"Cage The Animals" (Warriors)
Title: Cage The Animals
Recipient: romanticalgirl
Fandom: Warriors
Character: John Feeley
Rating: R, I guess, to be on the safe side.
Thanks to sionnain for doing a mechanics beta; any canon inconsistencies are entirely my fault.
It was like watching through glass, all of the horror held safely back just out of reach, just the slightest bit unreal.
Or it should be, according to the higher-ups, the orders and directives handed down from the UN. John read the statements of principles written by men and women so very far away and wondered if the distance was the key, if it warped and distorted the messages that came from Bosnia and turned them into something else. Inverted images, or negatives, like lifting a film cel up to the light and seeing a death's-head instead of a face.
If they were here, it would be different. The glass would break; there was no way to keep it when you didn't just see what was happening, you heard it, smelled it, tasted it. Stale grit when you licked your lips, and ashes on your tongue.
Then again, Captain Gurney seemed to manage well enough. The office staff, the ranking officers who passed through and left again. The other lieutenants, even, never seemed to slip, to smack up against the glass and crack it with their own skulls. John didn't talk to any of them much, except for Neil. And Neil was more than happy to notice nothing but Minka, anymore.
Maybe that was the trick. To keep it all unreal, painted, off of your teeth and out of your dreams. Just avert your eyes, turn your focus to whatever was most handy: following orders to the letter or your paperwork or a lovely woman with long blonde hair.
John tried to look at Almira, but she was under glass as well, and reaching for her cut his hands to ribbons before he even knew.
**
Neil squinted up at the sky and lit his cigarette, holding the lighter's flame cupped in his hands for an extra few seconds to indulge in the heat. John blinked and looked away, his eyes dazzled by the small light against the darkness. The air was cold enough to feel sharp against his skin and make his lungs ache with each breath.
“Too fucking cold to breathe,” Neil muttered, and John blinked, startled by the echo of his thoughts. “Have one.” John shook his head at the offered cigarette, drawing another gulp of air into his chest and holding it against the pain. There must be some way to get used to it, given long enough. Given patience.
“You hear what happened yesterday? South of here. Different zone.” Neil's voice was rough, distant, hardly interested in his own words. “Journalists got themselves in some trouble.”
“I heard, yeah.” John pushed his hands deeper in his pockets and nodded, although Neil wasn't looking at him. Of course he'd heard. They got their news from the same places, the same people telling the same stories over and over until new ones came along, because they weren't supposed to interfere, weren't supposed to touch the real world that lived here and learn from it, speak to it, listen. “They got out all right in the end.”
“Yeah.” Neil blew out a slow stream of smoke, the bright end of his cigarette bobbing in the air. “Fucking funny, though.”
John frowned. “Not really.”
“Well, of course not really.” Neil sighed and took another drag, glaring at John from the corner of his eye. “I mean, d'you remember in school, learning about how television and movies were supposed to change war, how people once thought that seeing real pictures of war would shock the world and make it all more real and so they'd just stop doing it?”
John nodded again and rocked back on his heels, closing his eyes against a sudden sharp gust of wind that made them tear and hurt. “Didn't work very well, did it.”
“It's human nature to kill things. Animal nature.” Neil dropped the end of his cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his shoe. “Won't change that by giving them something to look at.”
“Makes the notion that we're here to observe just a bit ironic, doesn't it?” For a minute the words seemed to hover in the air, like John could see them, and something almost clicked into place, brutal and perfect sense hovering just out of reach.
And then it was gone, and John blinked as Neil laughed a little and shrugged. “I suppose. I'm going inside, it's too fucking cold out here.”
John looked out into the dark and saw a few spots of clean, white light where the electricity had held on, and a few dirty orange glows where people had been knocked back to burning whatever would take a flame for light and warmth. Those fires could have come from any night anywhere in the world, a thousand years ago, just like the bitter cold sky and the bodies going rotten in their graves.
**
Langrubber gave him the name and address, with much smirking and leering and jokes in Serbian that John didn't understand and wouldn't ask Minka, even though some of the words sounded like the ones he heard her say at night through the wall to Neil's room.
He was being unfair, and he knew it. Minka was a nice woman, serious and competent and kindhearted. Emma was nothing to her, not even a shadow, just a name. Neil brought no pictures, and that wasn't Minka's fault. She was looking for touch and comfort in this little piece of hell, no different from any of his men who waited for phone calls and football scores. He couldn't, in good conscience, blame her.
He did anyway, because she chose to attach herself to Neil and return his attraction when there were a dozen others who would have looked at her the same. Maybe even John would have, though he couldn't say anymore. He didn't know much of anything, except that the tea he drank with Almira was always thin and no better than lukewarm, and that Minka cried out to some local saint when she came, and that his men stared at him with haunted eyes when he repeated the directives, the orders, the statements of purpose and principle that keep them back from these people, contained, separated by phantom glass.
Langrubber had assured him that this place was safe, discreet and clean, that he had sent other officers here and they had come back satisfied. John didn't know why he believed that, when the man had been wrong a thousand times already. But here he was, because this was somewhere he'd never been and maybe it would be the key to taking his eyes off the things he wasn't supposed to see.
He knew he was wrong within minutes of stepping inside, when he realized with near-perfect certainty that all of these women were Muslim, these thin and bruised women with indifferent eyes who looked him over slowly and without surprise.
It was like another set of orders, a mandate from above, though he was the only one who knew or cared besides Langrubber, and nobody liked that bastard enough to listen. Still, he stayed, moving through the steps automatically, choosing one of them mostly at random and following her upstairs. She had dark hair, at least, not blonde; he wasn't quite that far gone in his own head, though halfway through things he realized she had Almira's eyes and had to close his own and bite his lip to keep from screaming.
She lit a cigarette while he was getting dressed, and looked at him with a trace of curiosity and expectancy that puzzled him until he looked at the bruises again, the dark scattered maps on her body, and realized she was probably only wondering if now that he'd fucked her, he was going to want to hit her, too. And he could, he thought, a slow shock of understanding rolling through his body. She wouldn't be surprised at all; neither would the women downstairs, or Langrubber. They all might even have expected it. And nobody who might give a damn, nobody who carried the same rules and lines in mind as John himself, would ever know.
He looked at her and thought of some lecture he'd heard a hundred years ago, probably at university, about how what a people decides to hate must be inhuman, how being enemies means the other has to be broken down into a nothing, until it doesn't laugh or cry or love or feel pain.
She blew a trail of smoke at him and lifted her eyebrows, holding out her hand for money. He was careful not to let his fingers touch her palm.
**
In London, they asked him to give statements, to count bodies from memory, to tell stories into a microphone until they turned into what the listeners would accept as truth. They gave him a promotion and talked about the noble effort, the higher calling of civilized nations to hold the line. He nodded and looked past them and waited them out, waited for the silence on the other side.
But between him and silence stood his men, a scattered and cracked handful who were quieter than when they left, or maybe just a bit more resigned, or dead like Skeet or made sick by the smell of raw meat like James. All he could give them were more hollow words and the example of his own squared shoulders, but it seemed to mean something to them; God knew what, but something, and so all right.
Get past them, past Neil's vague and rote camaraderie and Emma's anger, and then it was off to Ireland, still not quite quiet, still not quite a chance to rest. There were a hundred little things to do, the clutter of the day filling up his mind. It distracted him, for a while; he took a side road into that chatter and business and it was good enough.
Just a few idle words in the pub. “You were there, Feeley. What do you think?” All it took to sweep everything clean and leave him facing the glass again, looking through at that place a thousand miles away as clearly as at a photograph. Except the frame was scorched and twisted, and the glass in his mind riddled with hairline cracks and fractures, one wrong breath away from falling to pieces.
And it wasn't silence he found at all, but the low raw moaning of the wind.
Recipient: romanticalgirl
Fandom: Warriors
Character: John Feeley
Rating: R, I guess, to be on the safe side.
Thanks to sionnain for doing a mechanics beta; any canon inconsistencies are entirely my fault.
It was like watching through glass, all of the horror held safely back just out of reach, just the slightest bit unreal.
Or it should be, according to the higher-ups, the orders and directives handed down from the UN. John read the statements of principles written by men and women so very far away and wondered if the distance was the key, if it warped and distorted the messages that came from Bosnia and turned them into something else. Inverted images, or negatives, like lifting a film cel up to the light and seeing a death's-head instead of a face.
If they were here, it would be different. The glass would break; there was no way to keep it when you didn't just see what was happening, you heard it, smelled it, tasted it. Stale grit when you licked your lips, and ashes on your tongue.
Then again, Captain Gurney seemed to manage well enough. The office staff, the ranking officers who passed through and left again. The other lieutenants, even, never seemed to slip, to smack up against the glass and crack it with their own skulls. John didn't talk to any of them much, except for Neil. And Neil was more than happy to notice nothing but Minka, anymore.
Maybe that was the trick. To keep it all unreal, painted, off of your teeth and out of your dreams. Just avert your eyes, turn your focus to whatever was most handy: following orders to the letter or your paperwork or a lovely woman with long blonde hair.
John tried to look at Almira, but she was under glass as well, and reaching for her cut his hands to ribbons before he even knew.
**
Neil squinted up at the sky and lit his cigarette, holding the lighter's flame cupped in his hands for an extra few seconds to indulge in the heat. John blinked and looked away, his eyes dazzled by the small light against the darkness. The air was cold enough to feel sharp against his skin and make his lungs ache with each breath.
“Too fucking cold to breathe,” Neil muttered, and John blinked, startled by the echo of his thoughts. “Have one.” John shook his head at the offered cigarette, drawing another gulp of air into his chest and holding it against the pain. There must be some way to get used to it, given long enough. Given patience.
“You hear what happened yesterday? South of here. Different zone.” Neil's voice was rough, distant, hardly interested in his own words. “Journalists got themselves in some trouble.”
“I heard, yeah.” John pushed his hands deeper in his pockets and nodded, although Neil wasn't looking at him. Of course he'd heard. They got their news from the same places, the same people telling the same stories over and over until new ones came along, because they weren't supposed to interfere, weren't supposed to touch the real world that lived here and learn from it, speak to it, listen. “They got out all right in the end.”
“Yeah.” Neil blew out a slow stream of smoke, the bright end of his cigarette bobbing in the air. “Fucking funny, though.”
John frowned. “Not really.”
“Well, of course not really.” Neil sighed and took another drag, glaring at John from the corner of his eye. “I mean, d'you remember in school, learning about how television and movies were supposed to change war, how people once thought that seeing real pictures of war would shock the world and make it all more real and so they'd just stop doing it?”
John nodded again and rocked back on his heels, closing his eyes against a sudden sharp gust of wind that made them tear and hurt. “Didn't work very well, did it.”
“It's human nature to kill things. Animal nature.” Neil dropped the end of his cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his shoe. “Won't change that by giving them something to look at.”
“Makes the notion that we're here to observe just a bit ironic, doesn't it?” For a minute the words seemed to hover in the air, like John could see them, and something almost clicked into place, brutal and perfect sense hovering just out of reach.
And then it was gone, and John blinked as Neil laughed a little and shrugged. “I suppose. I'm going inside, it's too fucking cold out here.”
John looked out into the dark and saw a few spots of clean, white light where the electricity had held on, and a few dirty orange glows where people had been knocked back to burning whatever would take a flame for light and warmth. Those fires could have come from any night anywhere in the world, a thousand years ago, just like the bitter cold sky and the bodies going rotten in their graves.
**
Langrubber gave him the name and address, with much smirking and leering and jokes in Serbian that John didn't understand and wouldn't ask Minka, even though some of the words sounded like the ones he heard her say at night through the wall to Neil's room.
He was being unfair, and he knew it. Minka was a nice woman, serious and competent and kindhearted. Emma was nothing to her, not even a shadow, just a name. Neil brought no pictures, and that wasn't Minka's fault. She was looking for touch and comfort in this little piece of hell, no different from any of his men who waited for phone calls and football scores. He couldn't, in good conscience, blame her.
He did anyway, because she chose to attach herself to Neil and return his attraction when there were a dozen others who would have looked at her the same. Maybe even John would have, though he couldn't say anymore. He didn't know much of anything, except that the tea he drank with Almira was always thin and no better than lukewarm, and that Minka cried out to some local saint when she came, and that his men stared at him with haunted eyes when he repeated the directives, the orders, the statements of purpose and principle that keep them back from these people, contained, separated by phantom glass.
Langrubber had assured him that this place was safe, discreet and clean, that he had sent other officers here and they had come back satisfied. John didn't know why he believed that, when the man had been wrong a thousand times already. But here he was, because this was somewhere he'd never been and maybe it would be the key to taking his eyes off the things he wasn't supposed to see.
He knew he was wrong within minutes of stepping inside, when he realized with near-perfect certainty that all of these women were Muslim, these thin and bruised women with indifferent eyes who looked him over slowly and without surprise.
It was like another set of orders, a mandate from above, though he was the only one who knew or cared besides Langrubber, and nobody liked that bastard enough to listen. Still, he stayed, moving through the steps automatically, choosing one of them mostly at random and following her upstairs. She had dark hair, at least, not blonde; he wasn't quite that far gone in his own head, though halfway through things he realized she had Almira's eyes and had to close his own and bite his lip to keep from screaming.
She lit a cigarette while he was getting dressed, and looked at him with a trace of curiosity and expectancy that puzzled him until he looked at the bruises again, the dark scattered maps on her body, and realized she was probably only wondering if now that he'd fucked her, he was going to want to hit her, too. And he could, he thought, a slow shock of understanding rolling through his body. She wouldn't be surprised at all; neither would the women downstairs, or Langrubber. They all might even have expected it. And nobody who might give a damn, nobody who carried the same rules and lines in mind as John himself, would ever know.
He looked at her and thought of some lecture he'd heard a hundred years ago, probably at university, about how what a people decides to hate must be inhuman, how being enemies means the other has to be broken down into a nothing, until it doesn't laugh or cry or love or feel pain.
She blew a trail of smoke at him and lifted her eyebrows, holding out her hand for money. He was careful not to let his fingers touch her palm.
**
In London, they asked him to give statements, to count bodies from memory, to tell stories into a microphone until they turned into what the listeners would accept as truth. They gave him a promotion and talked about the noble effort, the higher calling of civilized nations to hold the line. He nodded and looked past them and waited them out, waited for the silence on the other side.
But between him and silence stood his men, a scattered and cracked handful who were quieter than when they left, or maybe just a bit more resigned, or dead like Skeet or made sick by the smell of raw meat like James. All he could give them were more hollow words and the example of his own squared shoulders, but it seemed to mean something to them; God knew what, but something, and so all right.
Get past them, past Neil's vague and rote camaraderie and Emma's anger, and then it was off to Ireland, still not quite quiet, still not quite a chance to rest. There were a hundred little things to do, the clutter of the day filling up his mind. It distracted him, for a while; he took a side road into that chatter and business and it was good enough.
Just a few idle words in the pub. “You were there, Feeley. What do you think?” All it took to sweep everything clean and leave him facing the glass again, looking through at that place a thousand miles away as clearly as at a photograph. Except the frame was scorched and twisted, and the glass in his mind riddled with hairline cracks and fractures, one wrong breath away from falling to pieces.
And it wasn't silence he found at all, but the low raw moaning of the wind.