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aydann-runs · 6 months

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What are you doing tonight? Isobel’s text comes in as Alex is parking at Deep Sky. He’d planned on working late–Michael’s headed deep into the desert with Dallas and won’t be home until after midnight, and Alex hadn’t really wanted to spend the evening alone.

Working, he shoots back as he steps into the elevator. He’s nearly to his office by the time he has reception again and Isobel’s reply comes through.

Wrong, you’re coming to girls night.

Alex would be pissed if he thought Isobel actually believed that being gay equated with being effeminate, but he wasn’t just going to let her off the hook, either.

Rude and offensive. Gay =/= girly.

He’s barely slipped his phone into his pocket when it rings. Alex doesn’t even have to check the caller ID to know it’s Isobel.

“Oh my god Alex, you know I don’t think that,” Isobel says as soon as he accepts the call. She sounds exasperated? Affronted? and he suppresses a smile.

“Okay,” he says mildly. “Because I’m a gracious brother-in-law, I’ll let you explain why you thought it was appropriate to invite me to an event you’re calling girls’ night.”

“It started as a girls’ night, but lately, it's been more like, can use some company,” Isobel answers. “Honestly, Kyle’s there most of the time, and even Michael's come a few times.”

“What, exactly, do you do at girls’ night that Michael is interested in?” Alex asks, trying to imagine it. He just can't picture his husband sitting around, drinking wine and giving Liz a manicure. Kyle, definitely. But not Michael.

“You'll find out tonight. See you at seven!” Isobel says brightly and then hangs up before Alex can answer.

He stares at the phone for a moment and then pockets it, shaking his head.

I guess I have plans tonight after all.

Alex pulls in behind Maria's truck and wanders around to the back of the house where he can hear voices. Liz and Maria are chatting while Maria fixes a drink at the makeshift bar Isobel’s set up on the back patio, and Isobel’s just coming out of the house carrying a charcuterie board. “Alex! You're right on time. I've got beer in the fridge, or Maria brought your favorite whisky?”

“Beer would be great, thanks,” Alex says, looking around for the first time since he arrived. He's only been to Isobel's once or twice–they usually hang out at Max’s when they're all together–but he doesn't remember the projector and screen from the last time he was here.

“Is that new?” he asks, nodding towards the screen.

“It's kind of hard to have movie night without it,” Maria answers for Iz, who’s headed back into the house, presumably for Alex’s beer.

“Movie night? Why don’t you just call it that, instead of girls’ night?”

“It’s not always a movie night. If Maria’s working, we’ll go hang out at the Pony to keep her company. We’ve gone to Planet 7 a few times,” Liz explains. “And sometimes we do have a stereotypical girls’ night. Kyle had fun learning how to apply eye makeup.”

“I bet,” Alex laughs. “So, what are we watching tonight?”

“The Evil Dead,” Isobel answers as she returns with his beer.

“Really?” Alex asks incredulously. “I would not have pegged you as campy horror movie fans.”

“Young Bruce Campbell,” Liz chimes in, as if it explains everything.

“I’m game if you are,” Alex says.

They all settle in for the movie, and it’s good. The right amount of humor and horror, and Alex is just enjoying being around his people. He’s glad Isobel invited him–or maybe commanded his presence–because this is a much better way to spend an evening without Michael than being at work.

They’ve finished The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, and are debating whether to watch Army of Darkness tonight or save it for next time when Alex hears the familiar rumble of Michael’s truck.

“That’s my cue to call it a night.” He leans over to kiss Isobel’s cheek before pushing himself up from the loveseat. “See you girls next time.”

Michael’s leaning against his truck when Alex rounds the house, in full cowboy-mode, and he looks good. As glad as Alex is to have had a distraction tonight while Michael was out, he’s even happier to be going home with his husband.

#30 day writing challenge #day 15 #write about a girls' night #roswell new mexico #ficlet #my fic #a day late #but i wrote most of it yesterday #malex fic #if you squint #it's mostly alex

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stirringwinds · 2 years

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Purgatory

Whumptober Day 8: Back from the dead

Summary: Vietnam, 1967. Marine Captain Alfred F. Jones, born on July 4th 1942, is killed in action at 0930 hours, twenty klicks from Quang Tri city. This is the aftermath.

Or: Alfred, through the eyes of one of his men. Because not every human’s experience coming face-to-face with their nation is a good one.

Notes: CW for violence, death, graphic injuries, war, depictions of PTSD, murder and Cold War-era imperialism. This fic leans hard on the darker side of ‘nations as creepy as hell eldritches and their relationship with war’; citizenship, loyalty and nationhood can cut many ways can’t it?

“VC” refers to the Viet Cong— the Vietnamese guerrillas who fought against both the US-backed South Vietnamese military and US forces. They were allied with, but distinct from the regular ARVN (aka, the North Vietnamese military). “Charlie” became a slang for the Viet Cong, because the NATO phonetic alphabet reads “V.C” as “Victor Charlie.” [3.2k words]

Read on AO3

One week after Jones dies, a VC sniper nails me twice in the right thigh on a night patrol, with all the suddenness and wrath of a prayer answered by the Almighty.

Maybe Charlie had been aiming for my balls and had missed, the helo pilot on the medevac chopper had guffawed. He’d seen people in worse shape than me, I’d live, so just sit tight and shut up.

It enters my leg at a diagonal, it hurts like a bitch, fractures my thigh bone, shreds a whole lot of muscle and nerve tissue, nicks a major artery; I lose buckets of blood. The surgeon at the field hospital in Khe Sanh who ties the artery, fishes out the bullet fragments and sews me back together tells me that at best, I’d walk with a painful limp all my life—if I even recover that much function. Then, I get a raging infection. I burn and I freeze; my temperature shoots to a hundred and four, I’m pumped with antibiotics, I’m told I nearly died—but I don’t give a shit.

I’m giddy, delirious and incoherent, hopped up on morphine and euphoria.

My war is over.

I’m packed off to the 700-bed Naval Support Activity hospital at Da Nang. The hospital’s on the strip of land in between the Han River and the South China Sea—which means unlimited ice-cream, lazing in bed all day, and miles and miles of golden sand and the gorgeous blue of the ocean. After seven months in the red mud, hell and mosquitoes that is Khe Sanh, Quang Tri province, this is heaven, as far as I’m concerned.

One night, I awake with a start. It’s my ninth day there.

At first, I think it’s because the air conditioning has broken down. The ward I share with eleven other guys is dark and quiet, the air oppressively still, sticky and humid. The corpsman’s station is empty—which often happened whenever there was a surge in casualties. Everyone else is either passed out or groaning in their sleep—unsurprisingly; I was the milder case in a ward full of grunts convalescing from amputations and head injuries.

I throw off the blankets. My hospital pajamas are soaked with sweat. I’d been doing well enough that they’d taken me off the IV. So I drag myself out of bed, reach for my newly acquired crutches. Maybe there’d be more of a breeze outside—they’d made a makeshift verandah of sorts. You could see the ocean from there, and they’d begun wheeling me out there in the day, like those photos of TB patients in the old days, to take in the fresh air.

I stagger outside, a pathetic figure shuffling on my crutches. I’m a long way off from my high school days on the track team.

Outside, the smell of salt hits my nose. It’s three twenty-five in the morning, according to the glowing hands of my watch. The air is warm, like an oven; back home, it’d be much cooler at this time of the year—but at least there’s a breeze, instead of the hot, still air inside.

A tall silhouette of a man. The waft of cigarette smoke. Someone else is already out there. My eyes are still adjusting to the dark, so I can’t make out his features. I’m weighing whether to greet this stranger, or to just shut the fuck up—but he takes the lead.

“You’re finally up, Corporal,” the stranger’s voice is low and nonchalant—and I can’t breathe. “I’ve been waiting.”

It’s like ice shooting through my veins—the cold, deeply awful dread that instantly surges up at the sound of the not-stranger’s voice, at the recognition that hits me.

I’m having a heart attack, it feels. It’s like getting shot again—not feeling anything, just numb for a few seconds and then the pain just exploding. There’s a clatter as one of my crutches falls to the ground. My fingers are gripping the wooden railing. It’s rough, unfinished, there are splinters digging into my palms. I’m going nuts. I’d been steadily losing it over the past seven months, but now I’m sure as hell over the edge.

That’s what it is, seeing a dead man in the flesh.

“There are only so many reasons for this kind of shit, so I can guess,” Jones strolls over nonchalantly, his distinctive features melting out of the shadows into the light of the moon with vivid, horrifying, mesmerising clarity, looking every bit as he did in life; the unmistakably gold glint of his hair, the intense blue of his eyes, the strong bronze angles of his face. That strikingly handsome, sharp and squared-away look; the exact damned way the Marine Corps liked its officers.

“But I’d still like to hear it in your own words,” Jones stops, keeping about a meter and a half between us. “So. Tell me. Why’d you do it?”

Dully, I barely register the fact that he’s considerately picked up my crutch, setting it against the railing with a dull thud.

“Fuck. You’re not real.” You’re dead, is what I really want to say.

“Come on, man,” Jones raises a well-groomed brow, completely disregarding my weak protest. “This whole thing wasn’t just your idea, I know—but you did the honours, didn’t you?” His manner is dry, matter-of-fact. He speaks as though he were assigning latrine-cleaning duty or boredly ordering us to set up a night defense perimeter.

There’s no anger, no vengeful fury from this ghost. Whole thing. Describing his own murder with such nonchalance. Something vaguely unpleasant, but that ultimately had little lasting consequences.

“I was,” I echo uselessly, when I’m able to form words again. I’ve sunk down into one of the chairs they’d placed out there for us to enjoy the sea views. “It wasn’t personal.” Of course it was personal.

All those dangerous jungle patrols, deep into Viet Cong territory, the zealous, whole-hearted fanaticism with which Jones pushed us on with, his voice like the very command of God.

The way he’d held McLean’s hand as he bled out, just one month shy of his nineteenth birthday. McLean, who was just the latest in a long line of dog-tags and body bags. No, what was terrible wasn’t that Jones didn’t care. What was terrible was the sincerity with which he said you did good as McLean died, his unseeing eyes staring up at the remorselessly blue sky, as his blood seeped down into the soil of Vietnam. How he said how his sacrifice would be worth it, that he'd personally make sure of it.

The careful, sincere letters Jones always composed to the next-of-kin, not dashed off carelessly the way some other shitbags did it. He meant every word he wrote. Their sons and brothers had been brave and special. They had gone too soon. But for a worthy cause at the end of the day, for their nation, for the global cause of freedom and democracy and— And I suddenly saw it. How many other hands had my commanding officer held? An endless procession of poor motherfuckers like myself, led into the abyss to make the deaths of those before worth it. The weight of my M-16 rifle suddenly felt too much. Its strap was cutting into my neck, a noose—

In the present I shrug. I stick my hands into the pockets of my hospital-issued pajamas so he won’t see them shaking. Not that it matters—he’s probably already noticed, of course. I keep my eyes staring straight ahead at the inky darkness of the ocean—anything but the ghost standing beside me. Maybe this is what damnation is.

“You were going to get us all killed, sooner or later. You couldn’t be dissuaded.” I’m defending myself, justifying it, assuaging my conscience—whichever.

“And you decided to take on the burden, I suppose,” Jones remarks. On the surface, his expression is eerily placid, bereft of any vindictiveness. “A noncom like you, loyal not to his superior officer, but his men? Guess I can admit there’s something admirable about that, Corporal.”

I can’t tell whether he’s mocking me or not. He probably is.

“Admirable?” I feel sick. I could, of course, go along with this bullshit. Loftily and righteously say I did it because I owed it to the miserable fucks under my section, to the 14 teenaged Marines who were barely younger than I was, to save them from our commanding officer’s zealotry. But— what principle was there when it came down to it, when I looked the truth in the face? When the overwhelming feeling that had driven me was pure fear? The desperate fear that every next patrol Jones assigned me, further and further into the dangerous, mined jungle paths that the VCs knew like the back of their hand—it was their land after all—would be my last?

“Yes,” Jones drawls. There’s a southern twang in his voice; he’d always said he was born in Virginia. July 4th, 1942, of all dates— but as with all things to do with him, you don’t know when the truths end and the lies begin.

“Don’t get it fucking twisted up,” I breathe. Close my eyes. I feel the edges of hysteria creeping in—not now. Not fucking now of all times. “I just wanted to go home in one piece. And I sure as hell wasn’t gonna get my ticket punched before I can even get legally piss-drunk, not in that fucking shithole.”

Jones fixes his eyes on me. The gleam of his captain’s bars on his right collar catches the moonlight. He’s in a fresh and clean uniform, instead of the bloodied, shredded mess I’d last seen. My mind is filled with just two thoughts— of my knee hurting like a bitch in this incredibly realistic nightmare, and the way his stare feels like it’s gnawing on my very soul.

“And you won’t die for this?” Jones’ smile is curious and there’s something disconcertingly piercing in it. Mesmerising. “Not for this cause?” It’s a disarming smile, the same one he always flashed in life—that bullshit Hollywood smile that so easily wooed and won anyone over. A trap. He exhales a stream of smoke, his blue eyes dark and unblinking, his presence all at once relaxed and disarming, intense and oppressive. “Not even for me?”

Once, I would have followed him, until the end. I’d worshiped him, with the fervour of an idiotic boy fresh from dropping out of community college, beaten and broken down at Parris Island. He was magnetic, that way; always friendly and easy going— not one of those officers who looked at us grunts like we were lower than the shit in the latrines.

Before all this, I knew nothing of Vietnam, had the luxury of thinking nothing of Vietnam. When my draft notice came, my mother and older sister had begged me not to go, to run away and stay with our relatives in Guadalajara. Or our maternal granduncle, who was still living in Ireland. He’d take me in for sure. Didn’t I see the news? The casualties? This war was a bad one…I’d brushed them off, with all the conceit of an arrogant, stupid boy hungry for adventure—I wasn’t thinking. I’d never lived anywhere but home, I wasn’t about to cut and run forever. How bad could it be? Our late father had proudly won his medals in Europe, on the beaches of Normandy, hadn’t he? And so, I’d have eaten a hundred bullets for Jones, chewed miles of barbed wire, crawled through a fucking VC tunnel if he ordered it. Maybe I still would have, in the darkness of the thick jungle of Quang Tri province, away from the lively cities and towns, away from anything that reminded me that I was more than a warm body with a M-16 and Ka-bar knife.

It’s like exiting a fog, looking back at those moments and realising how deluded and detached from reality I’d become.

“No, I fucking wouldn’t,” I exhale, say the things I never dared to in the light of the day. “You’re just a man. A charismatic and delusional asshole, but blood and meat when it comes down to it.”

Jones takes this all in calmly and silently, with a sort of knowing and watchful patience. It’s like hurling pebbles into a vast lake and seeing no ripples. It’s utterly unsettling, this shade of him, this utter calm. Where is all that dark, vindictive fury our commanding officer had betrayed, in life? All that seething fanaticism that simmered underneath that effortlessly charming exterior of his—that something dark and dangerous, that showed in his eyes, whenever he spoke of the wretched tide of Soviet influence, polluting and fracturing the utopian world order that lay ahead, that was the reason rivers of American blood were being shed so far from home?

Here, in this night, the silence is punctuated only by the sound of the waves crashing against the shore.

“If that’s the way you see it then I guess I am.” Jones is staring at his own hand, the one free of the cigarette, his palm skywards, flexing his fingers experimentally. “Just a man. Nobody’s said that to me for a long time.”

“What else would you be?” The hair at the back of my neck stands. I can see the faint sweat beading on Jones’ brow because of the muggy heat, the same way it does on mine.

He’s human, I remind myself. And very much dead, and just a figment of my imagination, a remnant of the guilt that haunted me.

Jones shrugs. “Many other things.” Then, surreally—with an easy-going and gregarious smile—“Cigarette?”

“No, thanks.” I only just remember to silence the reflexive sir on the tip of my tongue. “The doc said I couldn’t, not so soon after getting cut up. Risk of infection or something.”

Jones nods. “You oughta take care, yeah.” He stashes his smokes back in his pocket. I brace myself, but for the next few minutes, he doesn’t say anything. He’s content to smoke and stare out at the inky darkness of the ocean in the distance, his blue eyes contemplative. It’s incredibly vivid, this nightmare, I think. Even the very slope of his shoulders, the way he leans against the verandah, the loose strand of blonde hair falling over his eyes—is true to life.

“What’s it like, on the other side?” The words slip out. I’m going along with this batshit dream, I guess. Maybe I need the reassurance. Día de Muertos and All Souls’ Day had been in the landscape of my childhood, but I’d never really believed in ghosts. Or the afterlife. At least not the way either of my grandmothers talked about it. “You’re one calm motherfucker for someone who is dead.”

Jones exhales another stream of smoke. The end of his cigarette is a burning ember in the darkness. Now, he’s not smiling. But his blue-grey eyes are still that unnerving, thoughtful calm.

“Am I, really?”

“You are,” I say to the ghost, who takes this news calmly. Maybe this was some screwed up way I sought closure. Some sort of fucked up confessional. The shrinks would have a field day with this, if I could ever talk about it. There was the chillingly routine murder of the enemy in the business of war, and then there was this shit sandwich on top of it. I murdered my commanding officer, and now the bastard shows up in my dream for a casual smoke and chat—

I continue. “You died. On a muddy trail in the middle of the jungle twenty klicks outside of Quang Tri city. It was Thursday, and it was nine-thirty in the morning. I pulled the pin. It was a Soviet-made NVA grenade I stole off a VC prisoner taken into custody. Back at base, I lied. We all lied. Said that we were ambushed by the enemy.”

Jones’ calm expression doesn’t flicker, as he stubs out his cigarette on the railing. He flicks a stray piece of ash off his sleeve, as he strolls over. I’m rooted to my chair, I wouldn’t have the energy to stand up even if I wanted to.

“Murdered by my own men,” he says ironically, with an almost bizarrely philosophical air. Jones exhales. “Lien would be having a good laugh about this, I suppose. ”

A Vietnamese name—A woman’s name isn’t it? I think vaguely. Nothing he says makes sense. There were more than a few of us who, after leave in Da Nang or Saigon, deluded ourselves into thinking a beautiful bargirl we'd met on a night out was our one true love, not a poor or desperate woman with few choices and trying her best to make ends meet. But Jones’ tone is bereft of such sentimentality, almost businesslike, the way he’d talk about a peer. “Who?”

“Someone I’ve known for a long time,” Jones says, with cryptic nonchalance.

His shadow falls across me. For a moment, I’m thinking that this is the moment where he’ll reach for his sidearm and blow my brains out, dream or not.

“Well, I suppose this is goodbye, Corporal.” The unmistakable, solid feeling of Jones’ fingers casually slapping my shoulder is a shock. “You take care and watch that leg of yours, yeah?” He says it, neither sarcastically nor backhandedly, but with a surreal, friendly sincerity that makes my skin crawl all the same— “And just so you know; I don’t take it personally.”

Then, he’s disappearing around the corner, and against my will, my eyes are closing, sinking underneath months and months of exhaustion.

I wake up to a nurse shaking me, her hand on my shoulder. There are the faintest pink streaks on the horizon. I ought not to be out there, she said, not unkindly—had I been there all night? The air-conditioning had been fixed. Maybe I ought to have some hot coffee.

In the bright light of the day, all of it seems unreal. The sky is an endless blue dome, the palm trees on the beach and the bougainvillea bushes lushly green and purple. No ghosts could wander here, in all that light and freshness.

The next few days, I find my breath catching whenever I catch sight of an officer. Maybe my dream was a premonition. Maybe they’d find out what I did. Maybe I’ll be arrested for murder. Maybe one of the guys still in the hell that is Quang Tri will break, will spill. Maybe I’ll be undone. That’s how it always happens, doesn’t it? Just right when freedom is around the corner.

But nobody accosts me, nobody asks me any questions, nobody says a single word about Jones.

I spend another two weeks at the Naval Hospital in Da Nang. Then, I’m handed my medical discharge papers. I’m going home

The remaining days pass, easy and languid in the eternal summer of Da Nang, all the way until I board my flight home to America, my citation for a Purple Heart in hand, sick with relief and exhaustion, the bloody wheel of the war grinding on—but behind me, for good.

Notes:

1. ‘Fragging’: the attempted or successful murder of (usually higher-ranking) military personnel by fellow troops— occurred amongst US forces during the Vietnam War, due to the war’s unpopularity, usage of young draftees and the breakdown of morale. The term comes from how a fragmentation grenade was the weapon of choice used at times. There were close to an estimated 900 incidents recorded.

2. Parris Island: the Marine Corps recruit depot in South Carolina. A Purple Heart is a decoration awarded to US military personnel wounded or killed in action.

3. Lien is of course, Vietnam herself. Vietnam was partitioned in 1954; after Vietnamese forces successfully defeated the French attempt to re-establish its colonial presence. US foreign intervention in Vietnam was publicly justified by American politicians on the basis that Northern Vietnamese forces were communist puppets of larger powers like the USSR or China. Many US policymakers subscribed to the “domino theory”: that the “fall” of another country to Communism would lead to it spreading throughout Asia. But a more accurate appreciation of the situation might have recognised the nationalist motivations of the Viet Cong and regular Northern Vietnamese forces, whose end goal was to reunite their country and rid it of what was for them a long line of foreign imperialism; French, Japanese and now American. And therefore, the limits of American hard power, especially in propping up a Southern Vietnamese regime that was unpopular with the population for multiple reasons.

#hetalia #hws america #my writing #alfred f jones #death #blood #violence #depictions of PTSD #injury mention #whumptober #long post #hws vietnam (mentioned)#human pov fic #a day late #pls heed the content warnings #this is def one of the darker fics i've written

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