1 . Name: Req @ 2012-10-06 05:45

Okay folks, first time posting any kind of thing. This isn't outright porny, so I hope I'm not putting it in the wrong place. I'm putting it here, though, because it has some pretty adult themes.

Warning: period-appropriate racial slurs.

Summary: Scout's internal monologue on war, death, and folk music.


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Where the hell did those guys get off, singing things like, "adieu my friend, it's hard to die"? And another thing, whose bright idea was it to put this record on at the damn -wake-? The Scout knew (from way, way too much experience) that it really -wasn't- that hard to die. Isn't. Wasn't. Whatever. He'd died more times than he'd made a good sunny-side-up egg, and maybe he was biased because he'd been told (much as a guy could trust the Administrator and her tasty little assistant, anyway) that respawn would keep him alive and kicking as long as he was on their payroll, but as far as he could tell, when your guts are slipping between your fingers or your brains just painted the redrock redder, dying's really too damn easy, even when you try your damnedest not to.

Looking at the photographs all in their frames, the Scout imagined that Will tried his damnedest. How was it that Will looked so damn old in some of these photos, but Scout felt so much older? Maybe because Scout had kept aging since Will had died, and dammit if Will never would.

"Adieu Papa please pray for me; I was the black sheep of the family..." The Scout glared at the record player, his nose stinging with emotion he didn't want Mrs. Sheehan to see, damning the Kingston Trio for not knowing what the hell they were talking about. Will's old man was fucking -ecstatic- when they got that letter from the draft board. The guy had been trying to get his only son to join the army since he finished high school, served in Korea himself, thought military service was the only way to make a man out of a boy. That purple heart he was so proud of, mounted on velvet on the mantelpiece, didn't make the family any less poor and Irish. And Will didn't get no purple stinkin' heart, what he got was a pine box and a hole in the ground, and his Ma got a stiffly-worded condolence letter she couldn't exactly frame and put up on the wall.

Early on in his stint in America's Gravel Basket, the Scout once made the poor decision to ask the Soldier what he was doing putting craters in the New Mexican desert, when there was a war on in 'Nam. A lot of screaming and an upset bowl of mashed potatoes didn't get him anywhere near a real answer. He realized right quick he was not going to learn what kind of a man his own father was by asking anything of the Soldier.

In the photo from his training at Fort Jackson, with his fresh haircut and his ears sticking out like the wings on a Lockheed Constellation, Will looked a lot like the Scout's dad did, in a photo his mom kept on top of the television. It was taken before Scout's mom and dad even met, but his grandma wanted his Ma to have it. They only had a few pictures of him. In his wedding photo, holding Scout's mom's hands with his thumbs brushing over her white-gloved knuckles, he wore a moustache. When they brought his oldest brother Frances home from the hospital after a bout of pneumonia in his infancy, both his parents had dark circles under their eyes but took out the Brownie to celebrate, Frankie was alive. His Ma would laugh; they couldn't afford to have the picture developed until Frankie was almost five, but they took it anyway. Those photos, and a few from birthday parties where the family could buy some film and Scout's father wasn't manning the camera, were all Scout knew of the man. Gabe, just a year older than Scout himself, called their father 'Pop' in reference-- probably because he was just learning to talk when dad's P-38 went down. The Scout wouldn't even be born for another four months after that. When he was teenaged and bitter, he'd refused to wear his dad's dog tags. Why should he carry the weight around his neck, the knowledge that he'd never meet his own damn father? Anyways, he felt bad for his Ma because she was five months pregnant when it happened, so she couldn't even drink.

Scout realized, taking another deep gulp of wine, that he believed that there were times when the only proper response to a situation was to get really totally stinking drunk. He didn't think even the whole jug of this tepid stuff was going to do it for him, of course; it tasted weaker than the watery junk he used to get at Communion, and his alcohol tolerance was near as impressive as his batting average, since he'd taken to Friday nights with Demo. "The Wild Wild West" was on at 7:30, then "The Name of the Game", and after that, the Sniper would amble in from his camper to watch "Star Trek" at 10. By that point Scout, having tried to match drinks with a Scotsman (and one who probably had at least 60 pounds on him) would be pretty wicked trashed and Snipes would have to deal with him, er, "singing" along with the Star Trek theme. It had become a ritual by this point, just like getting Engie to play the Bonanza theme when he took out his guitar, and it made Demo laugh to see how disgruntled Sniper got at having the intro to his favourite show messed with, and that was better than when Demo got all tragic and remorseful. Scout figured Demo had pretty good reasons to feel that way--fuck, when they'd gone to see Barbarella, the stupid bozo in the ticket box almost wasn't about to let Demo in. Then the guy noticed that Demo, Sniper, and Scout were all wearing that particular shade of blue that meant the causeless destruction of a mall santa training facility, and he let them through, trying to shield himself with his little ticket desk. Scout told the stupid asshole where he could stick his stupid fucking theater policy. It ticked him off, because back home, old neighbours of his were actually -protesting- desegregation in schools. He'd played some of the Roxbury guys before and man, some of them were damn good ballplayers! If they wanted to transfer, he'd have loved to have them on his team, back in high school. And yeah, he knew why people from his neighbourhood wouldn't want to desegregate. They wanted to make sure that poor and Irish and miserable as they were, they still had someone to look down on. Medic would call it 'schädenfreude', and Engie would call it 'mean-spirited petty nonsense'; just so long as you didn't ask Demo at the wrong time of night, because he might call it 'a good reason to go back to building car bombs', and really, enough of those people were either supporters or members of the IRA, and, with what was going on over in Belfast, it really wouldn't even be funny.

"Adieu, Francoise, my trusted wife; without you I'd have had a lonely life..." The Scout almost laughed at that, though, and the lyric that followed about the singer's wife's infidelity. He couldn't let Mrs. Sheehan see that either. The Scout was the only one that knew Will's secret, but the irony of the one lyric being most applicable being the one about a guy forgiving his old lady for running around on him; well, it would've been for different reasons, but the humour didn't escape him. Scout was pretty proud of himself, not only because he knew something nobody else did, but also because he'd managed to keep it that way. It was like when he found out about Medic and Heavy. Sure, Spy at least had to know about it, if not because -duh-, he's the SPY, but after all, the Spook's room was adjacent to Medic's and the infirmary. Just like Scout knew about Soldier's screaming night terrors, and the Pyro's fondness for radio drama, he figured most folks knew about what their neighbours got up to in the silent desert night. And, he didn't want any ribbing about his own nocturnal adventures, so, just like living with seven brothers in a three-bedroom apartment, there was stuff you talk about and stuff you don't, and as far as what a guy chooses to do at night, he'd learned it's best to just leave the whole subject well enough alone. Still and all, it was kind-of astounding that Medic managed to be louder than even -Heavy-. Goddamn, right?! He didn't have to see whatever they were doing to know at least a couple of things-- for one, that weren't no one-night stand, the way they carried on. Maybe they were even -happy-, could you imagine? Finding something like that in a place like theirs, he couldn't decide if it was unbelievable or the most likely thing in the world. Either way it was fuckin' crazy. Scout wondered if maybe Will had found somebody to bunk up with, in the army. Yeah, they ask you about it at the conscription office, but who actually tells the little man at the draft board? Dirty, lying hippies, that's who, hippies looking for an easy loophole and a ride to California. Scout didn't want to go to 'Nam, hell no, but he would have, if they'd called his number. 'Course they wouldn't, because he was a felon, but that was beside the point. And anyhow, he got blown to bits near every day, and put back together again by some crazy machine he couldn't even begin to understand, and he wasn't sure if that was better or worse than going into the jungles around the 38th parallel. At least in the desert, it was a dry heat.

Fuck, Will, what'd they do to you over there? Scout's guts clenched for the millionth time since he'd heard they couldn't have an open-casket funeral. He didn't look at the body. Couldn't. The papers were going to town with statistics, and he didn't want to remember his closest friend as another one of them. He'd heard stories about the medical choppers they had over there; plastic bubble windows under the pilot so he could see straight down and land pronto where needed, that bubble filling with a soup of blood and bile running out of the wounded if he dipped the nose too much. He'd heard stories of guys his age getting sent home in plastic bags because they couldn't scrape together enough bits of 'em to fill a wooden box. Now, he'd seen his own innards. He'd seen strips of muscle hanging off his bones, and his scorched flesh still bubbling and crackling like a Christmas ham, and his own headless corpse chest-down in the dust, bleeding in sluggish spurts from the ragged neck. He'd seen the slow, black, pull of death like a sucking tar pit, swallowing him, before a blueish, clinical light burst in through the darkness and seemed to haul him back to the land of the living with a searing grip on his esophageal tube. He had to imagine that those few moments were what Purgatory was like. He went through it a dozen times, daily. Sometimes, especially times like this where he was staring at something from before he joined the war between BLU and RED that would never be the same, that he felt like he'd missed out on because he was out getting a dirt tan on top of his regular tan-slash-sunburn and beating skulls in, that maybe he'd died when he drove that Dodge over the embankment and into the harbour. Maybe all this was the punishment for that one, for losing his shit after the World Series last year, and for joining Boston in grieving the Impossible Dream in the only way he (and maybe a good number of other Sox fans) knew how: wild amounts of property damage. That had been one of those situations where the only response was to get mad drunk, right? Well, he didn't remember much between seeing the keys still in the ignition of that navy Dodge Dart 170, and sitting in an interrogation room at the precinct, with a cop that looked like he was using his uniform's collar to hold up the rolls of fat on the back of his neck, telling him exactly how much public and private property he'd destroyed. On top of the grand theft auto and numerous other infractions, they'd thrown 'unlawful dumping' on there as well, so Scout could only assume he'd ditched the car in the water. He was so dazed and hung-over, though, that all he could think about was whether or not there was enough difference between the dark blue the Sox wore for away games, and the blue those damn Yankees put in their uniforms. The officer behind the table had an angry flush creeping up his neck. He took a deep breath through his nose and Scout could tell the guy was about to launch into a tirade, and just then it hit him how this might affect his family, and he couldn't pay attention to whatever the cop was shouting because he was too busy worrying about how the heck he could make it so his family wouldn't have to pay for whatever he'd wrecked. Maybe it'd be easier if he did go to prison; wouldn't go causing any more problems for his Ma, not on the outside, anyway. The officer was standing. Scout noticed because the chair scraped loudly across the floor and a shadow fell across Scout's constantly flexing fingers. The Scout glanced up, but the cop was looking at the door, where a petite woman stood, holding a clipboard and adjusting her glasses. Scout felt himself leaning in his chair to try and get a better look at her. She was hiding her rack with her paperwork, but she had some hips on her, and Scout had the worst urge to pinch her ass. Yowza! And she had those kinda soft full lips that always got him going because he could imagine how they'd look wrapped around his dick. She was all-business, though, clearing her throat and standing with her heels together in their sensible flats (but with a minidress! He'd bet money she had some go-go boots stashed somewhere and that when she let her hair down and started shaking that ass, she would really get wild), addressing the cop with a tight, persuasive smile that left no room for argument and asking him if he'd mind leaving the room for just a little bit so she and 'the perp' (she used the officer's own terminology to win his favour, Scout could tell) could have a little chat. As the huge policeman lumbered out, Scout wondered briefly if they'd already decided to put him on death row and this lady was here to grant his last request. She didn't sit, merely placed her clipboard and a couple of manila folders on the desk before leaning against it. Scout took this opportunity to judge that her breasts were about the size of grapefruits-- grapefruits wrapped in purple stretch cotton. He guessed each one would fit right about perfectly in one of his baseball-strengthened hands. No matter what he said, though, he couldn't get an opening on her. She parried his innuendos and suggestions like it was nothing! By the end of their meeting he was no closer to digging fingers into her round bottom and hauling her hips down on his, but he might have a job (sounded too good to be true, but he skimmed the terms and contracts and it all looked on-the-level) and a way out of prison. If the figures on the salary were correct-- she'd assured him they were, but judging by her glasses, her eyesight wasn't very good, so it could be a mistake-- he might even be able to pay folks around here back for damages so it wouldn't fall on his Ma and brothers. Well, it was that crazy scenario or prison, and actually, she'd made that distinction quite clear. He'd tried asking what exactly the job WAS only to find that most information was classified. Couldn't argue with the pay, though. And he didn't regret it, despite the egregious amounts of personal injury he endured daily; once it was all healed up it was like the whole thing was nothing but an extremely vivid nightmare.

Not so for Will's army buddy, who went by the name of Ridley. Scout had talked with the guy briefly, couldn't be older than 19, had been there when Will got killed, seemed pretty shell-shocked over it. How he got leave to attend the services, Scout didn't know, but he was torn between feeling like the kid oughta man up-- Scout saw people die horrifically every day-- and feeling deeply sorry because where Ridley came from, people died -for real-, and wouldn't be there for supper after giving Death the finger. Over there, in that close and heavy jungle, men spilled their hot entrails among the vines, watered the rice paddies with their blood. They got ripped open by mental explosion and became tallymarks, wired stateside from the DMZ and reported A1 from Tacoma to Tallahassee. They were blotted out. Like Will. Will got torn into by some nameless yellow ghost in the jungle, and he wasn’t coming back. Scout knew that. He'd thrown a clump of dirt on the casket and everything. Will was gone.

But there was no coping with it.

There was no coping with the unfairness of his own reckless lifestyle in the face of such an easy, everyday tragedy. Ridley's hands shook with bulletshock. Mrs. Sheehan gazed out the window like she was looking into the abyss. Will's older sister and two younger ones were never without one another now, and every now and again some household item would set off a memory and one set of pink lips would start to tremble, or one pair of hands would go white-knuckled, and then all three would have to duck into another room to pull themselves together. When Scout was growing up, the family would get frequent visits from one of the other flyboys from Scout's father's squadron. He lived in Franklin (the county, not the town), and it wasn't too far to Boston, really, not too far when eight kids could run a woman ragged and a fella could take 'em all to a ballgame and let their long-suffering Mama have a day to herself, for once. Sometimes they'd all go to the park, maybe even the Franklin Zoo (in the town, not the county), to whatever beach was available, or to Dorchester Heights to play 'soldiers'. To that end, each of all eight brothers got a pop-gun for Christmas one year, and could line up like the most ill-suited military company you ever saw-- not only for the fact that Scout turned six that year and looked like a buck-toothed terrier, whereas Frankie was goin' on seventeen (probably too old for the pop-gun) and had recently gotten a job at the veterinary clinic, and Dunstan bulked up like a fuckin' linebacker working at the docks, Patrick was only fourteen had these huge forearms from helping their neighbour take motors apart and putting 'em back together all day at the auto shop, Adrian wore these mad thick glasses he thought made him look like Buddy Holly but really just made him look like a big nerd, Joshua was always sunburned no matter what, Elmo had wicked bad asthma and at ten was always picked last for kickball, and Gabriel seemed to always be missing a prominent tooth for most of that year. Oftentimes Will would tag along on those outings, giving Uncle Leroy as they called him the distinct challenge of getting nine kids into a 1948 Chevy pickup. You can imagine Scout spent a lot of time flying down the highway, clutching the running board for dear life. Anyway, on one such occasion, Scout and Will had gotten into a scuffle, and Uncle Leroy was putting Bactine and Band-Aids on their knees when Scout asked if Uncle Leroy had ever killed anybody in the War. "Oh, probably," he'd said. "Didja shoot 'em?" "I shot their planes with my plane," he'd answered calmly, smoothing a bandage. "What's it like?" Will asked. "Well, it's pretty scary," Uncle Leroy admitted. "You ever shoot a guy on the ground?" Scout interjected. He was young and wanted a blood-and-guts war story, wanted a tale of equal parts heroism, barbarism, and bullshittery. Leroy scratched the short grey stubble clinging to his chin. "No, I don't believe I did. I was Air Force, after all." "Oh, so you were -forced- to stay in the -air-?" Will got that grin he would when he thought he was being particularly witty. That same goofy smile followed him into his young adulthood. Scout wondered if Ridley or the rest of the company had a chance to see it, because it was just so dopey it always made Scout laugh, too. Uncle Leroy gave a lopsided smirk, almost like a reward for Will's joke, then looked up into the midsummer sky with its eddies of soft white clouds and told Scout and Will about a G.I. he'd met when his squadron was stationed on a godforsaken island in the South Pacific, with a company or two of ground forces.

"I don't remember his name, but I think it started with a J. Jorgensen? Johanneson? Something like that. He was from northern Minnesota, which struck me as odd since his Division was called 'Dixie'. Lemme tell ya, though, at first that accent of his made it real hard to take anything he said seriously." Uncle Leroy then spent a moment imitating a Minnesotan accent for the kids, making them giggle. "I believe he was with the 124th Infantry," he continued, "and he told me a few stories over C-rations-- that is, hard biscuits and some kinda brown goo-- stories that I won't soon forget. Your dad sat next to me, kiddo, holding his hand over the top of his cup to keep the flies out, as this guy told us about July, 1944. His whole company was hunkered down on that sweaty island, right, looking for the Japs. Well the Japs found them, launched a sneak attack, and got maybe a couple hundred of their own behind our lines. Apparently, some of 'em learned phrases in English to try and trick the American G.I.s on the ground into getting close, exposing themselves out of the leaves. They might shout 'Medic!' or 'Help, I'm dying!', but the guy said he even heard shouts of 'To hell with Babe Ruth!'" Leroy gave them a tired smile. "The fella from the 124th said he figured it was meant to make an American mad. Guess the Japs never counted on any of us being from Boston, huh?" The kids puffed up proudly. "Forget Babe Ruth!" Will declared, dutifully. "Yeah, the traitor!" Scout agreed. Leroy went on: "So all these guys keep trying to advance through the rotting vegetation, and meanwhile, the Japs have snuck up behind them and are picking them off like ticks from a dog. Jungenheim or whatever his name is sticks close to his buddy, but they get separated from their company. It's the middle of the night, and they get to crawling on their bellies through the stinking jungle, trying to stay low, when they come to a stream that branches off the main river. The banks are washed clear of brush, and are obviously lower ground. If there are enemies up the hill on the other side, our guys would have no cover trying to cross the water. But, they couldn't turn back, knowing there was a whole mess of Japs behind them, and they know that their company would have moved forward to try and establish a new campsite, regroup, and eventually capture a Japanese base at... Hollandia, I think. So what can they do? I'll tell you what they do: not wanting to waste ammunition, they slink along sideways until they're about twenty-five feet from one another, then they start lobbing rocks and mud into the greenery up the hill. They chuck that stuff all over the place, and their mudballs are answered by machinegun fire. They hit the decks, and trees splinter to dust overhead. See, the thing about that jungle is that a tree that looks strong and healthy is just as likely completely ruined by insects, or else rotten to the core. And the tropical storms would rip them right out of the ground to let them fall on whatever or whoever is in their way." He paused, looked around, made sure all of Scout's brothers were still within sight, and picked up where he left off. "So they locate the origin of those sprays of bullets and start shooting. The Japs won't charge 'em, they just stay under the dense cover, and our boys know that there might be snipers in the trees, so they can't blow their cover, either. They hear a few pained shouts, but that could just as easily be a ruse to lure a U.S. soldier forward as any baseball commentary those Japs could think up. But they can't hold out like that forever. God knows there might be enemies coming up behind at any time, and their ammo won't last all night. Then, explosions, unending explosions, tearing the sky apart. It was an ammunitions dump going off, whether by accident or as a planned attack by the Japanese, it didn't matter. Point is, Jernsen-- that's what it was, Jernsen!-- thought mortars were coming down on him. Not an irrational thought; it practically rained mortars, on both sides, for those days or weeks they advanced across that island, and in the dark of the night, when the flash-bang went off, you could see the piles of bodies-- the Japs would just keep coming, sometimes taking five or six bullets before falling, until they'd more or less formed a barricade with their corpses heaped on top of eachother, and the infantrymen couldn't even shoot out of their foxholes anymore, because there were too many dead bodies in the way." The kids were enthralled, and Leroy briefly wondered if he was going to give them nightmares with this talk, but, nah, don't coddle them, there were American kids dying in Korea, POWs still lost somewhere Over There, Frankie would be eighteen much too soon and the family could lose another man to the Pacific Rim. So, he soldiered on, so to speak.

"Jernsen took off running, right at the spot he thought the Japs on the hill were. If they were chucking mortars, it'd be safer to get close, because under ordinary and not kamikaze suicide type circumstances, you throw the bomb AWAY from yourself. But they WEREN'T throwing mortars at him; and they opened fire, but he dodged and ran, jumping over roots and ferns like a goddamn freakin' gazelle, I guess, and his buddy was screaming, what the hell are you doin', and scrambled after him. Jernsen said he kept shouting Fall BACK, FALL BACK! but, well, hard to hear when it sounds like the world is ending around you. Then he's suddenly right on top of those Japs in their foxhole between two fallen trees, dug into the hillside. Nearly slips right in alongside 'em, the ground's so slick, and he -jumps- the trench, trying to gain some solid footing. Just plain leaps right over their heads. He turns to stand and bear down on them, and suddenly HE has the high ground, and he kicks their machine gun off its stand in an attempt to dodge their handgun fire. He's shooting into the hole with his own pistol, hardly even looking where he's shooting, then two of the three are scrambling out of the hole, tired of being fish in a barrel, and running DOWN the hill, away from him. The third is dead near his foot. He shouts for his buddy but it's still explosions on all sides, and he shoots one Jap in the leg once and then the back of the neck. He falls into a tree, face forward, nearly upright, and Jernsen said it was the craziest thing because he couldn't get the image out of his mind about how the blood running down into the dead Jap's collar looked like the red ribbon in the back of one of them geisha girls' hair. The third Jap ducks into the underbrush and he tries to shoot or flush him out but there's nothing for it but wasting a clip." Leroy looked up into the clouds again, watching them shift in the breeze, as he often did when he remembered the War. "He found some packaged meat and fish rations in the fox hole, and this dry rice brick he later found out had some kinda sour red berry thing in it. Plus there were a few hard biscuits he said were not unlike hard tack: crunchier, but less filling. No time to eat then, of course, plus he didn't know if it was poisoned or not, so he shoved it all in his pack and called for his buddy again." Leroy shrugged. "That third Jap had killed his buddy, just a short ways down the hill, and Jernsen blamed himself. 'Fools rush in,' he said. Oh well, he regrouped with the 124th and eventually, they took the river and three Japanese air strips. We lost something like 450 men in that battle but the Japs lost 11,000. How are those kinds of figures even possible?" Leroy shook his head. "It was a hell of a crazy war."

Scout was pretty sure his war was crazier.

Will's war was pretty crazy, too, by the looks of it.

Hell, it was all crazy, everything, the whole world had gone crazy! Or, maybe it was always crazy and nobody had ever noticed. Mrs. Sheehan was doing a rosary by the fireplace, and Scout hadn't seen Mr. Sheehan since the service. Scout went to go join Will's ma in the Lord's Prayer a few times through, and it mixed strangely with the last refrains of the folk song on the record player.

"We had joy, we had fun, we had-"
Our Father, who art in Heaven
"Seasons in the sun;"
Hallowed be Thy name,
Thy Kingdom come,
"But the hills that we climbed were just-"
Thy will be done,
"Seasons out of time."
On Earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
"We had joy, we had fun,"
And forgive us our trespasses,
"We had seasons in the sun;"
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
"But the stars we could-"
But deliver us from evil,
"Reach were just-"
For Thyne is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory forever.
"Starfish on the beach."
Amen.

It felt a little blasphemous. A lot of things did, though, ever since he accepted that pretty purple tomato's offer and signed on with Builder's League United. The best he could do was square his shoulders and keep going, keep fighting like he always had, keep trying to come out on top. He was given more chances than God ever intended, so he'd damn well better make something of it, better fight like there was no tomorrow, because, for some people, there wasn't. Scout could get stabbed, shot, shredded, and smeared in a sticky red paste across a landscape, but so long as he could come back for more, he would. He could endure it all, absorb it and throw it back out at the world. Not for BLU, and not even for Will, because fat load of good that'd do. He wasn't even totally sure WHAT for, really, except that while it was woefully easy to die, it was hard to live with the thought you wouldn't go down swingin'.

'Starfish on the beach, my ass,' he thought. After all, if anybody could jump and reach the goddamn stars, it would be the Scout.