FIC: A Fine Layer of Dust (1/1) Generation Kill
TITLE: A Fine Layer of Dust
AUTHOR: Laura Smith
PAIRING: Lilley, Reporter
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: There's a world out there beneath it all.
DISCLAIMER: Generation Kill and all the characters therein belong to people who are not me. I make no profit from this, I just like playing with them.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Written for shoshonnagold for the Generation Kill Minor Characters Ficathon. Request: Lilley (slash/gen/het): Sometimes camera doesn't see everything, especially what's right in front of him.
When he gets back to the states, Lilley burns a DVD of his movie for everyone in Bravo. He knows most of them will never look at it again, but to him, it’s more than just about the war. It’s a chance for them all to have a connection to the moments he didn’t put in, the ones they’ll remember with or without the footage he shot.
The scenes all seem different when he gets back, and he watches the hours again and again trying to make sense of something that had seemed so clear. It’s all there, in between hours of desert and sand and out of focus berms - the death, the destruction, the incompetence, and the chaos. All the things the anti-war protestors hold up as irrefutable proof that they’re all monsters. But what he sees are the other things - the reasons that the LT brought back all of his Marines alive, why too many of them want to charge into it again even though it can’t ever be the same.
He doesn’t show anyone else the stuff he left out. Maybe, in 50 years, they’ll do some grand mini-series like the ‘Band of Brothers’ guys, the guys who have stories from the last war everybody believed in, and people will understand then, will get it. But the stories of Bravo Company aren’t as grand, aren’t as easy to bring out like a photo album at Christmas. Their stories are shrouded with a thin layer of dust and grime until their own mothers couldn’t recognize them, but they know each other by heart.
Baptista praying with his rosary, silent Hail Marys falling from his lips, no less recognizable for the fact that he’s speaking Portuguese. Doc Bryan with his hand on the back of Garza’s neck, leaning in as if there’s anything he can do to treat the pain of stupidity. Chaffin asleep, leaning on Rudy’s shoulder, while Manimal draws an arrow pointing to Chaffin’s mouth, writing ‘Cock goes here’ in the LT’s stolen grease pencil.
Walt, swaying from the pressure of his own conscience, and Trombley reaching out a hand to steady him. Poke staring out in the distance, a shade paler than the night, his cigarette tip glowing orange. Pappy and Ray singing made-up, disgusting lyrics to a Hank Williams tune, and Gunny, eyes bright with suppressed laughter as he listens. Brad and the LT silhouetted by the light of tracers, real warriors on an unreal battlefield. The moment when the camera’s turned on himself, when he forgets to be tough, to be a Marine, and remembers to be human.
He changes his mind and burns another disc, a song Walt sent him playing in the background. He packs the disc and sends it before he can change his mind. The reporter saw it all too.
He’ll understand.
**
Evan opens the package at his desk. He’s used to CDs and other paraphernalia from up-and-coming, wannabe rock stars, so he almost tosses it aside into the slush box for the interns to listen to, but there’s a Post-It note attached, and the bright yellow catches his eye. He doesn’t recognize the handwriting, but the Bravo Company markings are embedded in his brain, burned in there on the sides of trashed out Humvees he still rides in when he dreams. It’s not too hard to figure it out when he sees it’s actually a DVD, not some cracked out CD by Person and Colbert, giving Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby a run for their money in some crappy seventies MOR radio version of ‘White Christmas’.
There are two discs in the case, and he puts the first one in, watching as the guys jockey for position in the picture. He’s got the picture framed on his desk and he looks at it all the time, puzzling out how the piece will go in the magazine, if there’s more to say that can get said in his allotted word count. He knows them all better than he’s ever known anyone, and he feels like he doesn’t really know any of them at all. The film goes on, bringing back scenes he’s forgotten, scenes he’s tried to forget. Since Vietnam people have been saying that television desensitizes the public to war, but these images are real, too real. There’s blood changing from red to black, soaking into the desert sand like water. There are dismembered limbs and blown out Jeeps, there are shattered buildings and bombs blazing through the sky like million dollar fireworks sent to celebrate liberty through destruction.
He makes it through the first disc, pausing it now and then to scribble another note in his ever-present notebook. The lined pages are filled with words, scribbled in the heat of battle and in the dark, in burning sun and in places he never thought he’d be. It’s real and he has to make it real, make these seemingly super-human men who are putting their lives on the line seem human, be human, as only they can. He puts the second disc into his computer and watches as night falls over Baghdad, tracers and car headlights and the distant rumble of what sounds like thunder, but is really just the sound of worlds crashing down. Q-tip is sitting on the back of the LT’s truck, staring off into the dark. “Ain’t real, you know? This shit ain’t real to nobody but us. They’ll tell ‘em about it back home and nobody’ll believe it, nobody’ll fuckin’ care. It ain’t real back there with MTV and McDonalds an’ shit. Life ain’t really like this.” He shakes his head and almost smiles. “Told me I’d see the world.”
“Just didn’t tell you it’d be the real one?” Gunny asks softly, almost invisible beside the truck.
“Screwby.” Q-tip replies.
Evan covers his mouth with his hand, watching the mostly silent images roll by. There isn’t the same level of Marine bravado in this one, the level of junior high humor that pervades most of how they all seem to live in theater. It’s simply the rest of the war - the impact it carries, the weight they all bear now on shoulders already loaded down with gear and guilt. He watches all of them move across his screen like dreams he thought he remembered, only to find he forgot the most important part. The DVD ends on Lilley, and Evan wonders if he even knew the camera was still rolling when it was filmed.
“You know the worst part, Brah?” Lilley’s voice is distant, soft like he’s half-asleep or like everyone else is dropping off around him. “After a while, this starts to feel like what life is supposed to be like.” He turns and looks at the camera and smiles. It’s a familiar curve of lips, a self-mocking smile that all the Marines seem to have issued to them, part of their stock in trade. “How fucked up is that, right?”
AUTHOR: Laura Smith
PAIRING: Lilley, Reporter
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: There's a world out there beneath it all.
DISCLAIMER: Generation Kill and all the characters therein belong to people who are not me. I make no profit from this, I just like playing with them.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Written for shoshonnagold for the Generation Kill Minor Characters Ficathon. Request: Lilley (slash/gen/het): Sometimes camera doesn't see everything, especially what's right in front of him.
When he gets back to the states, Lilley burns a DVD of his movie for everyone in Bravo. He knows most of them will never look at it again, but to him, it’s more than just about the war. It’s a chance for them all to have a connection to the moments he didn’t put in, the ones they’ll remember with or without the footage he shot.
The scenes all seem different when he gets back, and he watches the hours again and again trying to make sense of something that had seemed so clear. It’s all there, in between hours of desert and sand and out of focus berms - the death, the destruction, the incompetence, and the chaos. All the things the anti-war protestors hold up as irrefutable proof that they’re all monsters. But what he sees are the other things - the reasons that the LT brought back all of his Marines alive, why too many of them want to charge into it again even though it can’t ever be the same.
He doesn’t show anyone else the stuff he left out. Maybe, in 50 years, they’ll do some grand mini-series like the ‘Band of Brothers’ guys, the guys who have stories from the last war everybody believed in, and people will understand then, will get it. But the stories of Bravo Company aren’t as grand, aren’t as easy to bring out like a photo album at Christmas. Their stories are shrouded with a thin layer of dust and grime until their own mothers couldn’t recognize them, but they know each other by heart.
Baptista praying with his rosary, silent Hail Marys falling from his lips, no less recognizable for the fact that he’s speaking Portuguese. Doc Bryan with his hand on the back of Garza’s neck, leaning in as if there’s anything he can do to treat the pain of stupidity. Chaffin asleep, leaning on Rudy’s shoulder, while Manimal draws an arrow pointing to Chaffin’s mouth, writing ‘Cock goes here’ in the LT’s stolen grease pencil.
Walt, swaying from the pressure of his own conscience, and Trombley reaching out a hand to steady him. Poke staring out in the distance, a shade paler than the night, his cigarette tip glowing orange. Pappy and Ray singing made-up, disgusting lyrics to a Hank Williams tune, and Gunny, eyes bright with suppressed laughter as he listens. Brad and the LT silhouetted by the light of tracers, real warriors on an unreal battlefield. The moment when the camera’s turned on himself, when he forgets to be tough, to be a Marine, and remembers to be human.
He changes his mind and burns another disc, a song Walt sent him playing in the background. He packs the disc and sends it before he can change his mind. The reporter saw it all too.
He’ll understand.
**
Evan opens the package at his desk. He’s used to CDs and other paraphernalia from up-and-coming, wannabe rock stars, so he almost tosses it aside into the slush box for the interns to listen to, but there’s a Post-It note attached, and the bright yellow catches his eye. He doesn’t recognize the handwriting, but the Bravo Company markings are embedded in his brain, burned in there on the sides of trashed out Humvees he still rides in when he dreams. It’s not too hard to figure it out when he sees it’s actually a DVD, not some cracked out CD by Person and Colbert, giving Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby a run for their money in some crappy seventies MOR radio version of ‘White Christmas’.
There are two discs in the case, and he puts the first one in, watching as the guys jockey for position in the picture. He’s got the picture framed on his desk and he looks at it all the time, puzzling out how the piece will go in the magazine, if there’s more to say that can get said in his allotted word count. He knows them all better than he’s ever known anyone, and he feels like he doesn’t really know any of them at all. The film goes on, bringing back scenes he’s forgotten, scenes he’s tried to forget. Since Vietnam people have been saying that television desensitizes the public to war, but these images are real, too real. There’s blood changing from red to black, soaking into the desert sand like water. There are dismembered limbs and blown out Jeeps, there are shattered buildings and bombs blazing through the sky like million dollar fireworks sent to celebrate liberty through destruction.
He makes it through the first disc, pausing it now and then to scribble another note in his ever-present notebook. The lined pages are filled with words, scribbled in the heat of battle and in the dark, in burning sun and in places he never thought he’d be. It’s real and he has to make it real, make these seemingly super-human men who are putting their lives on the line seem human, be human, as only they can. He puts the second disc into his computer and watches as night falls over Baghdad, tracers and car headlights and the distant rumble of what sounds like thunder, but is really just the sound of worlds crashing down. Q-tip is sitting on the back of the LT’s truck, staring off into the dark. “Ain’t real, you know? This shit ain’t real to nobody but us. They’ll tell ‘em about it back home and nobody’ll believe it, nobody’ll fuckin’ care. It ain’t real back there with MTV and McDonalds an’ shit. Life ain’t really like this.” He shakes his head and almost smiles. “Told me I’d see the world.”
“Just didn’t tell you it’d be the real one?” Gunny asks softly, almost invisible beside the truck.
“Screwby.” Q-tip replies.
Evan covers his mouth with his hand, watching the mostly silent images roll by. There isn’t the same level of Marine bravado in this one, the level of junior high humor that pervades most of how they all seem to live in theater. It’s simply the rest of the war - the impact it carries, the weight they all bear now on shoulders already loaded down with gear and guilt. He watches all of them move across his screen like dreams he thought he remembered, only to find he forgot the most important part. The DVD ends on Lilley, and Evan wonders if he even knew the camera was still rolling when it was filmed.
“You know the worst part, Brah?” Lilley’s voice is distant, soft like he’s half-asleep or like everyone else is dropping off around him. “After a while, this starts to feel like what life is supposed to be like.” He turns and looks at the camera and smiles. It’s a familiar curve of lips, a self-mocking smile that all the Marines seem to have issued to them, part of their stock in trade. “How fucked up is that, right?”