1 . Name: Cosmic Tuesdays @ 2012-01-15 09:06

Since this series is moving pretty steadily, I finally got around to putting everything together into one place for easy reference: http://archiveofourown.org/series/14389

Thanks to Amp and Kara for cheerleading, and Toxo for beta-reading and helping with the title.

My own take on what might happen when the music stops.

<i>O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play. – “Tommy,” Rudyard Kipling</i>


--


He didn’t even take off his helmet when he sat down at the bar, just growled at Richard for a beer, really growled, like a junkyard dog. It wasn’t the growling or the time of day that got Richard’s attention, but that he hadn’t taken off his helmet to look him in the eye. That just wasn’t how things were done in Des Moines, even in this day and age.

Then again, eight years behind the bar, there was plenty worse than just not taking off a hat. “What kind of beer?”

“What kind – beer-flavored beer, that’s what kind, something made from fermented grains and hops that comes sold in bottles.” He pulled out of his wallet and slapped a twenty down onto the bar. “Get me however many of those this buys. And get them to me all at the same time. And turn off that damn TV.” The woman sitting on his right nursing her Tom Collins hummed a note of curiosity, and the man turned to glare at her as best he could through his helmet. “He heard me just fine, lady.”

“Hey,” Richard said, clicking the TV off – nobody was watching it anyway, the news about the day’s parade had turned into the evening weather forecast for the time being. “Hey. Pabst Blue Ribbon good?”

“Pabst will perform sufficiently.”

He downed almost half of the first bottle in one long swallow, then stopped to catch his breath before finishing. The second bottle went slower, with more reasonable sips one after each other. He still stared straight ahead, perfect posture on the stool, his uniform starched to where Richard could hear it move when he brought his arm up to take a drink. Richard looked away and moved down the bar to check the four customers at the other end, filled Angela and Gillian’s table orders, took a couple of moments to chat with Jimmy in back about what’d happened at the parade when he had to get more lemons. Even on a day like today, it wasn’t too late, and the bar could miss a few moments of being tended to without anyone getting hurt. When he got back, the man was on his fourth beer, looking just like he’d had on his second and the woman had slid over a stool.

“You doing all right?”

“I am doing just as well as I ought to be under the circumstances.” He took a long swallow and then turned his attention back to Richard. “It’s a disgrace that this country doesn’t give the recognition to those that deserve it.”

“Yeah.”

“An outrage. Two hundred years men and women have been fighting and dying to see to it that this country stays safe and what do they get in exchange for that? Less than what they deserve. Oh, not that they asked for anything, oh no sir, they stand up because it’s their duty, it’s their obligation, like they’ve always done, but oh you bet your sweet keister that a little token of recognition at the end of a tour of duty is somehow too much for Jane Q. Public to offer.”

“It’s a shame what they do to soldiers these days,” Richard said carefully.

“A complete shame.” The man slammed the empty bottle down and started on the fifth. “They’ve never had to dig their own foxhole or untangle themselves from barbed wire or reload a gun in the middle of a shelling. They’ve never had to know, and the thanks they get for being allowed to remain in ignorance? A joke! It’s a big, lousy joke to them. Well, the joke is on them. They think war can be solved with peace. Hah. War keeps the peace, that’s how it works.” He took a breath, finished the bottle, and went for the sixth and last. “It’s the nature of the conflict. They just don’t see that, they’ve never been in it fighting to see and learn. It’s the whole conflict, stretching back ages, farther than any damn hippie wants to admit to, handed down generation to generation like an heirloom, mother to child – ” He chugged the bottle down, and placed it down with more delicacy than Richard had expected from someone who’d gotten that much alcohol in their system in under thirty minutes.

“Well.” There was still the baseball bat under the garnishes and the shotgun under the register if anything got nasty. But he still had perfect posture, and going by the medals and stars and today’s date, he just needed to keep on drinking. “What can I get you now?”

He cleared his throat and pulled his shoulders back. “A shot of Jack. Make that a round of shots of Jack. For everyone. Everyone in the bar right now.” He pulled out his wallet again, and handed over a hundred-dollar bill. “That should cover it.”

“Uh, yeah, yeah that will.” Richard had to check it with the special fabric pen and stick it under the main register compartment, but it was real American money, and if this was how the man wanted to spend it then it wasn’t his business to tell him otherwise. Angela and Gillian couldn’t quite believe it themselves – “He doesn’t look that flush, does he,” Gillian mused, and Angela just stared for a moment – and went to orbit the room and pass out the news along with the drinks and, in doing so, make it a little easier for themselves to believe it. Richard had served the man his shot first, and he’d just stared at it, like he was trying to intimidate a shot of whiskey.

“And just what do you think you’re doing, private?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I distinctly said everyone in the bar right now. And you and the waitresses and whoever’s in the back are all in the bar, and I don’t see any of you with a drink to match. And I demand a full refund if my conditions are not met.”

“I suppose you did. My apologies,” Richard said, as sincerely as he could make it sound. In his experience, it was best to make sure that the people who lived in their own worlds stayed there. “We’ll get right on that. Angela, could you get Jimmy?”

“She’d damn well better,” he muttered.

When they were all together in front of him, Angela raised her glass. “Happy Veteran’s Day.” Jimmy coughed when he swallowed his shot down, and Richard just patted his friend on the back and offered him a drink of water.

By then, three of the guys from the north corner’s booth had decided anyone buying the whole place a round was worth drinking with, and had sided up to sit next to him, their own modern uniforms a sharp contrast to his dressier one, camouflage greens to his dark reds. Richard left them to laugh together while he checked the rest of the bar, and when he got back and caught their conversations, he smiled; war stories were always some of the best.

“– so then she says, and pardon my French but it’s right from her mouth, well, my people fucking invented fireworks, and then he says, well, my people bloody perfected them, and it’s up to me to step in and lay down the law that I’m the only one who works with them and if anyone on the team has a say in the Bicentennial Independence Day display it’d better be me –”

“Wait, go back, where are you stationed again?” The youngest one, Evans, asked while motioning to Richard for another Corona.

“All over. Wherever I’m most needed.”

The one sitting next to him, Welsh, pulled back and looked at him through half-closed eyes. “Didn’t you say you served your tour?”

“I did, and I had, and I was called up again when they needed me to go.”

He leaned back in to take a closer look at the man’s chest ornaments. “Those medals the real thing?”

The man puffed out his chest to show them off. “I can guarantee it, private.”

“Major.”

“Where’d you serve again?” Leitch sidled around from behind Evans.

“The western front. All through Poland.”

“No shit, my dad served there, you knew him?” Richard had to turn away when a woman in purple with cat’s-eye glasses sat down and ordered a glass of lemonade.

“I was – I was unlikely to have made his acquaintance.”

Welsh nodded and crossed his elbows on the bar. “And what’s it you got now?”

The man turned to look at him. “I am not at liberty to divulge that sort of information, private –”

“Major –”

“But suffice to say that I am part of a hand-selected unit doing what needs to be done so good hardworking families can sleep peacefully every night.”

“Amen,” the three said, and clinked their glasses. Leitch piped up, “Say, you saw the parade?”

“Oh, I saw it,” he growled, and Richard snapped his head to stare at what he could of the man’s face with that tone, “I saw it, and I tried – I explained, and I bargained, and I jumped right in, and –”

“Holy shit, that was you?” Evans gaped. “You’re the guy who crashed the parade? There’s like eight people in the hospital –”

It’d been all over the news for almost six hours and Richard knew it’d be back on again tonight, the regular coverage of the Veteran’s Day Parade going batshit when some crazy guy came out of nowhere and tried to raze the whole thing to the ground. The TV crews had tried to stay and cover the fallout, and the guy had managed to hold his own against a whole parade of servicemen for over an hour before somehow disappearing, and there hadn’t been a good picture of him, just a blur of red. At the time, Richard had been glad he’d been inside a bar, and now, he wasn’t so sure.

“I did no such thing! You should be ashamed at making such an accusation! I intended to march alongside the rest of the soldiers as befitting the holiday but no, they said no, and there was no reasoning with such people and I had to make a strategic –”

“Mr. Doe?” The woman in purple stood and walked over to the small gathering. “Mr. Doe, it’s for the best we leave now.”

“If you’ll allow me a moment’s courtesy to explain to these collective disgraces to the uniform the precise manner of events this afternoon…”

“We need to leave now.”

“I’d – I’d just wanted to be in the parade.”

“I know. We can work something out for you to be in it next year. But right now we have to go.”

“Hold on,” Welsh asked. “Are you telling me this is the guy –”

“Sir,” she said, and Richard knew that tone, the one he used to stop fights before they started, and what the hell was going on here? “Please stay out of this.”

“I wasn’t –”

“Soldier, we have to go.”

They left through the front door, the woman following the man – Mr. Doe, who walked with a lot more coordination than Richard would have expected. After a couple of minutes of staring and murmuring, everyone went back to their drinks.

He undid his apron and went to find Jimmy, promised him lunch from Max’s Soapdish for a week if he covered for an hour, and went to follow, just to check, this wasn’t an ordinary day by any means and just checking to make sure he wouldn’t need to get interviewed by the police again for serving someone he shouldn’t have.

The woman glanced at him when he caught up to them four blocks away from the bar, right by the capitol, before looking back at Mr. Doe. She was leaning against a small purple car, bundled tight in her jacket, and Richard wished he’d grabbed his scarf. It was a cool, dry November, with all the leaves gone and no snow yet, the sky a slate-gray robbing everything of its shadows and no wind to speak of, and according to the forecast, it wouldn’t rain until Thursday. All the fallen balloons and singed streamers and little paper flags from the parade hours ago were still in the street, waiting for the sweepers to come through tomorrow morning before anyone else woke up.

“He didn’t cause any trouble, did he?” Her breath puffed out into the air.

“No, he just drank peacefully. Even bought everyone a round of shots.”

“He does that sort of thing sometimes.” She took another glance at him, and then a closer look. Something went over her face and she stuck out a gloved hand. “Miss Pauling.”

“Richard.”

They kept on watching him, finally satisfied, kicking up the streamers and balloons, marching alone, in his parade of one.