Fic: Military Madness: Military Madness (Is Killing Your Country) (Stargate)
Title: Military Madness (Is Killing Your Country)
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: K+
Genres: het
Recipient: ancient_leah
Prompt: Stargate Atlantis, Vietnam War AU, Matthew Kemp & Jenna Wells, Of course Jenna Wells has her reasons for cleaning this chopper. Matt Kemp just would like to know what they are.
Summary: It's Vietnam 1967 and Matt Kemp is charged with getting Jenna Wells to stop cleaning a chopper she has no business being in except being a passenger.
A/N: So. Holiday Fic Request Meme. This takes place six months after America Has Heard The Bugle Call and has, again, Matt Kemp and Jenna Wells. It deals with[problematic war related issues]issues surrounding the use of Agent Orange and a soldier trying to cope with it, so I'd like to advise caution in your proceedings. Anyway... tell me what you think?
( 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) )
( So I Came in Here (And Your Long-Time Curse Hurts) )
( No Reason To Get Excited (The Thief He Kindly Spoke) )
( Forget The Dead You’ve Left (They Will Not Follow You) )
( It’s Way Too Soon (To Be Obsessin’ Like This) )
( America Has Heard The Bugle Call (And You Know It Involves Us One And All) )
Military Madness (Is Killing Your Country)
“And after the wars are over
And the body count is finally filed
I hope that man discovers
What's driving the people wild
Military madness
Is killing your country
So much sadness
Between you and me.”
Graham Nash, “Military Madness”
Oh. Uh-oh. Not good.
A disaster, actually.
She wasn’t supposed to be here. And most of all, Lorne wasn’t supposed to be here, either. Dammit, dammit, dam… “Excuse me, Lieutenant, but what are you doing in my bird?”
“Well,” she says, putting a lot of effort into rubbing something off the cockpit entry’s frame, “what does it look like?” And then, as if she just remembered that there’s a Major staring at her, she adds a delayed, “Sir,” and just goes on cleaning the frame.
Lorne stops dead in his tracks, mumbles something about no one respecting the oak leaves anymore and then barks without even turning around, “Kemp!”
He resists a long suffering sigh and simply steps up, hands clasped behind his back, “Yes, sir?”
To his satisfaction - even though he’d never tell anyone about that - Lorne actually whips around, looking startled for just a moment and belatedly realizes that you just don’t startle a guy who’s served in a combat zone for over a year. Thank God Lorne doesn’t carry a firearm on base or he’d probably be sporting a nice hole in his forehead right now. “Your Lieutenant is messing around with my bird. Please make her stop that nonsense.”
First of all, he wants to say, she’s not my Lieutenant and then, second, I’m not her superior, your girlfriend is but because he’s not stupid and because he already heard what went down between the General and Jenna and because he heard it from a rather out of her depth Laura Cadman, he just clears his throat, uttering, “Uh, sir…”
Lorne just rolls his eyes. “She’s all yours, Captain.”
At that, he can only blink at his boss and after another moment, Lorne realizes his mistake and rolls his eyes again, this time probably at himself and he’s pretty sure that the Major is about to add an amused snort. Probably not the best thing to do around Jenna at the moment. He clears his throat again. “I’ll do my best, sir.”
He gets a nod from Lorne and an actual pat on the shoulder when he walks past him, shaking his head and… did that sound like cursing a certain General under his breath?
Anyway, something’s afoot with Jenna and he has a dark feeling that he knows what it might be about. The trick now is to make her stop her current nonsense, as Lorne called it and make her talk about it instead of taking out her frustration on the inner structure of an unsuspecting HH-3. Well. He climbs into the chopper, sitting down on the cot opposite the door and looking at her for the first time since these shenanigans began.
She’s wearing jungle greens, with the garrison cap she nicked from him flattened and shoved under one of her epaulettes, even though the current WAF detachment commander disapproves of the greens but as Cadman explained to her in a showdown of epic proportions, Jenna Wells is a reporter who spends most of her time in the jungle, so she probably should wear something that fits the jungle and the other woman had grudgingly let go of harassing Jenna for wearing “those unbecoming baggy coveralls and drill clothes”.
Also, her hair is all over the place. He thinks he can detect remnants of an actual hairdo but yeah, not much left of it. And when he could just catch a short glimpse of her face, it most certainly doesn’t look like the lipstick wearing fresh faced young woman that Uncle Sam wants his female soldiers to be. More like a grease monkey after a two hour maintenance shift, with a big smudge of dark oil across her left cheek.
If she didn’t look so damn distressed, he’d even think it cute. In an absolutely platonic, friendly kind of way.
Anyway, she now moved to polishing floorboards near the cot opposite his. From his position, he continues watching her in silence, trying not to stare at her ass because she has eyes in the back of her head and she’d notice. So he tries to look just about anywhere else while simultaneously trying to keep track of her which is nearly impossible. Then again, they teach Air Force pilots that they are born to do the impossible right from the beginning.
But goddammit, he always thought jungle greens were baggy. Apparently, that doesn’t pertain to them when the wearer is crouching on the floor and… “You know, I’m kind of disappointed that I still haven’t heard about the General’s plane crashing somewhere in the mountains.” Huh? Uh, Jenna… “Okay, so, it would be a tragedy if anything happened to the crew or something but damn, couldn’t he just… fall out of the plane or something? He’d be doing the world a real favor.”
Okay, he hadn’t expected that. God knows he knows that Jenna has major issues with her father and that most of them stem from feeling she isn’t good enough… maybe even for her actually not being good enough for Major General Jonathan Wells’s standards, and he knows that whatever drove her to putting all her energy into making sure that her favorite jungle taxi is squeaky clean has something to do with the General’s surprise two day inspection visit to TSN that he just finished this morning to surprise some other poor unsuspecting souls further into the jungle but… what in God’s name did the General do to warrant something so harsh from her?
He considers fingering his pack of Marlboros out of his breast pocket but she’d probably just bust his ass for smoking in one of the most precious things on this entire base so he tries to keep the urge under covers and draws his feet up on the cut, angling his legs and resting his forearms against his knees, linking his hands together. He tries not to sigh again. “Jenna…”
“He’s an honorable officer, they kept telling me. Flew bombers to defend the free world during World War II, they said. Did you know that he was Colonel Sheppard’s commanding officer in England?” Uh, no, he didn’t. But what does this all have to do with… “He did some weird ass shit in Korea, too. Never talked about it and I’m starting to understand why.” Well, how about you… “A decent guy, everyone says. Never let the war get to him, you know? Never beats his wife, even puts up with his firebrand troublemaker daughter, didn’t even blink an eye when she joined the Air Force ROTC instead of going to college and finding a good husband like any sane young woman. Such a decent guy, that Major General Jonathan Wells.”
The quiet desperation and disgust that crept into her voice word for word and was nearly dripping from the last sentence gives his heart an unexpected painful squeeze. He runs a hand through his sweat soaked hair, staring outside just when another violent shower of lukewarm rain goes down. Fucking rainy season. “He’s not a decent guy, Matt.”
Too hot and tired with this fucking country, he’s not even startled, just slowly turns back to her.
To his surprise, she’s not cleaning anymore, but sitting on the ground, leaning against the cot behind her, mirroring his pose. For the first time since entering the Giant, he gets a good look at her front, smudge on her cheek and everything. Her hair is frizzy and standing up in every direction, slightly curly with humidity at the ends that nearly touch her shoulder. She moves to put an elastic band around them but it only serves to reveal dark smudges in the crook of her neck as well, as if she rubbed her neck with dirty hands several times.
Her jungle greens are a bit oversize and they’re stained with sweat and dirt and oil all over. Her combat boots are caked with mud and he wonders if she even went back to her quarters in the last two days since she came back from her latest assignment. If she even slept. The noticeable tremor in her hands and the dark rings under her eyes that have nothing do with oil or dirt aren’t exactly inspiring confidence in that, at least.
The desire to walk over and draw her into his lap, to hold her until she falls asleep slams into him like an enemy MiG-21 at full speed and he needs a moment to recover from it before he can say, only barely audible over the din of the rain battering the Giant’s hull, “What kind of guy is he?”
She gives him a look that is part bone tired, part asking him “You really gotta ask that?” dripping with irony before she says equally softly, “He’s one of them, Matt.”
One of whom, he wants to ask but if he’s honest with himself, he knows whom she’s referring to. They call it “The Man” back in the world, a faceless entity of shadow men deciding upon the fate of the world, being involved in shady dealings, playing their people like puppets on a string. He never believed in any of that crap and he’s aware that it’s partly because it would mean that he’s just another puppet on a string and quite frankly, that’s something no self-respecting Air Force pilot would ever want to call himself.
Outside - and in the chopper as well - it’s become dark, the shower having turned into a full blown thunderstorm raging across the land with a ferocity he has never seen out in the world. He can just make out her features, with her blond hair and her still incredibly light skinned face standing out like beacons in the dark. Even in the semi dark, she looks awfully dejected, like all the energy she just put into cleaning went out of her after she spelled it out for him what she thinks of her father.
He knows he probably should let it lie, not thrust the knife in even deeper and twist it but he also knows that she needs to tell him, tell someone, anyone about what happened between her and her father before the General went off deeper into the jungle. “Jenna?” She looks up and as a lightning strike from outside lights up the chopper’s interior for just a moment, he can see that the exhaustion from going two days without sleep is starting to set in. “What did he do?”
She fumbles around for a while and starts cleaning the floor boards again while still being seated opposite him, her left hand making an almost hypnotizing back and forth motion. It’s a nervous reaction, his mind tells him. It nearly drives him mad, his gut tells him. When she still hasn’t answered a question after five minutes of silently polishing the floor board he’s almost ready to call it quits and brave the thunderstorm to drag himself to his quarters and get a bit of shut eye before the inevitable rescue for at least one or two downed pilots that usually follows thunderstorms like this, she finally says, “He never even looked the pictures. Didn’t have to. Knew about it anyway.” She swallows hard, as he can see when another stroke of lightning temporarily lights up the chopper. “He knew about it, Matt.”
At first, he wants to ask what it is supposed to be but then he remembers an assignment five days ago, their hump day in ‘Nam, halfway through their tour, woohoo, let’s celebrate when you’re back from the jungle. They never got to celebrate it because as soon as the Huey she’d hitched a ride on - that had felt just a bit like betrayal but they’d been on an SAR sortie when she’d gotten the assignment so he doesn’t blame her for choosing someone else as her taxi that day - had touched ground, she’d jumped off, practically storming into the direction of the photo lab and he hadn’t seen her for two days straight after that.
He’d considered trying his luck with the guards at the female BOQ to see if she at least came back there to sleep but he’s neither Lorne nor Moore and he still hasn’t worked out the guards’ “random” schedule to perfection as those two have so of course the ugliest, meanest Marines had been on guard duty for exactly those two days. The third day he’d seen her climb into Moore’s Caribou in the morning and stagger back out of it in the afternoon, just to be confronted with the news that a certain Major General Wells had just touched down and would she like a family reunion?
And after that… well. He looks at her again. “What happened, Jenna? And I mean everything this time.”
Of course trying to make her talk about anything is always a bad idea - he’d learned that very fast even back at Cannon - but seriously, he’s tired of this dancing around the issue shit, this walking on egg shells thing and he knows she needs to get this out of her system so he’s definitely not above forcing the issue. Not anymore.
“Matt, I’m not…”
“All of it, Lieutenant.” Sometimes that works. Sometimes he can make her do something by calling her by her rank, even though he’s nowhere even near her chain of command. Something in her just clicks when he does that and sometimes the results are quite remarkable.
“Fuck that tone, Captain.” Okay, today is not “sometimes”, apparently, so… “That’s the tone he used and if you ever use that on me again, you’ll be suffering the most painful, embarrassing and obliterating death you can imagine, flyboy.”
The scary thing is, he believes her without doubts or reservations. If he ever talks to her like that again, she’s going to torch him. He has seen her humiliate a guy in front of half his squadron because he dared grabbing her ass. He’s pretty sure that the guy’s on a permanent limp now, just from all the embarrassment she heaped on him. He honestly has never seen a man being emasculated so thoroughly without Jenna even looking at the guy’s balls. Oh God, he shudders even thinking about it.
Alright. He takes a deep breath. “I’m… sorry, Jenna. It’s just that… I just want to…”
“He used that tone when he tried me shut up. He actually said… what was it he said when I told him about the things that this Agent Orange crap is doing to the people, the children of this country and went to show him the pictures of those… of… what was it?” She’s trying to sound detached and sarcastic but her voice is breaking continuously when she’s trying to talk about what she saw on that assignment five days ago.
He knows a bit about, Laura Cadman having been at least partially forthcoming about it when he couldn’t see any other way to find out what had her holing up in her lab for two days except asking her commanding officer about it. He knows that she went to an orphanage, to do one of those sob stories that Cadman makes her take every once in a while in exchange for the rest of Jenna’s stories being more in the technical department, something she’s actually quite good at. Only the head of military PR doesn’t like women taking the “hard” topics, so Cadman and Jenna struck up that deal and until five days ago… it worked just fine.
So she went to that orphanage and she must have seen… things because in the short moments he saw her after that, her eyes had a terrible look. Tired and old and haunted and he’d wanted nothing more than to make that go away somehow, any way he could possibly imagine. So it takes him unawares when she says, sounding terrifyingly much like her father, “Jenna, he said, stop fanning around those pictures. Of course I know about that. The Joint Chiefs know about it, too. They sanctioned the further use of Agent Orange while knowing of this. Now stop crying like a baby and buck the fuck up. You wanted to be in a war. Well, this is war. Learn to live with collateral damage like a real soldier or resign your commission. Now stand aside, I have other appointments to keep.”
So.
He should have known that would happen. It’s not like he hadn’t had his own run ins with the General before and it’s not like he doesn’t know what the General can be like but somehow he’d still managed to harbor the illusion that he wouldn’t be like that with his daughter.
For a moment, he wonders if she might just be exaggerating it - hopes it, actually - but it’s not in her nature to do that. She likes to grumble about anyone and anything, especially bugs and any Marine, soldier or airmen stupid enough to take her for a naïve little college graduate playing at war and trying to explain to her the works around here, yes. But she doesn’t exaggerate in matters of her father, he learned that pretty fast.
And that’s what makes it nearly impossible to answer right away, to answer at all which is why he stares outside to see the thunderstorm stop nearly as suddenly as it started and she goes back to polishing floorboards. In the silence - relative, yes, because it’s never silent at TSN - that follows the thunder and lightning, he can hear the scrubbing and scratching noises of Jenna shuffling along the floor and it’s starting to grate on his nerves enough that he turns back to look at her and something dawns on him, possibly the only way to answer the sordid things her father told her.
He gets up and walks over to her, crouching next to her first and then sitting down so that he faces her, or would if she weren’t concentrating so hard on staring at the floor. He leans his head against the rim of the cot and says, sounding way too weary for his taste, “Jenna?”
She pauses and looks up at him, strands of woozy hair partly obscuring her face but he knows the look, anyway. It’s her honey badger look, damn sure. “What?” And it’s the honey badger tone, too.
The honey badger he can deal with, at least. He turns his head a little, temple leaning against the metal frame of the cot, cool and calming in a way. “I’ll look at the pictures.” That makes her pause again and sit back on her haunches, blinking at him and looking like a very dazed and confused honey badger. Jesus, he should just stop with that analogy or he’ll call her that out loud and suffer an untimely death as a result soon.
Alright, so he probably needs to clarify and he makes himself add, “As long as you want me to. I’ll look at them.”
She still needs a moment to realize what he said and why he said it and to be honest, he might need a few more moments to understand that himself. But something in her eyes tells him she knows it better than himself and she just nods, putting a strand of stringy blond hair behind her ear, leaving another smudge of oil on her right cheekbone and it takes all of his self-control not to lean forward to gently wipe it away.
So he does the next best thing and fumbles that Marlboro out of his pocket, after all and lights it, just grinning at her darkening expression. Then he crouches next to her, moving the cigarette to the corner of his mouth, leaving it hanging there and drawling in that tone that he knows she hates with the power of a thousand suns, “Okay, stand aside and let a pro show you how this cleaning business is done, Little Miss Honey Badger.”
Shit.
Shit shit shit.
For a moment, all she does is stare at him like she wants to eviscerate him solely with the power of her laser eyes but then all she does is shove against his shoulder, hard and making him fall on his side, also pretty hard. It’s ridiculous how proud he is of managing to keep that cig in his mouth while simultaneous crying out in protest and laughing his fucking ass off but it’s all worth it when he hears her snort and feels her thump his shoulder again with her fist and shriek in surprise when he manages to get up and tackle her.
It’s a minor miracle that this is not the moment Lorne decides to have a look at what’s taking so fucking long but a moment about an hour later when she has fallen asleep right in the middle of trying to free the cots from a lot of ugly dark stains while he’s giving probably not so helpful instructions and is lying with her head in his lap. All Lorne does is take a look at him, at them and roll his eyes and tell him to get Wells to her quarters before their next sortie, seeing as they’re still on standby and then exiting again.
He doesn’t do it right away, probably because all he wants is to sit here just a little while longer and take care that she sleeps off all the hassle and horror of the last five days, probably because the feeling of her head in his lap and her shoulder rising and falling in a regular, deep and calming breathing is just too good to let go of so soon. Either way he’s not gonna wake her up anytime soon because what else can you do for a girl who just lost a father and probably her innocence, too to a war she volunteered for and who needs a friend just so fucking bad? What else can you do for her?
~*~
TBC in And All Of The Men In This War Torn Land (Salute The Nurses of Vietnam).
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: K+
Genres: het
Recipient: ancient_leah
Prompt: Stargate Atlantis, Vietnam War AU, Matthew Kemp & Jenna Wells, Of course Jenna Wells has her reasons for cleaning this chopper. Matt Kemp just would like to know what they are.
Summary: It's Vietnam 1967 and Matt Kemp is charged with getting Jenna Wells to stop cleaning a chopper she has no business being in except being a passenger.
A/N: So. Holiday Fic Request Meme. This takes place six months after America Has Heard The Bugle Call and has, again, Matt Kemp and Jenna Wells. It deals with[problematic war related issues]issues surrounding the use of Agent Orange and a soldier trying to cope with it, so I'd like to advise caution in your proceedings. Anyway... tell me what you think?
( 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) )
( So I Came in Here (And Your Long-Time Curse Hurts) )
( No Reason To Get Excited (The Thief He Kindly Spoke) )
( Forget The Dead You’ve Left (They Will Not Follow You) )
( It’s Way Too Soon (To Be Obsessin’ Like This) )
( America Has Heard The Bugle Call (And You Know It Involves Us One And All) )
Military Madness (Is Killing Your Country)
“And after the wars are over
And the body count is finally filed
I hope that man discovers
What's driving the people wild
Military madness
Is killing your country
So much sadness
Between you and me.”
Graham Nash, “Military Madness”
Oh. Uh-oh. Not good.
A disaster, actually.
She wasn’t supposed to be here. And most of all, Lorne wasn’t supposed to be here, either. Dammit, dammit, dam… “Excuse me, Lieutenant, but what are you doing in my bird?”
“Well,” she says, putting a lot of effort into rubbing something off the cockpit entry’s frame, “what does it look like?” And then, as if she just remembered that there’s a Major staring at her, she adds a delayed, “Sir,” and just goes on cleaning the frame.
Lorne stops dead in his tracks, mumbles something about no one respecting the oak leaves anymore and then barks without even turning around, “Kemp!”
He resists a long suffering sigh and simply steps up, hands clasped behind his back, “Yes, sir?”
To his satisfaction - even though he’d never tell anyone about that - Lorne actually whips around, looking startled for just a moment and belatedly realizes that you just don’t startle a guy who’s served in a combat zone for over a year. Thank God Lorne doesn’t carry a firearm on base or he’d probably be sporting a nice hole in his forehead right now. “Your Lieutenant is messing around with my bird. Please make her stop that nonsense.”
First of all, he wants to say, she’s not my Lieutenant and then, second, I’m not her superior, your girlfriend is but because he’s not stupid and because he already heard what went down between the General and Jenna and because he heard it from a rather out of her depth Laura Cadman, he just clears his throat, uttering, “Uh, sir…”
Lorne just rolls his eyes. “She’s all yours, Captain.”
At that, he can only blink at his boss and after another moment, Lorne realizes his mistake and rolls his eyes again, this time probably at himself and he’s pretty sure that the Major is about to add an amused snort. Probably not the best thing to do around Jenna at the moment. He clears his throat again. “I’ll do my best, sir.”
He gets a nod from Lorne and an actual pat on the shoulder when he walks past him, shaking his head and… did that sound like cursing a certain General under his breath?
Anyway, something’s afoot with Jenna and he has a dark feeling that he knows what it might be about. The trick now is to make her stop her current nonsense, as Lorne called it and make her talk about it instead of taking out her frustration on the inner structure of an unsuspecting HH-3. Well. He climbs into the chopper, sitting down on the cot opposite the door and looking at her for the first time since these shenanigans began.
She’s wearing jungle greens, with the garrison cap she nicked from him flattened and shoved under one of her epaulettes, even though the current WAF detachment commander disapproves of the greens but as Cadman explained to her in a showdown of epic proportions, Jenna Wells is a reporter who spends most of her time in the jungle, so she probably should wear something that fits the jungle and the other woman had grudgingly let go of harassing Jenna for wearing “those unbecoming baggy coveralls and drill clothes”.
Also, her hair is all over the place. He thinks he can detect remnants of an actual hairdo but yeah, not much left of it. And when he could just catch a short glimpse of her face, it most certainly doesn’t look like the lipstick wearing fresh faced young woman that Uncle Sam wants his female soldiers to be. More like a grease monkey after a two hour maintenance shift, with a big smudge of dark oil across her left cheek.
If she didn’t look so damn distressed, he’d even think it cute. In an absolutely platonic, friendly kind of way.
Anyway, she now moved to polishing floorboards near the cot opposite his. From his position, he continues watching her in silence, trying not to stare at her ass because she has eyes in the back of her head and she’d notice. So he tries to look just about anywhere else while simultaneously trying to keep track of her which is nearly impossible. Then again, they teach Air Force pilots that they are born to do the impossible right from the beginning.
But goddammit, he always thought jungle greens were baggy. Apparently, that doesn’t pertain to them when the wearer is crouching on the floor and… “You know, I’m kind of disappointed that I still haven’t heard about the General’s plane crashing somewhere in the mountains.” Huh? Uh, Jenna… “Okay, so, it would be a tragedy if anything happened to the crew or something but damn, couldn’t he just… fall out of the plane or something? He’d be doing the world a real favor.”
Okay, he hadn’t expected that. God knows he knows that Jenna has major issues with her father and that most of them stem from feeling she isn’t good enough… maybe even for her actually not being good enough for Major General Jonathan Wells’s standards, and he knows that whatever drove her to putting all her energy into making sure that her favorite jungle taxi is squeaky clean has something to do with the General’s surprise two day inspection visit to TSN that he just finished this morning to surprise some other poor unsuspecting souls further into the jungle but… what in God’s name did the General do to warrant something so harsh from her?
He considers fingering his pack of Marlboros out of his breast pocket but she’d probably just bust his ass for smoking in one of the most precious things on this entire base so he tries to keep the urge under covers and draws his feet up on the cut, angling his legs and resting his forearms against his knees, linking his hands together. He tries not to sigh again. “Jenna…”
“He’s an honorable officer, they kept telling me. Flew bombers to defend the free world during World War II, they said. Did you know that he was Colonel Sheppard’s commanding officer in England?” Uh, no, he didn’t. But what does this all have to do with… “He did some weird ass shit in Korea, too. Never talked about it and I’m starting to understand why.” Well, how about you… “A decent guy, everyone says. Never let the war get to him, you know? Never beats his wife, even puts up with his firebrand troublemaker daughter, didn’t even blink an eye when she joined the Air Force ROTC instead of going to college and finding a good husband like any sane young woman. Such a decent guy, that Major General Jonathan Wells.”
The quiet desperation and disgust that crept into her voice word for word and was nearly dripping from the last sentence gives his heart an unexpected painful squeeze. He runs a hand through his sweat soaked hair, staring outside just when another violent shower of lukewarm rain goes down. Fucking rainy season. “He’s not a decent guy, Matt.”
Too hot and tired with this fucking country, he’s not even startled, just slowly turns back to her.
To his surprise, she’s not cleaning anymore, but sitting on the ground, leaning against the cot behind her, mirroring his pose. For the first time since entering the Giant, he gets a good look at her front, smudge on her cheek and everything. Her hair is frizzy and standing up in every direction, slightly curly with humidity at the ends that nearly touch her shoulder. She moves to put an elastic band around them but it only serves to reveal dark smudges in the crook of her neck as well, as if she rubbed her neck with dirty hands several times.
Her jungle greens are a bit oversize and they’re stained with sweat and dirt and oil all over. Her combat boots are caked with mud and he wonders if she even went back to her quarters in the last two days since she came back from her latest assignment. If she even slept. The noticeable tremor in her hands and the dark rings under her eyes that have nothing do with oil or dirt aren’t exactly inspiring confidence in that, at least.
The desire to walk over and draw her into his lap, to hold her until she falls asleep slams into him like an enemy MiG-21 at full speed and he needs a moment to recover from it before he can say, only barely audible over the din of the rain battering the Giant’s hull, “What kind of guy is he?”
She gives him a look that is part bone tired, part asking him “You really gotta ask that?” dripping with irony before she says equally softly, “He’s one of them, Matt.”
One of whom, he wants to ask but if he’s honest with himself, he knows whom she’s referring to. They call it “The Man” back in the world, a faceless entity of shadow men deciding upon the fate of the world, being involved in shady dealings, playing their people like puppets on a string. He never believed in any of that crap and he’s aware that it’s partly because it would mean that he’s just another puppet on a string and quite frankly, that’s something no self-respecting Air Force pilot would ever want to call himself.
Outside - and in the chopper as well - it’s become dark, the shower having turned into a full blown thunderstorm raging across the land with a ferocity he has never seen out in the world. He can just make out her features, with her blond hair and her still incredibly light skinned face standing out like beacons in the dark. Even in the semi dark, she looks awfully dejected, like all the energy she just put into cleaning went out of her after she spelled it out for him what she thinks of her father.
He knows he probably should let it lie, not thrust the knife in even deeper and twist it but he also knows that she needs to tell him, tell someone, anyone about what happened between her and her father before the General went off deeper into the jungle. “Jenna?” She looks up and as a lightning strike from outside lights up the chopper’s interior for just a moment, he can see that the exhaustion from going two days without sleep is starting to set in. “What did he do?”
She fumbles around for a while and starts cleaning the floor boards again while still being seated opposite him, her left hand making an almost hypnotizing back and forth motion. It’s a nervous reaction, his mind tells him. It nearly drives him mad, his gut tells him. When she still hasn’t answered a question after five minutes of silently polishing the floor board he’s almost ready to call it quits and brave the thunderstorm to drag himself to his quarters and get a bit of shut eye before the inevitable rescue for at least one or two downed pilots that usually follows thunderstorms like this, she finally says, “He never even looked the pictures. Didn’t have to. Knew about it anyway.” She swallows hard, as he can see when another stroke of lightning temporarily lights up the chopper. “He knew about it, Matt.”
At first, he wants to ask what it is supposed to be but then he remembers an assignment five days ago, their hump day in ‘Nam, halfway through their tour, woohoo, let’s celebrate when you’re back from the jungle. They never got to celebrate it because as soon as the Huey she’d hitched a ride on - that had felt just a bit like betrayal but they’d been on an SAR sortie when she’d gotten the assignment so he doesn’t blame her for choosing someone else as her taxi that day - had touched ground, she’d jumped off, practically storming into the direction of the photo lab and he hadn’t seen her for two days straight after that.
He’d considered trying his luck with the guards at the female BOQ to see if she at least came back there to sleep but he’s neither Lorne nor Moore and he still hasn’t worked out the guards’ “random” schedule to perfection as those two have so of course the ugliest, meanest Marines had been on guard duty for exactly those two days. The third day he’d seen her climb into Moore’s Caribou in the morning and stagger back out of it in the afternoon, just to be confronted with the news that a certain Major General Wells had just touched down and would she like a family reunion?
And after that… well. He looks at her again. “What happened, Jenna? And I mean everything this time.”
Of course trying to make her talk about anything is always a bad idea - he’d learned that very fast even back at Cannon - but seriously, he’s tired of this dancing around the issue shit, this walking on egg shells thing and he knows she needs to get this out of her system so he’s definitely not above forcing the issue. Not anymore.
“Matt, I’m not…”
“All of it, Lieutenant.” Sometimes that works. Sometimes he can make her do something by calling her by her rank, even though he’s nowhere even near her chain of command. Something in her just clicks when he does that and sometimes the results are quite remarkable.
“Fuck that tone, Captain.” Okay, today is not “sometimes”, apparently, so… “That’s the tone he used and if you ever use that on me again, you’ll be suffering the most painful, embarrassing and obliterating death you can imagine, flyboy.”
The scary thing is, he believes her without doubts or reservations. If he ever talks to her like that again, she’s going to torch him. He has seen her humiliate a guy in front of half his squadron because he dared grabbing her ass. He’s pretty sure that the guy’s on a permanent limp now, just from all the embarrassment she heaped on him. He honestly has never seen a man being emasculated so thoroughly without Jenna even looking at the guy’s balls. Oh God, he shudders even thinking about it.
Alright. He takes a deep breath. “I’m… sorry, Jenna. It’s just that… I just want to…”
“He used that tone when he tried me shut up. He actually said… what was it he said when I told him about the things that this Agent Orange crap is doing to the people, the children of this country and went to show him the pictures of those… of… what was it?” She’s trying to sound detached and sarcastic but her voice is breaking continuously when she’s trying to talk about what she saw on that assignment five days ago.
He knows a bit about, Laura Cadman having been at least partially forthcoming about it when he couldn’t see any other way to find out what had her holing up in her lab for two days except asking her commanding officer about it. He knows that she went to an orphanage, to do one of those sob stories that Cadman makes her take every once in a while in exchange for the rest of Jenna’s stories being more in the technical department, something she’s actually quite good at. Only the head of military PR doesn’t like women taking the “hard” topics, so Cadman and Jenna struck up that deal and until five days ago… it worked just fine.
So she went to that orphanage and she must have seen… things because in the short moments he saw her after that, her eyes had a terrible look. Tired and old and haunted and he’d wanted nothing more than to make that go away somehow, any way he could possibly imagine. So it takes him unawares when she says, sounding terrifyingly much like her father, “Jenna, he said, stop fanning around those pictures. Of course I know about that. The Joint Chiefs know about it, too. They sanctioned the further use of Agent Orange while knowing of this. Now stop crying like a baby and buck the fuck up. You wanted to be in a war. Well, this is war. Learn to live with collateral damage like a real soldier or resign your commission. Now stand aside, I have other appointments to keep.”
So.
He should have known that would happen. It’s not like he hadn’t had his own run ins with the General before and it’s not like he doesn’t know what the General can be like but somehow he’d still managed to harbor the illusion that he wouldn’t be like that with his daughter.
For a moment, he wonders if she might just be exaggerating it - hopes it, actually - but it’s not in her nature to do that. She likes to grumble about anyone and anything, especially bugs and any Marine, soldier or airmen stupid enough to take her for a naïve little college graduate playing at war and trying to explain to her the works around here, yes. But she doesn’t exaggerate in matters of her father, he learned that pretty fast.
And that’s what makes it nearly impossible to answer right away, to answer at all which is why he stares outside to see the thunderstorm stop nearly as suddenly as it started and she goes back to polishing floorboards. In the silence - relative, yes, because it’s never silent at TSN - that follows the thunder and lightning, he can hear the scrubbing and scratching noises of Jenna shuffling along the floor and it’s starting to grate on his nerves enough that he turns back to look at her and something dawns on him, possibly the only way to answer the sordid things her father told her.
He gets up and walks over to her, crouching next to her first and then sitting down so that he faces her, or would if she weren’t concentrating so hard on staring at the floor. He leans his head against the rim of the cot and says, sounding way too weary for his taste, “Jenna?”
She pauses and looks up at him, strands of woozy hair partly obscuring her face but he knows the look, anyway. It’s her honey badger look, damn sure. “What?” And it’s the honey badger tone, too.
The honey badger he can deal with, at least. He turns his head a little, temple leaning against the metal frame of the cot, cool and calming in a way. “I’ll look at the pictures.” That makes her pause again and sit back on her haunches, blinking at him and looking like a very dazed and confused honey badger. Jesus, he should just stop with that analogy or he’ll call her that out loud and suffer an untimely death as a result soon.
Alright, so he probably needs to clarify and he makes himself add, “As long as you want me to. I’ll look at them.”
She still needs a moment to realize what he said and why he said it and to be honest, he might need a few more moments to understand that himself. But something in her eyes tells him she knows it better than himself and she just nods, putting a strand of stringy blond hair behind her ear, leaving another smudge of oil on her right cheekbone and it takes all of his self-control not to lean forward to gently wipe it away.
So he does the next best thing and fumbles that Marlboro out of his pocket, after all and lights it, just grinning at her darkening expression. Then he crouches next to her, moving the cigarette to the corner of his mouth, leaving it hanging there and drawling in that tone that he knows she hates with the power of a thousand suns, “Okay, stand aside and let a pro show you how this cleaning business is done, Little Miss Honey Badger.”
Shit.
Shit shit shit.
For a moment, all she does is stare at him like she wants to eviscerate him solely with the power of her laser eyes but then all she does is shove against his shoulder, hard and making him fall on his side, also pretty hard. It’s ridiculous how proud he is of managing to keep that cig in his mouth while simultaneous crying out in protest and laughing his fucking ass off but it’s all worth it when he hears her snort and feels her thump his shoulder again with her fist and shriek in surprise when he manages to get up and tackle her.
It’s a minor miracle that this is not the moment Lorne decides to have a look at what’s taking so fucking long but a moment about an hour later when she has fallen asleep right in the middle of trying to free the cots from a lot of ugly dark stains while he’s giving probably not so helpful instructions and is lying with her head in his lap. All Lorne does is take a look at him, at them and roll his eyes and tell him to get Wells to her quarters before their next sortie, seeing as they’re still on standby and then exiting again.
He doesn’t do it right away, probably because all he wants is to sit here just a little while longer and take care that she sleeps off all the hassle and horror of the last five days, probably because the feeling of her head in his lap and her shoulder rising and falling in a regular, deep and calming breathing is just too good to let go of so soon. Either way he’s not gonna wake her up anytime soon because what else can you do for a girl who just lost a father and probably her innocence, too to a war she volunteered for and who needs a friend just so fucking bad? What else can you do for her?
~*~
TBC in And All Of The Men In This War Torn Land (Salute The Nurses of Vietnam).