s tempted to stab the damn thing into his hand and be done with it but she’s not that far gone, yet. She lets him have it, in the end. He’s silent again, taking one drag, then another and another and just when she thinks he’ll probably just keep sitting there, smoking and being an ass, he says, in a weirdly detached voice, “Have you ever seen a man slowly bleed out and die?”
Oh.
Oh God.
She struggles with something to say but in the end, she doesn’t get to do it, anyway because he just plows on in that odd flat voice. “Charlie didn’t look so bad when we found them. He had a couple bullet wounds, nothing too tragic. Meyers patched him up. Had a bit of trouble with the VC but otherwise, things were fine.”
“Evan…”
He shakes his head, not looking at her and practically hanging on to that cig for dear life. “Then, suddenly, couple hours or so later, he starts wheezing, says “Hey, I think something’s wrong…” and Meyers takes another look at him. Lifts his shirt and whoa, he’s got a bruise the size of… Florida or something, all over his chest.”
And all the time, he sounds as if he’s talking about some random GI, not his goddamn brother-in-law. It’s scaring the living daylights out of her.
“It took him another hour to die. All the time, he made this sound, when he breathed in and out and in and out…” He makes a terrible wheezing sound to demonstrate and she wants to gag him, hit him until he’s unconscious, anything to make him shut the hell up. “He said… his last words… he said that if I still wanted to him for coming here, I should do it now and then he just… he…” He coughs, the nearly done cig shaking violently between his fingers. “He drowned in his own blood.”
There’s nothing she can reply to that that won’t sound tacky or trite or useless. So all she does is gently take the cigarette away from his hand and put it out in the dirt next to her. As she does so, she notices that it wasn’t the cough that made the cig shake in his hand and she quietly takes the empty hand in her own, to lace her fingers through his and hold his hand between them. She can feel him holding on for dear life.
And yet the only thing she does find worth saying is, “He was still right.”
The laugh he gives her sounds desperate but he keeps holding her hand, actually moving it to his mouth and putting a surprisingly soft kiss on her fingers. “What was I supposed to do, Crackers? Let that little… piece of shit and his shitty little friends keep on harassing my crew member?” The way he says crew member, it sounds more like “one of my family”.
She refrains from sighing, simply leans in a little closer, so that their knees are touching and that every inch further to her right would have her sit in his lap. “No, of course not. But…”
“Did you know that there’s KKK on this base?” Well… no, she didn’t, actually. Which worries her. She’s a reporter, she’s supposed to know such things, isn’t she? “I don’t have any substantial proof but Baker’s almost sure as hell part of that. Am I supposed to wait for burning crosses in front of the NCO quarters before I react?”
She rubs a hand over her eyes, feeling so damn tired again, right out of the blue. It happened less ever since he’s back. If she felt tired in the last month, it was usually because she didn’t spend most of her nights sleeping, or at least not sleeping alone. Unable to keep holding on to him, she pries her hand lose from his and hugs herself briefly. She keeps leaning in, though. “Evan… I know that you meant well but… what do you think is gonna happen to him in the barracks now?”
It’s not that she has ever actually seen anything she’s insinuating now, at least not with male soldiers, but she’s seen her fair share of nasty things going on in women’s barracks during OCS and her first station in the US. She has seen what a herd of furies did to a black female NCO after her white superior dared standing up for her to them. She doesn’t even know if the NCO is still serving after that. She has no illusions about men being any better at handling what Evan just did.
He’s leaning forward, dropping his forehead on his knees, his hands folded in his neck and she’s tempted to reach out to him and rub his back soothingly but for some reason she’d rather leave him alone right now. It’s probably the wrong decision, seeing as she left him alone about his brother-in-law’s death, too and look what came out of that but for some reason all she can is watch him struggling through everything that happened, ever since that day at the heliport.
After a minute or maybe ten spent in that position, he leans back against the wall, with his hands still behind his head. Suddenly, he looks as if he just aged five years. “I really, really messed up, didn’t I?”
She just nods and leans her head on his shoulder, somehow insanely glad that she feels him putting an arm around her shoulder, squeezing very lightly. Carefully, she puts a kiss on his jaw before putting her head on his shoulder again. “All the way to FUBAR, Cookie.”
There’s a strange… jerking motion from him, as if he just gave a laugh. Or sobbed. She feels him put his other arm around her as well, draw her closer to him, so that she can bury her face in the crook of his neck and snake her arms around his waist, draw in the scent she’s become so intimately familiar with over the last couple months. Machine oil and aftershave and the smoke from her cigarettes all rolled into one, and she feels the beads of his dog tags’ chain dig into her cheek and the damp cotton of his regulation shirt under her hands, before she sneaks the one on his back under the shirt to feel equally damp, hot skin and a scar from a training accident years ago.
His arms around her tighten and his mouth wanders from the kiss he put against the top of her head down towards her ear and into the crook of her neck before he whispers in a broken voice, “I’m lost, Laura. Ever since Charlie died, I’m lost and I have no fucking idea how to get home.”
At least he finally admitted it. At least he finally confirmed her suspicions about what was causing out of character behavior like his outburst against Sergeant Hillbilly an hour or so ago. It doesn’t make anything better and she hopes to God he won’t lose another friend, another member of his family, due to the idiocy of thinking he could shut away his grief and guilt in a locker, never to open it again. But at least he opened that locker. Maybe they’re not completely fucked yet.
She reaches up one hand to bury it in his hair, like she did on that first night at the heliport. She buries it deep and holds him close and she tells him, “We’re gonna find a way back, Cookie and we’re gonna find it together,” because she has no idea how else to tell him not to lose faith in himself, in her, in the universe.
“Just don’t let me go off the deep end ever again,” he rasps and she wishes she could promise him she won’t, wishes she had that power to take away all his pain and despair and grief and replace it with nothing but the deep, all-encompassing feeling of belonging she feels when she’s with him, the feeling of a warm blanket around her shoulders and a cup of hot cocoa when the winds are raging across frozen Lake Michigan, the feeling of being home.
Just barely managing not to sob, she shakes her head. “I can’t promise you that.” She wishes she wouldn’t have had to say that. She wishes this war wouldn’t have taught her how to be so brutally honest. “But if you ever do go off the deep end again, I’ll be there to set you straight.” It’s the least she can do for him, the least she can tell him. Anything further and she’d have to use those three words. She’s not ready for those yet, and maybe she’ll never be but she’ll always be ready to stand by what she just told him.
He takes a moment, a moment to mess up the last semblance of regulation pinned up hair she still had left after a harrowing supply flight with Sheppard by cradling the back of her neck with his hand, the feeling of his sweaty, calloused palm against the base of her head giving her decidedly out of place goose bumps of arousal. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
She snorts, even gives a hollow laugh. “Yeah, you better.”
Amazingly, she feels him echo that laugh, mostly sure it isn’t another dry sob.
Somehow, that also seems to break the spell and slowly, he disentangles himself from their embrace, leaning his back against the wall but keeping his arm around her shoulders and for some indeterminable reason, the urge to light a cigarette is strong enough that she actually sacrifices another one of her precious last bits, taking a far too long drag nestled against his shoulder.
For a while, there’s nothing but the sound of choppers landing and taking off, the distant din from Le Van Loc and the occasional dirty joke and guffawing laughter from around the tool shed floating through the night air. At some point, she does crawl into his lap, settles down with her back to his chest, between his legs and he hugs her around her shoulders, occasionally letting go with one hand to take a drag himself. By now, she’s seriously considering to stop smoking altogether just so she won’t keep on corrupting him like that.
Then again, it’s his choice and if he keeps doing that, maybe she’s just gonna start charging him or something.
Through all that, neither of them talks and she knows she just should let it go but something tells her that this isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. She sighs soundlessly. “You still gotta talk to your Sergeant, you know.”
“I know, Laura,” he says and nuzzles her neck, “God knows I do.” He leans his head against hers and the heaviness in his voice when he says, “As soon as I find a way out of this clusterfuck…” makes her reach up and behind her to mess around with hair and draw him further down and kiss him.
He complies and she’s glad to taste him again, like every time. In the short time they’re actually in this relationship, she has come to associate this taste of coffee and toothpaste and smoke with being in an embrace like the current one, nestled firmly against him in a little cocoon that sometimes not even the sounds of war can penetrate. She can only hope that he feels even a fraction of that whenever they kiss.
When they break the kiss, she uses the opportunity and cranes her neck enough to be able to look him into the eye and tell him, “As soon as we can find a way out of this clusterfuck. We’re in this together, Cookie. You’re not gonna get rid of me so easily.”
That makes him laugh, a real, genuine laugh without that terrible sadness and hollowness attached to it that his laugh had ever since his brother-in-law died and he squeezes her shoulders and puts a kiss to her temple, telling her, “And thank God for that.”
She has to laugh herself at that and leans back against him, actually relaxing for the first time today, maybe even in a long time and she knows that today things just got a lot more complicated and a lot worse than what they already were. But sometimes, sometimes things need to get a lot worse before they can better. Maybe this is one of them. Maybe now that it got really worse, he can start getting better and make it better this time around and possibly even unfuck the mess he made about Meyers and Sergeant Hillbilly.
He has to because damn, that was just stupid but she’s still here and she’ll stick around for as long as he wants her to and she’ll help him with everything she has to get back whatever he lost when he felt his brother-in-law slip away in his arms. What else is there to do when you love someone, after all?
~*~
TBC in So I Came in Here (And Your Long-Time Curse Hurts).