Fic: Very Superstitious (Generation Kill, PG, Poke-Ray)
Title: Very Superstitious
Fandom: Generation Kill
Pairing: Poke&Ray gen, mostly
Rating: PG-13 for the filthy, filthy mouths of Marines
Word Count: 3000 words
Summary: "That had better be my own hand on my thigh right now, suddenly gone all leached of melanin and psycho-possessed so I don’t know it," Tony says evenly. He doesn't look down at the grubby fingers wrapped just above his knee, twitching slightly. It is entirely possible that would be taken as encouragement. "Else I'ma cut it off with my KA-BAR. Might do it anyway."
A/N: AHAHA, oops! I wrote this a few months ago when the we_pimpin comm had just opened, and am only just now slinging it up here. Heh. And also, thanks go to shiningartifact for her lovely beta. <3
Inspired by this:
UGH ILTHEM. Anyway, moving right along...
***
"That had better be my own hand on my thigh right now, suddenly gone all leached of melanin and psycho-possessed so I don’t know it," Tony says evenly. He doesn't look down at the grubby fingers wrapped just above his knee, twitching slightly. It is entirely possible that would be taken as encouragement. "Else I'ma cut it off with my KA-BAR. Might do it anyway."
"Poke, you are so bad at gay chicken," Ray complains mournfully, and doesn’t move his hand. Motherfucker. “Didn’t all the other little Mexicans teach you to play right in your LA fishing village? Now it’s your go.”
“I done told you,” Tony says patiently. “My go? Is going to involve cold steel and motherfuckin’ field amputation.”
There is an injured sigh and the hand finally moves.
“Spoilsport,” Ray mutters, leaning back against the Humvee wheel and Tony cannot believe it, but white boy is pouting. This is not in Tony’s job description. This is Iceman’s gig.
“What the fuck are you doing over here anyway, dog?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t you have your own victor to be hasslin’?”
“Brad said I was corrupting Walt with my whiskey tango, country music ways, and that you looked pretty fucking lonely over here by yourself, since all your boys are doing some freaky combat jack circle in the bushes. Hey, man, no sweat, it’s hard making the first move, but I’m pretty sure if you just pass Lilley a note marked ‘check yes or no,’ they’ll totally invite you too.”
“Brad wouldn’t do me like that,” Tony says, injured, and Ray straight-up smirks at him, knocks their shoulders together companionably, then shakes his head, starts to run a hand over his head. He comes up against his own helmet, then sighs again, shoulders slumping.
“I mighta also been about to vivisect Trombley with my own KA-BAR, so I guess it was danger close and Brad wanted to remove one of us from the situation. So, ‘least you’re stuck with me, not Trombley’s crazy, baby-killing ass, right? Am I right?”
“Yeah, well, Trombley don’t talk half as much as you,” Poke muses darkly, peering at the horizon. There’s bombs dropping, probably killing kids left and right, flashes and noise in the distance. Before Person’d slouched up out of nowhere and plopped down next to him, bitching about how Poke should help him out, because oppression was his fucking schtick, and Ray was being fucking musically repressed, brother - before that, Tony’d been thinking about his wife, how she’d be tucking his baby down for bed in a couple hours. Maybe she’d be reading a bedtime story - he wonders if they’ve moved on past the Rainbow Fish by now. For a while, his little girl’d been obsessed with that damn book, all sparkle and glitter and idealism and as far from Iraq as Poke’s mind could go. Useless marine biologist in the making, his baby girl.
Not good to think about that shit, though. Not safe. It’s not so bad having Person around, sometimes - pretty fucking difficult to get lost in your own thoughts when Ray keeps busting in every couple minutes with a song or a comment on pussy infrastructure or an ode to Wal-Mart.
“Yeah, but the shit he says when he does talk?” Ray says, an edge to his voice. Tony eyes him, thinks maybe Brad had the right idea after all, sending Ray out for a while. “Sometimes I cannot fucking believe the sociopath, serial killer, ignorant bullshit that comes out of that fuck’s mouth. It’s just… fuck.” There’s a pause, and then Ray laughs thickly. “And the little dicksmack keeps eating Charms, you believe that? Charms. In the point vehicle of our platoon. No wonder all this shit keeps coming down on us.”
“Fuck,” Tony says, shaking his head. If cracker’d been stationed in his victor, there’d have been a couple stray rounds of ammo gone off, or at the very least, a roll of Charms crammed up that bitch’s nasty ass. He doesn’t know how Ray and Brad have stood that shit for so long.
“You ever think about how goddamned hypocritical our superstitions are out here, dog?” he says instead. Sympathizing with Person will only lead to the fucker getting attached and following Tony around the way he does Brad, fucking cocker spaniel eyes and dribbling incontinently all over the place. Tony’s okay with an occasional invasion from Victor One, but he’s not down for joining Brad in the nanny-brigade.
Tony has his own fuck-wit worthless white boys to worry about, off doing god knew what in the darkness-Tony doesn't actually know if circle jerks are involved or not, but he wouldn't be surprised. He hears them giggling now from his left quadrant. He’s not going to look unless shit starts getting louder.
Anyway, at least Ray’s good for a conversation that doesn’t end in blank stares and meaningless frat boy, valley girl babbling. He’s watching Tony now, knees drawn up to his chest, eyebrow cocked.
“I mean, up here?” Tony taps his temple. “I know that fucking red dye and high fructose corn starch don’t make a damned difference between whether we get lit up or not. But all the same, you’d never catch me or my men eatin’ one. I’d deep-six his ass.”
“Sympathetic magic,” Ray says knowingly. Tony blinks.
“Did you just accuse my ass of doing voodoo, Corporal?”
“No, no,” Ray says, shaking his head. “I mean, not that I wouldn’t put it past you, you look like you got a little Haitian in there somewhere. Maybe around the eyes?” He leans over and cups a hand to Tony’s chin, tilts his chin down and stares into Tony’s eyes, his own wide and mock-serious.
“Seriously,” Tony says incredulously. “You’re seriously doing this.”
“You’re getting better at this gay chicken shit,” Ray tells him, making a kissy face and then letting go. “Walt would’ve gone all red and giggly on me by now. Hey, has Rudy been sharing the good exfoliants with you? Your skin’s like a baby’s ass, Sergeant.”
“You got something to say about Charms, Person, better spit it out now, ‘fore I backhand you and you forget all the bullshit you ever crammed in that tiny, cracked-out, pea-brain of yours.”
“Ooh, touchy,” Ray comments, stretching out his legs. “Shoulda joined the boys in that circle jerk, you need to relax, speaking of choking chickens and doing voodoo and all. Maybe we could summon up J. Lo with the almighty power of your jizz-hey, ow! Fuck! I was getting to it! Sheesh, you’re an impatient motherfucker.”
Tony taps his KA-BAR meaningful and Ray grins, a quick flash of teeth in the darkness.
“Okay, so there’s this Polish motherfucker, Bronislaw Malinowksi, if you can fucking believe it, and he goes out and lives with a group of naked, bare-titty savages in the South Pacific to record their lives for posterity, so the good old boys back in the universities of civilization can pick their lives apart at their leisure later. Pretty sweet gig, huh? Like Reporter, but instead of going to Iraq, he’s out with hotties on the beach. Reporter picked the wrong fucking assignment, my friend.”
“Hoo rah,” Tony says, shaking his head, content to let Ray ramble for now. He pats his vest, pulls out a battered pack of cigarettes and lights up. Ray immediately makes grabby hands his direction, like a fucking toddler, and Tony sighs and tosses the smokes his way.
“You’re a prince, Poke, I’ll pen you in for a blowjob later,” Ray says happily, cupping his hand around the lighter, protecting the flame from the cold night wind.
“You’re a weird motherfucker, you know that, right, dog?” Tony comments, inhaling deeply, getting those carcinogens nice and lodged in his lungs. Might as well, he figures. He appreciates the irony of it, smoking poison in a warzone. “I don’t got all fucking night, Person, speed it the fuck up, before I send your ass packin’ back to Daddy.”
“I’m getting there, damn,” Ray says from beside him, sounding offended. He tosses a leg over Tony’s and Tony immediately kicks it off, with extreme prejudice.
“Ow! Don’t crowd me, asshole. Anyway. So Malinowski, he’s wandering around with his notebook and his superiority complex, and he starts noticing that there’s a pattern to all these crazy hoodoo rituals the islanders got going, right? Lucky them he was there to notice. But yeah, he starts noticing they all go buttfuck nuts smearing themselves with paint and arranging their beads and chanting and shit when they’re going fishing in the open ocean.”
“Is there a point to this story, my friend?” Poke asks dryly. “Or are you just getting off on the sound of your own voice perpetuating these culturally insensitive, racist stereotypes, you ignorant, cracker motherfucker? Because I feel like you could do that just fine on your lonesome without my company.”
“Ye of little faith, Espera. My wisdom comes to those who wait. See, the thing is, they don’t do any of that shit when they’re fishing in the lagoons, ‘cause lagoons, lagoons are safe, right? You’re fucking gold fishing in a lagoon-it’s all down to your own personal skill whether or not you catch enough to feed your family, or if you drown or get tangled in a reef or wreck your canoe. You, the brown-skinned godless heathen savage with the fishing pole, you control your own destiny.” Ray pauses, leaning back against the Humvee, looking contemplative. “But in the open waters-well, there you got sharks, brother. Rogue currents. Storms. Krakens. Shit you can’t control. Doesn’t matter how good you are, the chances of your dying, or coming home empty handed, go way fucking up. And that’s when you turn to magic.”
Ray wiggles his fingers, presumably to demonstrate the magic more effectively, then blows a cloud of smoke at the horizon, the bombs dropping in the city beyond it. “And right now, my friend, we are all little brown men, cowering in our canoes, chucking Charms at the gods and praying to hell that we don’t get schwacked with artie by our own fucking platoon commander. See, it’s not just the brown man that does this shit. White man’s just as susceptible. It’s a human condition. We all infer causality to certain coincidences, like a rain of ass coming down on a platoon in the midst of opening up their fucking Charms dump-gotta be the fucking Charms’ fault, right? Because it makes us feel better to think we have some measly measure of control over our own lives. But it’s all in our heads, man, it don’t make a damned bit of difference.”
It’s an impressive litany of bullshit; some of it even makes sense. Tony doesn’t know if he could put up with hearing a steady stream of it day in and day out, on and on and on-maybe if Person had an off switch. But for now, it’s good. Tony can see the appeal. He grins lopsidedly, leans into Ray’s shoulder. Ray shoots him an expectant look, bouncing his leg.
“So what you’re tellin’ me,” Tony says deliberately, stubbing out his cigarette and smirking, “is that Trombley’s right?”
Ray makes a missile-like screech of outrage. “Fuck you, man, Trombley’s never right,” he splutters, sounding aggrieved. He’s pouting again, and fuck if it’s not sort of endearing. The trouble is, Person’s way too entertaining for his own good. Like a damned spaniel puppy. Fucking dangerous, that shit. “Come on, Poke, that was some Grade-A, rage against the White Man bullshit I just whipped up for you. I just psychoanalyzed our own weird-ass Marine magic taboos and rituals and brought our races down to the same level! I don’t get one fucking kiss for that? Pat on the back? Tug of the cock?”
Tony’s saved from having to respond by the LT and Gunny coming up-turns out they’re Oscar Mike. Again. Probably going to get their asses shot off, or wind up off-roading in a swamp, or driving into a landmine. It’s only a matter of time, ‘specially on this little sleep. And Ray’s looking tense again, mouth a thin line and shoulders hunched. Fuck.
Shit, Tony’d promised to ask Brad about whether Victor One had any spare gun lube for Chaffin. He might as well toss Person a bone.
“Get your ass up, Princess, I’ll walk you back home,” he says, and Ray lights up, the dumb motherfucker. “But I’m not puttin’ out on the first date. Might pat your sad, spindly back one or twice, if I can find me some Lysol later to disinfect that shit.”
“You’ve just made me the happiest boy at the ball, Sergeant,” Ray assures him, beaming and shouldering his ammo.
“No hand-holding,” Tony warns, because he just knows Ray’ll push that extra inch.
“We could link arms?” Ray suggests, in a tone that suggests he’s batting his eyes. Tony knows better than to look.
“I could shove my foot up your ass,” Tony says mildly.
“He’d probably like it,” Trombley offers from the dimness inside the lead victor. He sounds sulky and young, proof it’s not possible to physically expire of stupidity alone.
“Trombley,” Brad says, sounding tired. “Not another fucking word. The Quiet Game, remember?”
Ray is silent as he climbs in the driver’s side, settles behind the wheel, and Tony shoots him a look as he crosses over to talk to Brad.
Ray doesn’t look up, just stares at his own hands, and really, what the fuck could that dumbass Trombley have said to hit a nerve with Ray Person? Ray can run conversational rings around most of the men in their platoon, Tony himself and Brad Colbert notwithstanding. Trombley probably didn’t even know how to spell the word ‘conversation,’ let alone hold his own in one.
Tony and Colbert are interrupted in the middle of dicking around, trying to score some gun lube and batteries off each other, by Trombley’s voice ringing out, and there’s a genuine note of confusion in it, almost plaintive, which is just fucking-Tony does not ever want to meet the redneck fucks from whence this ignorant little fucker sprang.
“I’m just saying, if Person is gay, that’s bad luck. From God, Sergeant, and I don’t wanna die just because some faggot’s driving me.”
“What part of DADT is so fucking hard to understand,” Brad grates out, staring through the windshield, a muscle in his jaw jumping.
“Hey,” Tony says, leaning in the window. “We all gay in the Marine Corps, dog. This is all about homoerotic, man-to-man bonding at its most primeval. Straight up.”
Walt grins down at him from his Mach 19. “True fucking story, brother,” he says, and leans down for a fistbump.
“But I’m not gay,” Trombley protests, wide-eyed, looking from Marine to Marine, like he can’t believe his own ears. “You guys didn’t make me gay. I have a wife.”
“That’s how it starts, Trombley,” Ray interjects, sounding amused, and Brad’s face smooths out, cracks a smile. “You think you like the ladies, but before you know it, the smell of piss and ballsweat’s gonna make you pop a woody, and don’t even try to act like you haven’t been eying Rudy’s pretty mouth. We all do it, even Rolling Stone, and he’s just here to document all of our descents into the Greek lifestyle. And that’s just Rudy, man. We’re all fucking adorable, and you know it. Look at Walt’s big blue eyes and tell me you don’t want to hit that. I know you stare at his ass all day, Trombley.”
Reporter nods solemnly and jots something down in his notebook, and Trombley goes ape, clutching his weapon to his chest, like that’ll protect his manly honor somehow, and starts earnestly professing his love for pussy and tits and clit. Rolling Stone makes some comments on Freud that has Hasser giggling like mad and clutching his gun to stay upright, and that draws Ray into the conversation again, talking some bullshit about the might of the phallus and what it’s like to fellate a Mach 19 and other real tests of manhood. His hands have relaxed on the wheel, and he’s as twitchy as ever, but Tony’s pretty sure the moment where blood might have been shed has passed.
“Thanks,” Brad says in the middle of the low-grade apocalypse going on in the backseat, low and sincere, and Tony grins, thumps the hood of the Humvee.
“No thanks necessary, my white brother. Just lube.” Brad rolls his eyes and slaps a tin in Tony’s hand. Tony can be gracious in his victory, just nods and then winds his way around the front of the vehicle, eyeing Ray through the windshield. Ray has his NVGs down and is tracking Tony’s movements, smiling slightly. When Tony pauses by his window, he pushes the goggles up, cocks his head.
“Can I help you, fellow sodomite?” he inquires cheerfully, and Trombley makes a squawking noise of despair from the backseat. Tony straightens out his expression into something intent and serious, a repo expression, a ‘don’t fuck with me’ look. Ray’s eyes go wide and then Tony leans in, and tugs Ray by the back of the neck into a quick kiss, just a brush of chapped lips and the taste of tobacco and smoke. Ray makes a noise of surprise into his mouth and Tony smiles.
“For luck,” he says, ignoring the explosion of noise from within the vehicle, and then strolls off back towards his own repressed little herd of gay-ass, homosexual, fucked-up white boys. Hopefully they haven’t gotten fucking jizz all over his victor.
“Dude,” he hears Walt call out as he walks away. “Poke just fucking schooled you at gay chicken.”
“I have not yet begun to fight!” Ray shouts after Tony, and then cranks up the engine, and any response Tony might have made is lost to a cloud of Iraqi dust.
***
Fandom: Generation Kill
Pairing: Poke&Ray gen, mostly
Rating: PG-13 for the filthy, filthy mouths of Marines
Word Count: 3000 words
Summary: "That had better be my own hand on my thigh right now, suddenly gone all leached of melanin and psycho-possessed so I don’t know it," Tony says evenly. He doesn't look down at the grubby fingers wrapped just above his knee, twitching slightly. It is entirely possible that would be taken as encouragement. "Else I'ma cut it off with my KA-BAR. Might do it anyway."
A/N: AHAHA, oops! I wrote this a few months ago when the we_pimpin comm had just opened, and am only just now slinging it up here. Heh. And also, thanks go to shiningartifact for her lovely beta. <3
Inspired by this:
UGH ILTHEM. Anyway, moving right along...
***
"That had better be my own hand on my thigh right now, suddenly gone all leached of melanin and psycho-possessed so I don’t know it," Tony says evenly. He doesn't look down at the grubby fingers wrapped just above his knee, twitching slightly. It is entirely possible that would be taken as encouragement. "Else I'ma cut it off with my KA-BAR. Might do it anyway."
"Poke, you are so bad at gay chicken," Ray complains mournfully, and doesn’t move his hand. Motherfucker. “Didn’t all the other little Mexicans teach you to play right in your LA fishing village? Now it’s your go.”
“I done told you,” Tony says patiently. “My go? Is going to involve cold steel and motherfuckin’ field amputation.”
There is an injured sigh and the hand finally moves.
“Spoilsport,” Ray mutters, leaning back against the Humvee wheel and Tony cannot believe it, but white boy is pouting. This is not in Tony’s job description. This is Iceman’s gig.
“What the fuck are you doing over here anyway, dog?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t you have your own victor to be hasslin’?”
“Brad said I was corrupting Walt with my whiskey tango, country music ways, and that you looked pretty fucking lonely over here by yourself, since all your boys are doing some freaky combat jack circle in the bushes. Hey, man, no sweat, it’s hard making the first move, but I’m pretty sure if you just pass Lilley a note marked ‘check yes or no,’ they’ll totally invite you too.”
“Brad wouldn’t do me like that,” Tony says, injured, and Ray straight-up smirks at him, knocks their shoulders together companionably, then shakes his head, starts to run a hand over his head. He comes up against his own helmet, then sighs again, shoulders slumping.
“I mighta also been about to vivisect Trombley with my own KA-BAR, so I guess it was danger close and Brad wanted to remove one of us from the situation. So, ‘least you’re stuck with me, not Trombley’s crazy, baby-killing ass, right? Am I right?”
“Yeah, well, Trombley don’t talk half as much as you,” Poke muses darkly, peering at the horizon. There’s bombs dropping, probably killing kids left and right, flashes and noise in the distance. Before Person’d slouched up out of nowhere and plopped down next to him, bitching about how Poke should help him out, because oppression was his fucking schtick, and Ray was being fucking musically repressed, brother - before that, Tony’d been thinking about his wife, how she’d be tucking his baby down for bed in a couple hours. Maybe she’d be reading a bedtime story - he wonders if they’ve moved on past the Rainbow Fish by now. For a while, his little girl’d been obsessed with that damn book, all sparkle and glitter and idealism and as far from Iraq as Poke’s mind could go. Useless marine biologist in the making, his baby girl.
Not good to think about that shit, though. Not safe. It’s not so bad having Person around, sometimes - pretty fucking difficult to get lost in your own thoughts when Ray keeps busting in every couple minutes with a song or a comment on pussy infrastructure or an ode to Wal-Mart.
“Yeah, but the shit he says when he does talk?” Ray says, an edge to his voice. Tony eyes him, thinks maybe Brad had the right idea after all, sending Ray out for a while. “Sometimes I cannot fucking believe the sociopath, serial killer, ignorant bullshit that comes out of that fuck’s mouth. It’s just… fuck.” There’s a pause, and then Ray laughs thickly. “And the little dicksmack keeps eating Charms, you believe that? Charms. In the point vehicle of our platoon. No wonder all this shit keeps coming down on us.”
“Fuck,” Tony says, shaking his head. If cracker’d been stationed in his victor, there’d have been a couple stray rounds of ammo gone off, or at the very least, a roll of Charms crammed up that bitch’s nasty ass. He doesn’t know how Ray and Brad have stood that shit for so long.
“You ever think about how goddamned hypocritical our superstitions are out here, dog?” he says instead. Sympathizing with Person will only lead to the fucker getting attached and following Tony around the way he does Brad, fucking cocker spaniel eyes and dribbling incontinently all over the place. Tony’s okay with an occasional invasion from Victor One, but he’s not down for joining Brad in the nanny-brigade.
Tony has his own fuck-wit worthless white boys to worry about, off doing god knew what in the darkness-Tony doesn't actually know if circle jerks are involved or not, but he wouldn't be surprised. He hears them giggling now from his left quadrant. He’s not going to look unless shit starts getting louder.
Anyway, at least Ray’s good for a conversation that doesn’t end in blank stares and meaningless frat boy, valley girl babbling. He’s watching Tony now, knees drawn up to his chest, eyebrow cocked.
“I mean, up here?” Tony taps his temple. “I know that fucking red dye and high fructose corn starch don’t make a damned difference between whether we get lit up or not. But all the same, you’d never catch me or my men eatin’ one. I’d deep-six his ass.”
“Sympathetic magic,” Ray says knowingly. Tony blinks.
“Did you just accuse my ass of doing voodoo, Corporal?”
“No, no,” Ray says, shaking his head. “I mean, not that I wouldn’t put it past you, you look like you got a little Haitian in there somewhere. Maybe around the eyes?” He leans over and cups a hand to Tony’s chin, tilts his chin down and stares into Tony’s eyes, his own wide and mock-serious.
“Seriously,” Tony says incredulously. “You’re seriously doing this.”
“You’re getting better at this gay chicken shit,” Ray tells him, making a kissy face and then letting go. “Walt would’ve gone all red and giggly on me by now. Hey, has Rudy been sharing the good exfoliants with you? Your skin’s like a baby’s ass, Sergeant.”
“You got something to say about Charms, Person, better spit it out now, ‘fore I backhand you and you forget all the bullshit you ever crammed in that tiny, cracked-out, pea-brain of yours.”
“Ooh, touchy,” Ray comments, stretching out his legs. “Shoulda joined the boys in that circle jerk, you need to relax, speaking of choking chickens and doing voodoo and all. Maybe we could summon up J. Lo with the almighty power of your jizz-hey, ow! Fuck! I was getting to it! Sheesh, you’re an impatient motherfucker.”
Tony taps his KA-BAR meaningful and Ray grins, a quick flash of teeth in the darkness.
“Okay, so there’s this Polish motherfucker, Bronislaw Malinowksi, if you can fucking believe it, and he goes out and lives with a group of naked, bare-titty savages in the South Pacific to record their lives for posterity, so the good old boys back in the universities of civilization can pick their lives apart at their leisure later. Pretty sweet gig, huh? Like Reporter, but instead of going to Iraq, he’s out with hotties on the beach. Reporter picked the wrong fucking assignment, my friend.”
“Hoo rah,” Tony says, shaking his head, content to let Ray ramble for now. He pats his vest, pulls out a battered pack of cigarettes and lights up. Ray immediately makes grabby hands his direction, like a fucking toddler, and Tony sighs and tosses the smokes his way.
“You’re a prince, Poke, I’ll pen you in for a blowjob later,” Ray says happily, cupping his hand around the lighter, protecting the flame from the cold night wind.
“You’re a weird motherfucker, you know that, right, dog?” Tony comments, inhaling deeply, getting those carcinogens nice and lodged in his lungs. Might as well, he figures. He appreciates the irony of it, smoking poison in a warzone. “I don’t got all fucking night, Person, speed it the fuck up, before I send your ass packin’ back to Daddy.”
“I’m getting there, damn,” Ray says from beside him, sounding offended. He tosses a leg over Tony’s and Tony immediately kicks it off, with extreme prejudice.
“Ow! Don’t crowd me, asshole. Anyway. So Malinowski, he’s wandering around with his notebook and his superiority complex, and he starts noticing that there’s a pattern to all these crazy hoodoo rituals the islanders got going, right? Lucky them he was there to notice. But yeah, he starts noticing they all go buttfuck nuts smearing themselves with paint and arranging their beads and chanting and shit when they’re going fishing in the open ocean.”
“Is there a point to this story, my friend?” Poke asks dryly. “Or are you just getting off on the sound of your own voice perpetuating these culturally insensitive, racist stereotypes, you ignorant, cracker motherfucker? Because I feel like you could do that just fine on your lonesome without my company.”
“Ye of little faith, Espera. My wisdom comes to those who wait. See, the thing is, they don’t do any of that shit when they’re fishing in the lagoons, ‘cause lagoons, lagoons are safe, right? You’re fucking gold fishing in a lagoon-it’s all down to your own personal skill whether or not you catch enough to feed your family, or if you drown or get tangled in a reef or wreck your canoe. You, the brown-skinned godless heathen savage with the fishing pole, you control your own destiny.” Ray pauses, leaning back against the Humvee, looking contemplative. “But in the open waters-well, there you got sharks, brother. Rogue currents. Storms. Krakens. Shit you can’t control. Doesn’t matter how good you are, the chances of your dying, or coming home empty handed, go way fucking up. And that’s when you turn to magic.”
Ray wiggles his fingers, presumably to demonstrate the magic more effectively, then blows a cloud of smoke at the horizon, the bombs dropping in the city beyond it. “And right now, my friend, we are all little brown men, cowering in our canoes, chucking Charms at the gods and praying to hell that we don’t get schwacked with artie by our own fucking platoon commander. See, it’s not just the brown man that does this shit. White man’s just as susceptible. It’s a human condition. We all infer causality to certain coincidences, like a rain of ass coming down on a platoon in the midst of opening up their fucking Charms dump-gotta be the fucking Charms’ fault, right? Because it makes us feel better to think we have some measly measure of control over our own lives. But it’s all in our heads, man, it don’t make a damned bit of difference.”
It’s an impressive litany of bullshit; some of it even makes sense. Tony doesn’t know if he could put up with hearing a steady stream of it day in and day out, on and on and on-maybe if Person had an off switch. But for now, it’s good. Tony can see the appeal. He grins lopsidedly, leans into Ray’s shoulder. Ray shoots him an expectant look, bouncing his leg.
“So what you’re tellin’ me,” Tony says deliberately, stubbing out his cigarette and smirking, “is that Trombley’s right?”
Ray makes a missile-like screech of outrage. “Fuck you, man, Trombley’s never right,” he splutters, sounding aggrieved. He’s pouting again, and fuck if it’s not sort of endearing. The trouble is, Person’s way too entertaining for his own good. Like a damned spaniel puppy. Fucking dangerous, that shit. “Come on, Poke, that was some Grade-A, rage against the White Man bullshit I just whipped up for you. I just psychoanalyzed our own weird-ass Marine magic taboos and rituals and brought our races down to the same level! I don’t get one fucking kiss for that? Pat on the back? Tug of the cock?”
Tony’s saved from having to respond by the LT and Gunny coming up-turns out they’re Oscar Mike. Again. Probably going to get their asses shot off, or wind up off-roading in a swamp, or driving into a landmine. It’s only a matter of time, ‘specially on this little sleep. And Ray’s looking tense again, mouth a thin line and shoulders hunched. Fuck.
Shit, Tony’d promised to ask Brad about whether Victor One had any spare gun lube for Chaffin. He might as well toss Person a bone.
“Get your ass up, Princess, I’ll walk you back home,” he says, and Ray lights up, the dumb motherfucker. “But I’m not puttin’ out on the first date. Might pat your sad, spindly back one or twice, if I can find me some Lysol later to disinfect that shit.”
“You’ve just made me the happiest boy at the ball, Sergeant,” Ray assures him, beaming and shouldering his ammo.
“No hand-holding,” Tony warns, because he just knows Ray’ll push that extra inch.
“We could link arms?” Ray suggests, in a tone that suggests he’s batting his eyes. Tony knows better than to look.
“I could shove my foot up your ass,” Tony says mildly.
“He’d probably like it,” Trombley offers from the dimness inside the lead victor. He sounds sulky and young, proof it’s not possible to physically expire of stupidity alone.
“Trombley,” Brad says, sounding tired. “Not another fucking word. The Quiet Game, remember?”
Ray is silent as he climbs in the driver’s side, settles behind the wheel, and Tony shoots him a look as he crosses over to talk to Brad.
Ray doesn’t look up, just stares at his own hands, and really, what the fuck could that dumbass Trombley have said to hit a nerve with Ray Person? Ray can run conversational rings around most of the men in their platoon, Tony himself and Brad Colbert notwithstanding. Trombley probably didn’t even know how to spell the word ‘conversation,’ let alone hold his own in one.
Tony and Colbert are interrupted in the middle of dicking around, trying to score some gun lube and batteries off each other, by Trombley’s voice ringing out, and there’s a genuine note of confusion in it, almost plaintive, which is just fucking-Tony does not ever want to meet the redneck fucks from whence this ignorant little fucker sprang.
“I’m just saying, if Person is gay, that’s bad luck. From God, Sergeant, and I don’t wanna die just because some faggot’s driving me.”
“What part of DADT is so fucking hard to understand,” Brad grates out, staring through the windshield, a muscle in his jaw jumping.
“Hey,” Tony says, leaning in the window. “We all gay in the Marine Corps, dog. This is all about homoerotic, man-to-man bonding at its most primeval. Straight up.”
Walt grins down at him from his Mach 19. “True fucking story, brother,” he says, and leans down for a fistbump.
“But I’m not gay,” Trombley protests, wide-eyed, looking from Marine to Marine, like he can’t believe his own ears. “You guys didn’t make me gay. I have a wife.”
“That’s how it starts, Trombley,” Ray interjects, sounding amused, and Brad’s face smooths out, cracks a smile. “You think you like the ladies, but before you know it, the smell of piss and ballsweat’s gonna make you pop a woody, and don’t even try to act like you haven’t been eying Rudy’s pretty mouth. We all do it, even Rolling Stone, and he’s just here to document all of our descents into the Greek lifestyle. And that’s just Rudy, man. We’re all fucking adorable, and you know it. Look at Walt’s big blue eyes and tell me you don’t want to hit that. I know you stare at his ass all day, Trombley.”
Reporter nods solemnly and jots something down in his notebook, and Trombley goes ape, clutching his weapon to his chest, like that’ll protect his manly honor somehow, and starts earnestly professing his love for pussy and tits and clit. Rolling Stone makes some comments on Freud that has Hasser giggling like mad and clutching his gun to stay upright, and that draws Ray into the conversation again, talking some bullshit about the might of the phallus and what it’s like to fellate a Mach 19 and other real tests of manhood. His hands have relaxed on the wheel, and he’s as twitchy as ever, but Tony’s pretty sure the moment where blood might have been shed has passed.
“Thanks,” Brad says in the middle of the low-grade apocalypse going on in the backseat, low and sincere, and Tony grins, thumps the hood of the Humvee.
“No thanks necessary, my white brother. Just lube.” Brad rolls his eyes and slaps a tin in Tony’s hand. Tony can be gracious in his victory, just nods and then winds his way around the front of the vehicle, eyeing Ray through the windshield. Ray has his NVGs down and is tracking Tony’s movements, smiling slightly. When Tony pauses by his window, he pushes the goggles up, cocks his head.
“Can I help you, fellow sodomite?” he inquires cheerfully, and Trombley makes a squawking noise of despair from the backseat. Tony straightens out his expression into something intent and serious, a repo expression, a ‘don’t fuck with me’ look. Ray’s eyes go wide and then Tony leans in, and tugs Ray by the back of the neck into a quick kiss, just a brush of chapped lips and the taste of tobacco and smoke. Ray makes a noise of surprise into his mouth and Tony smiles.
“For luck,” he says, ignoring the explosion of noise from within the vehicle, and then strolls off back towards his own repressed little herd of gay-ass, homosexual, fucked-up white boys. Hopefully they haven’t gotten fucking jizz all over his victor.
“Dude,” he hears Walt call out as he walks away. “Poke just fucking schooled you at gay chicken.”
“I have not yet begun to fight!” Ray shouts after Tony, and then cranks up the engine, and any response Tony might have made is lost to a cloud of Iraqi dust.
***