Generation Kill: So It Goes
Title: So It Goes
Fandom: Generation Kill
Pairing: Nate/Brad
Rating: Like, R, for swearing
Wordcount: 1966
Notes: This went the opposite way of most of my recent fics, in that I thought it would be long but it ended up short. Also, yes, I am taking liberties with Vonnegut here.
Summary: Nate Fick was unstuck in time.
Nate Fick was unstuck in time.
He lived his childhood in the correct order, thankfully, but as far as he could remember--and remembering things was trickier for him than it ought to be--his first instance of time travel was at the age of twenty.
He was sitting in a lecture hall at Dartmouth, absently taking notes on Latin declension, when he was suddenly, deadly certain that he was going to be sick. Nate closed his eyes as his stomach twisted, dropping his pen and praying, and when he opened them again he wasn't in a lecture hall anymore. It was dark, and cold, and there was something heavy on his head. He reached up and felt a helmet, covered with stretched-out dirty cloth.
Nate was wearing fatigues and standing on dirt and there were mountains visible in the distance. Everything was lit white by the moon.
"Sir," somebody said, and he turned around to see who was behind him, because he'd thought he was alone.
Another guy in fatigues was holding out a clipboard. Nate took it and peered at it cautiously.
"My after-action report, sir," said the guy, standing at attention. "You said you wanted it tonight."
Nate blinked down at it. "Thank you," he said, trying to sound like the kind of person who people called 'sir'. The other guy nodded and walked away across the dirt.
Nate could just make out the handwriting in the moonlight. Apparently he'd been in a firefight earlier that day. Apparently he was in Afghanistan. The date at the top of the report said it was 2002.
What the fuck. It should have been 1997.
The radio clipped to his vest crackled and made him jump a little. "Delta Tango Three, whoever's singing Backstreet Boys needs to lock it the fuck down."
He spent a moment basking in the absurdity before tucking the clipboard under his arm and walking back the way the other Marine had come. Three steps later, he wasn't in Afghanistan anymore, he was six years old and at his aunt's house in Maryland, jumping through the sprinkler with his sister. He tripped over the hose and fell, banging his knee on a rock hidden in the grass. When he rolled onto his back, holding his knee and staring at the cut, and his sister kept running through the sprinkler stream behind him, his aunt came over and scooped him up in her arms.
"Look at that knee," she said. "We're going to have to amputate."
Nate was scared and trying to figure out what 'amputate' meant until she kissed him on the kneecap and suddenly it felt better. Amputation was nice, apparently.
And then Nate was sitting in the lecture hall at Dartmouth and the prof was still in the middle of the same sentence and Nate had just written a letter A whose tail trailed down the page a little further than it should have. He took several deep breaths through his nose but he couldn't understand any of the Latin on the blackboard anymore, his notes didn't make any sense, so he quietly gathered up his bag and left.
***
When Nate saw the poster for Tom Ricks' talk, everything settled into place with a kind of inevitability. He'd stayed up most of one night reading Ricks' book on the Marine Corps, interrupted by one trip to East Timor which had lasted a week, two back to his junior high years, one more to Afghanistan where he'd appeared with a weapon in his hands, and one CNAS meeting where Ricks had been in attendance. Nate figured he was about 30 in that last one; it made him feel better about the time in Afghanistan, if he was going to make it out of there alive.
The talk was reassuring, at least. Nate felt a sense of pride, sitting there in the auditorium listening to Tom Ricks talk about duty and honour and remembering the feel of a kevlar helmet on his head, the dusty smell of Afghanistan. He wondered later, when he was filling out his application for OCS, if this was the way things had to go, if just because he was living bits of his life in war zones meant he had to join the Marine Corps or what would happen if he didn't. But another part of Nate was firmly decided that if he was going to keep finding himself in the military then he had better at least learn how not to die or get anyone killed in the process. He was pretty sure he'd make it through; he wasn't so certain how the people around him would manage.
***
Thankfully, the first time Nate met Brad Colbert was more or less the first time Brad Colbert met Nate. Nate had just found himself in Camp Pendleton by way of his senior prom, his oversized cabin on the Navy ship he'd gone to Afghanistan on (full of other peoples' surfboards, Nate couldn't even surf), where he'd at least gotten a good night's sleep, a training exercise in OCS he'd only seen the first half of, and a party in college. He thought he might still be a tiny bit drunk.
Nate was standing in his office on base, in front of a guy who was six-four if he was an inch, and staring down at him. He took his cues from the uniform. "Sergeant Colbert," he said.
Brad Colbert raised an eyebrow, the first of many. "Lieutenant," he said. His tone was humouring Nate. Apparently they were in the middle of a conversation.
"Where was I?" Nate asked.
"You were just telling me about putting Sergeant Espera in charge of half of my team, in a separate vehicle."
Nate glanced down at his desk and there were his scribbled notes, right there to look at, and oh, this was a good day. He felt a minor throb of headache subside and said, "Right. Logistically, I think it's the best way forward, given our mission parameters. Any thoughts or objections, Sergeant?"
"None, sir." Colbert looked definitely amused now. "Long day, sir?"
"They're all long days," said Nate honestly.
***
Nate couldn't measure time correctly anymore, had no more concept of how old he might be in terms of how long he'd had consciousness; he was as old as his body was at any given moment he found himself in it. He had a vague impression that other people experienced Nate's life in a sane and linear fashion, which books and movies generally told him was how other people lived their lives from start to finish (Nate had somehow managed to stay in one time during an entire viewing of Memento, though, and he was the only person he knew who'd understood it on the first try). It was challenging to stay on top of, constantly dropping into some part of his life where he was expected to know what was going on and take some kind of action immediately, but the longer he did it, the easier it got.
Either this was because Nate was getting better at thinking on his feet, or because he was no longer working from a lack of knowledge in most areas of his life.
He managed to reach a point where the only person consistently giving him long, strange looks was Brad. Goddamn Brad. He was a smart guy and Nate was scared he was figuring out that something was wrong with Nate. That he maybe wasn't all there, that he was hiding something. Once, Nate had been having a conversation with Brad about Captain Schwetje's idiocy, halfway through which Nate had realized they were still in Kuwait and he'd had to swallow back a remark on some event which hadn't happened for Brad yet, and the next thing he knew he was at his sister's wedding, wearing a tux and halfway to smashed off his face, and started having dangerous thoughts.
His dangerous thoughts were that he could tell Brad what was going on, that Nate time travelled through his own life, that he lived like a card that someone had shuffled through a deck, all in the wrong order. He thought he could tell Brad this and Brad might get it, might understand and stop giving Nate those looks, those worried looks. Then Nate could stop wondering whether the worry was about him as a friend or as a liability.
The problem was that if Nate told Brad about this, he might have to tell him about everything, and he didn't think he could. There were things he just couldn't share. He realized this when he'd sobered up and then driven into the kill-zone in Al Muwaffaqiyah, adrenaline pushing him out of his victor and into the line of fire to dance through the bullets and shove everyone back into order. He'd done it because his concern that no one die because he was a little fucked up had become almost fanatical; he had some theories about his situation and about destiny that made him decide he wasn't going to die in Iraq or in Afghanistan, no matter what he did, because he'd been to his seventieth birthday party and the cake had been pretty good.
Brad had been fucking livid afterwards (not to mention Mike, but Mike hadn't stopped him getting out of the command vehicle either), and Nate had been left grim-faced, trying to calm him down and knowing that he couldn't tell Brad anything, because he wouldn't be able to explain to Brad's satisfaction the certainty he felt that he was going to survive, because he'd seen life after Iraq, so it was okay to do something daring and stupid for a good cause.
It wasn't the only thing he couldn't explain to Brad. He also couldn't explain how Brad was stuck with him, because sometimes he'd wake up 36 years old (or 32, or 40, or 65) in a California king bed and roll over to find Brad sleeping on the other side of it. That was hard, very hard to keep under wraps, because he had memories that hadn't happened yet for Brad, of just grinning at each other suddenly, and making out lazily before falling asleep, and fucking sweatily to mind-fuzzing orgasms, and the love that suffused those parts of Nate's life was bleeding into the other parts, the parts where he and Brad were coworkers and Brad was his subordinate and they were in a motherfucking war zone, which was no place for any kind of feelings except exhaustion, which Nate frankly felt a lot of.
It was hard to compartmentalize that. Nate wasn't sure he was doing a very good job.
That probably helped explain some of the long, strange looks.
Nate blinked, and a voice behind him said, "Penny for your thoughts."
He was in Iraq, but now they were in Baghdad. He hadn't even noticed the time slip, he'd been too lost in thought. He hated when that happened.
Nate plastered a smile on his face as he turned around to look at Brad. "You'd get change back," he lied.
"You looked like you were a million miles away."
A couple hundred miles and several days, but who was counting? "I'm here now," said Nate. "What do you need?"
Brad shook his head. "Nothing." They stood together in silence, looking across a soccer stadium, and Nate smiled to himself. As someone who lived in the moment and by no choice of his own, it was a feeling that he rarely had, but he was having it now: everything was going to be all right. If nothing else, one of these days he was going to get to enjoy the bottle of excellent scotch Brad had given him for his seventieth birthday.
THE END
ETA: Apparently this is the kind of fic I am taking missing scene prompts for, if you have any.
mdevile asked for the first time Nate woke up next to Brad, complete with naked awkwardness:
Nate was in Iraq, about to strong-point a town with his platoon because that was apparently what Iraq was shaping up to be, and then he was a toddler, running around on new legs and banging into the coffee table and hurting himself, and then he was asleep. Asleep was always his favourite; Nate probably didn't sleep enough but that was hardly his fault.
But then he woke up, and he wasn't alone. He was in a big bed in a warm room that smelled a little like the ocean, which reminded him of his place in Oceanside, but this wasn't his place in Oceanside. He was sure he'd only had the one.
Nate rolled over and found himself facing another man's back. It was big, and tanned. And above the bunched-up sheets that covered the other man's hips were the upper edges of a tattoo that Nate thought he recognized.
He weighed the odds of his being able to lean up and look at Brad's face, turned away toward the window, without waking him, and in the end he settled for reaching out one careful finger to lightly, lightly tug down the edge of the sheet.
Yeah. That was Brad's tattoo. Nate was in his bed. Also, neither one of them was wearing a stitch of clothing.
Nate mulled this over. He didn't know what year it was. He didn't know how they'd gotten here. He didn't know how welcome he was. He didn't know where his pants were.
Maybe it was a blessing that before he had to work out an exit strategy, he blinked again and was back in Iraq.
It wasn't so much a blessing that he found himself sitting next to a Humvee, right beside Brad. But it was okay; Nate had learned some breathing exercises for moments like these.
***
This entry was originally posted at http://waketosleep.dreamwidth.org/59964.html. (
comments)
Fandom: Generation Kill
Pairing: Nate/Brad
Rating: Like, R, for swearing
Wordcount: 1966
Notes: This went the opposite way of most of my recent fics, in that I thought it would be long but it ended up short. Also, yes, I am taking liberties with Vonnegut here.
Summary: Nate Fick was unstuck in time.
Nate Fick was unstuck in time.
He lived his childhood in the correct order, thankfully, but as far as he could remember--and remembering things was trickier for him than it ought to be--his first instance of time travel was at the age of twenty.
He was sitting in a lecture hall at Dartmouth, absently taking notes on Latin declension, when he was suddenly, deadly certain that he was going to be sick. Nate closed his eyes as his stomach twisted, dropping his pen and praying, and when he opened them again he wasn't in a lecture hall anymore. It was dark, and cold, and there was something heavy on his head. He reached up and felt a helmet, covered with stretched-out dirty cloth.
Nate was wearing fatigues and standing on dirt and there were mountains visible in the distance. Everything was lit white by the moon.
"Sir," somebody said, and he turned around to see who was behind him, because he'd thought he was alone.
Another guy in fatigues was holding out a clipboard. Nate took it and peered at it cautiously.
"My after-action report, sir," said the guy, standing at attention. "You said you wanted it tonight."
Nate blinked down at it. "Thank you," he said, trying to sound like the kind of person who people called 'sir'. The other guy nodded and walked away across the dirt.
Nate could just make out the handwriting in the moonlight. Apparently he'd been in a firefight earlier that day. Apparently he was in Afghanistan. The date at the top of the report said it was 2002.
What the fuck. It should have been 1997.
The radio clipped to his vest crackled and made him jump a little. "Delta Tango Three, whoever's singing Backstreet Boys needs to lock it the fuck down."
He spent a moment basking in the absurdity before tucking the clipboard under his arm and walking back the way the other Marine had come. Three steps later, he wasn't in Afghanistan anymore, he was six years old and at his aunt's house in Maryland, jumping through the sprinkler with his sister. He tripped over the hose and fell, banging his knee on a rock hidden in the grass. When he rolled onto his back, holding his knee and staring at the cut, and his sister kept running through the sprinkler stream behind him, his aunt came over and scooped him up in her arms.
"Look at that knee," she said. "We're going to have to amputate."
Nate was scared and trying to figure out what 'amputate' meant until she kissed him on the kneecap and suddenly it felt better. Amputation was nice, apparently.
And then Nate was sitting in the lecture hall at Dartmouth and the prof was still in the middle of the same sentence and Nate had just written a letter A whose tail trailed down the page a little further than it should have. He took several deep breaths through his nose but he couldn't understand any of the Latin on the blackboard anymore, his notes didn't make any sense, so he quietly gathered up his bag and left.
***
When Nate saw the poster for Tom Ricks' talk, everything settled into place with a kind of inevitability. He'd stayed up most of one night reading Ricks' book on the Marine Corps, interrupted by one trip to East Timor which had lasted a week, two back to his junior high years, one more to Afghanistan where he'd appeared with a weapon in his hands, and one CNAS meeting where Ricks had been in attendance. Nate figured he was about 30 in that last one; it made him feel better about the time in Afghanistan, if he was going to make it out of there alive.
The talk was reassuring, at least. Nate felt a sense of pride, sitting there in the auditorium listening to Tom Ricks talk about duty and honour and remembering the feel of a kevlar helmet on his head, the dusty smell of Afghanistan. He wondered later, when he was filling out his application for OCS, if this was the way things had to go, if just because he was living bits of his life in war zones meant he had to join the Marine Corps or what would happen if he didn't. But another part of Nate was firmly decided that if he was going to keep finding himself in the military then he had better at least learn how not to die or get anyone killed in the process. He was pretty sure he'd make it through; he wasn't so certain how the people around him would manage.
***
Thankfully, the first time Nate met Brad Colbert was more or less the first time Brad Colbert met Nate. Nate had just found himself in Camp Pendleton by way of his senior prom, his oversized cabin on the Navy ship he'd gone to Afghanistan on (full of other peoples' surfboards, Nate couldn't even surf), where he'd at least gotten a good night's sleep, a training exercise in OCS he'd only seen the first half of, and a party in college. He thought he might still be a tiny bit drunk.
Nate was standing in his office on base, in front of a guy who was six-four if he was an inch, and staring down at him. He took his cues from the uniform. "Sergeant Colbert," he said.
Brad Colbert raised an eyebrow, the first of many. "Lieutenant," he said. His tone was humouring Nate. Apparently they were in the middle of a conversation.
"Where was I?" Nate asked.
"You were just telling me about putting Sergeant Espera in charge of half of my team, in a separate vehicle."
Nate glanced down at his desk and there were his scribbled notes, right there to look at, and oh, this was a good day. He felt a minor throb of headache subside and said, "Right. Logistically, I think it's the best way forward, given our mission parameters. Any thoughts or objections, Sergeant?"
"None, sir." Colbert looked definitely amused now. "Long day, sir?"
"They're all long days," said Nate honestly.
***
Nate couldn't measure time correctly anymore, had no more concept of how old he might be in terms of how long he'd had consciousness; he was as old as his body was at any given moment he found himself in it. He had a vague impression that other people experienced Nate's life in a sane and linear fashion, which books and movies generally told him was how other people lived their lives from start to finish (Nate had somehow managed to stay in one time during an entire viewing of Memento, though, and he was the only person he knew who'd understood it on the first try). It was challenging to stay on top of, constantly dropping into some part of his life where he was expected to know what was going on and take some kind of action immediately, but the longer he did it, the easier it got.
Either this was because Nate was getting better at thinking on his feet, or because he was no longer working from a lack of knowledge in most areas of his life.
He managed to reach a point where the only person consistently giving him long, strange looks was Brad. Goddamn Brad. He was a smart guy and Nate was scared he was figuring out that something was wrong with Nate. That he maybe wasn't all there, that he was hiding something. Once, Nate had been having a conversation with Brad about Captain Schwetje's idiocy, halfway through which Nate had realized they were still in Kuwait and he'd had to swallow back a remark on some event which hadn't happened for Brad yet, and the next thing he knew he was at his sister's wedding, wearing a tux and halfway to smashed off his face, and started having dangerous thoughts.
His dangerous thoughts were that he could tell Brad what was going on, that Nate time travelled through his own life, that he lived like a card that someone had shuffled through a deck, all in the wrong order. He thought he could tell Brad this and Brad might get it, might understand and stop giving Nate those looks, those worried looks. Then Nate could stop wondering whether the worry was about him as a friend or as a liability.
The problem was that if Nate told Brad about this, he might have to tell him about everything, and he didn't think he could. There were things he just couldn't share. He realized this when he'd sobered up and then driven into the kill-zone in Al Muwaffaqiyah, adrenaline pushing him out of his victor and into the line of fire to dance through the bullets and shove everyone back into order. He'd done it because his concern that no one die because he was a little fucked up had become almost fanatical; he had some theories about his situation and about destiny that made him decide he wasn't going to die in Iraq or in Afghanistan, no matter what he did, because he'd been to his seventieth birthday party and the cake had been pretty good.
Brad had been fucking livid afterwards (not to mention Mike, but Mike hadn't stopped him getting out of the command vehicle either), and Nate had been left grim-faced, trying to calm him down and knowing that he couldn't tell Brad anything, because he wouldn't be able to explain to Brad's satisfaction the certainty he felt that he was going to survive, because he'd seen life after Iraq, so it was okay to do something daring and stupid for a good cause.
It wasn't the only thing he couldn't explain to Brad. He also couldn't explain how Brad was stuck with him, because sometimes he'd wake up 36 years old (or 32, or 40, or 65) in a California king bed and roll over to find Brad sleeping on the other side of it. That was hard, very hard to keep under wraps, because he had memories that hadn't happened yet for Brad, of just grinning at each other suddenly, and making out lazily before falling asleep, and fucking sweatily to mind-fuzzing orgasms, and the love that suffused those parts of Nate's life was bleeding into the other parts, the parts where he and Brad were coworkers and Brad was his subordinate and they were in a motherfucking war zone, which was no place for any kind of feelings except exhaustion, which Nate frankly felt a lot of.
It was hard to compartmentalize that. Nate wasn't sure he was doing a very good job.
That probably helped explain some of the long, strange looks.
Nate blinked, and a voice behind him said, "Penny for your thoughts."
He was in Iraq, but now they were in Baghdad. He hadn't even noticed the time slip, he'd been too lost in thought. He hated when that happened.
Nate plastered a smile on his face as he turned around to look at Brad. "You'd get change back," he lied.
"You looked like you were a million miles away."
A couple hundred miles and several days, but who was counting? "I'm here now," said Nate. "What do you need?"
Brad shook his head. "Nothing." They stood together in silence, looking across a soccer stadium, and Nate smiled to himself. As someone who lived in the moment and by no choice of his own, it was a feeling that he rarely had, but he was having it now: everything was going to be all right. If nothing else, one of these days he was going to get to enjoy the bottle of excellent scotch Brad had given him for his seventieth birthday.
THE END
ETA: Apparently this is the kind of fic I am taking missing scene prompts for, if you have any.
mdevile asked for the first time Nate woke up next to Brad, complete with naked awkwardness:
Nate was in Iraq, about to strong-point a town with his platoon because that was apparently what Iraq was shaping up to be, and then he was a toddler, running around on new legs and banging into the coffee table and hurting himself, and then he was asleep. Asleep was always his favourite; Nate probably didn't sleep enough but that was hardly his fault.
But then he woke up, and he wasn't alone. He was in a big bed in a warm room that smelled a little like the ocean, which reminded him of his place in Oceanside, but this wasn't his place in Oceanside. He was sure he'd only had the one.
Nate rolled over and found himself facing another man's back. It was big, and tanned. And above the bunched-up sheets that covered the other man's hips were the upper edges of a tattoo that Nate thought he recognized.
He weighed the odds of his being able to lean up and look at Brad's face, turned away toward the window, without waking him, and in the end he settled for reaching out one careful finger to lightly, lightly tug down the edge of the sheet.
Yeah. That was Brad's tattoo. Nate was in his bed. Also, neither one of them was wearing a stitch of clothing.
Nate mulled this over. He didn't know what year it was. He didn't know how they'd gotten here. He didn't know how welcome he was. He didn't know where his pants were.
Maybe it was a blessing that before he had to work out an exit strategy, he blinked again and was back in Iraq.
It wasn't so much a blessing that he found himself sitting next to a Humvee, right beside Brad. But it was okay; Nate had learned some breathing exercises for moments like these.
***
This entry was originally posted at http://waketosleep.dreamwidth.org/59964.html. (
comments)