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snowdarkredAuthor:
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snowdarkred Word Count: ~1.9K
Pairings: None/Gen
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, implied child abuse, non-graphic slaughter, other implied nastiness, swearing.
Author's Note: Pre-movie!verse. This wasn't what I set down to write (actually, I sat down to write some Kirk/McCoy, but obviously that didn't happen) but I like it. It's a quick look at what might have shaped the gang into who they are now. Title taken from Don't Stop Believing, because that will never get old. :D
Summary: You don't get to be in a unit like the Losers without a lot of baggage and the special brand of crazy that comes with it.
Living Just to Find Emotion
When Clay first read Corporal Jake Jensen's file, he knew instantly that at least half of it had to be fake, and the other half contained enough holes in it to be used as a hooker's fishnet tights.
Jensen had several identifying scars listed, but no explanations provided for them. He had made bad grades in high school, and had GED instead of a diploma, but his aptitude stats were off the charts in almost every category. He had been an emancipated minor who lived with his older sister and her kid, but there was no record of how, exactly, he became legally independent, or even when. Neither he nor his sister had held a paying job before he joined the army, but they stayed in a somewhat decent apartment and ate real food and didn't live off of welfare – for almost two years, right up until he enlisted.
His psych evaluation said 'normal' but everything else about him screamed 'fucked up'.
His records before enlistment were too clean, his skills were too honed, and the eyes that stared out at Clay from the picture attached to the file were just too sharp for someone who was normal.
Clay liked him immediately.
---
The Losers were the Losers because they were all fucked up. You didn't get to be in a unit like theirs without being a special kind of crazy, and that kind of crazy only came about if certain factors were present from an early age. It's not something that they talked talked about, because talk wasn't something that the Losers did. Oh, they talked – they shot the breeze and made stupid bets and threw insults and jabs around like grenades in a war zone, but they never sat down and had heart to hearts or went to group therapy or painted each others' nails. It just didn't work that way.
They didn't work that way.
---
Clay's father was a hard military man, and Clay had gone into the army because that's what he was told to do. Clay was a soldier, through and through, and he always had been. It was in his blood, in his sweat, and it would be in his tears if he ever cried any. He fought because that was what he'd been doing most of his life.
He learned how to shoot a gun from his grandfather. The old man was a withered husk of who he used to be, but he could still hold a gun steady, and it was his belief that anyone who wanted to be treated like a man ought to be able to shoot like one.
David – because Clay's grandfather didn't hold with people calling him Gramps or Dad or anything that wasn't his God-given name, and it was best to remember that, or else – handed a nine year old Franklin Clay a shotgun and told him to point and fire. There was a small clearing behind the house with a salt lick planted strategically in the center; Clay used to watch through the window as deer grazed in and out. He knew what was expected of him. He hefted the gun up, braced himself like he remembered seeing David and Jack do, aimed as best he could, and pulled the trigger.
He missed all of the deer by yards. The kick back broke his collar bone and dislocated his shoulder, and Clay's been shooting ever since.
His father and his grandfather were hard men, men worn down by duty and honor and blood. Both of them out lived their wives by decades, and the minute Clay, eighteen and confident with it, walked into basic training, he forgot that either of them existed. They weren't Gramps and Dad, they were David and Jack, and he'd never been told any different.
He didn't think of them when the threat of Max hung over his team's heads. The Clay men could take care of themselves, and if anyone tried to hurt him emotionally by going after them, they were barking up the wrong tree and were six different kinds of stupid on top of it. Clay hadn't seen either one of them in over a decade, and he was fine with it. He was.
He was perfectly fine with it.
---
Linwood Porteous grew up without a father. His mother was the one who named him and raised him, and when he was younger and didn't know better, he used to think that if his father had been there, he'd have been named something a little more sensible than Linwood. His mother didn't talk about his father at all – not how they met, or why he wasn't there, or where he was now. Linwood stopped asking when he saw that every question made his mother unsettled, nervous, jumpy. He didn't understand what that meant until he was a teenager, and by then it was too late.
He used to daydream about his father, about what he looked like, talked like, what he did for a living. For a while, he thought that his father was dead. He thought about how he might have died: drunk driver, mugging, line of duty, saving lives, fighting bad guys. He hoped that he looked like his dad, that there was some visible evidence that there was a man out there who was tied to him through blood, even if that man didn't exist on paper. Linwood was blind because he wanted to be blind, because he didn't want to think about why his mother never left the house and didn't date and never looked at him if she could help it.
The day Linwood stopped being blind, he broke every mirror in his room and threw up six times. Jolene was the one who held him through it and convinced him that killing himself was the worse thing that he could possibly do. Before that moment, she'd always just been the girl next door, a quiet person who walked at her own pace. After, he knew that she was the one that he was going to spend the rest of his life with.
Diana Porteous committed suicide the day after he turned eighteen. It was like she'd been holding on, waiting until he was of age and able to take care of himself, before excusing herself out of life.
So Linwood Porteous joined the Army, and Linwood became Pooch, and Pooch married his high school sweetheart who was also the girl next door, and they were going to have a baby, and everything was great. Right up until Bolivia and the whole world went to shit.
---
William Roque grew up in foster care, and the less said about it, the happier he was. Clay occasionally wondered, after all the shit went down and Roque's betrayal had cut through them all, what he would have been like if he'd been raised in a stable environment, with people who loved him. That thought usually made him want to track down every place that Roque ever lived in, just so that he could shoot some of the fucking assholes in the face for screwing his second over before he even had a chance. He could – he could just ask Jensen to work a little computer magic and get all the records he needed to hit every retirement home they were rotting in – but he won't. He can't.
He's not sure that Roque deserves that kind of justice.
---
Carlos Alvarez was eight when his oldest sister put a rifle in his hand. There was shouting outside, and panic in the air, and world was slowly sliding into a red haze as the sun sank on the horizon. Trucks roared unto the run down ranch that Carlos' family owned, and even at eight years old, Carlos knew that something bad was going to happen. Armada hid him in the closet of their father's office and told him to shoot anyone who came through the door. She took her own gun – an ancient Rast-Gasser M1898 revolver which hadn't been used since their grandmother's hair was still dark – and left him there.
No hacen un sonido, she told him as she ran through the door. Don't make a sound.
(Later, he would wonder if she would have survived if she had taken the rifle with her and left him with the century old gun that only held five bullets. He knows now that it probably wouldn't have made a difference.)
The roar and crackle of gunfire and bullets and screams seeped in through the walls, loud and clear and violent. Carlos couldn't block it out, no matter how hard he covered his ears.
When they came for him, the sun had disappeared from the sky and the stars were cold and distant above what had used to be Carlos' home. Now, it was a graveyard, with bodies lying motionless on the dirt and blood running against the hard earth in streams. The men who found him dragged him out of the closet, and he was too scared to shoot his gun, too scared to make a sound. They took the gun from him and laughed when he squeaked in fear. They smelled like gun powder and whiskey.
They took him out and showed the ranch to him, showed him the blood and gore, showed him his dead sister. They laughed and laughed, and they didn't stop laughing until he jerked free and grabbed a gun with clumsy fingers. He pulled the trigger again and again, until there was no one left and he was alone on his family's ranch with stars hanging silently above him.
---
Aisha al-Fadhil watched from the window as her mother pleaded with her father. Her father shook his head and cut her mother off with a quick word. He left, and Aisha blamed her mother for his absence because she couldn't think that her father, the man who swung her around in his arms and laughed into her hair, would ever willingly leave her.
Aisha was Daddy's Little Princess, and she lived in a castle built of lies and half-truths and love. She played in rooms covered in silks, was waited on hand and foot by a small army of faceless servants and bulky bodyguards. She learned how to dance, how to sing, how to build a small universe out of a dollhouse. She lived a charmed life, one without pain or worry, because in her universe, nothing could touch her and pain was still an unknown variable, a hypothetical that had no place in her life.
And then.
And then one day her mother disappeared, and Aisha went to her father to ask where she had gone. He stared at her with sad eyes, until she was fidgeting in her seat, and when he spoke, it was as if he was talking through a tube. He told her that bad men had come and taken her mother and that there had been a fight and that her mother was in Heaven, now, where all good girls go. Aisha had grieved for three weeks before she went to her father and demanded that he teach her how to fight.
It wasn't until she was older that she thought to wonder how the bad men had gotten through all those defenses that her father had built around his empire. She left because she couldn't bring herself to ask him, because of what he might answer, and then Clay killed him, and he was dead, and she realized that she would never know.
---
To be a Loser is to face death, to laugh at danger, to think that going up against fifty guys with AKs sounds like a fun time, to drink too much and think too hard, to watch each others' backs, to always move forward.
Never look back.
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-30 10:35 pm (UTC)I especially loved the imagery of Pooch's story. And even though you ended his with the world going to shit, the idea of Jolene holding him and protecting him just makes it seem alright. It's the basis of their relationship.
Very well written.
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Date: 2010-07-31 05:18 pm (UTC)Thank you! :D
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Date: 2010-07-30 10:37 pm (UTC)Fantastic.
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Date: 2010-07-31 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-30 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-30 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-30 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 05:30 pm (UTC)Jensen was interesting to think about. He fits my usual character type - smart, talkative, competent, and with a potentially angsty past. That stray comment he made in the movie caught my attention - after all, you can't have a had a happy childhood if a man threatening to blow a woman's head off reminds you of your parents. Jensen distracts - with his shirts, with his talk, with attitude. Trying to get a straight answer out of him if he didn't want to give it would be pointless. Clay, however, gets to look at Jensen from the outside through an inaccurate military file. If he had met Jensen face to face first, he might not have picked up on it.
Jolene is badass. Trufax. Their love just leaps off the screen.
Thank you so much for your comment! <3 I just got into the fandom, but it's so awesome so far! :D
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Date: 2010-07-31 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 07:01 pm (UTC)So, um. I just finished my second Losers fic. I haven't crossposted it yet - I just posted this one yesterday and I don't want to spam people - but it's here if you want to read it. :P IDK how you feel about girl!Jensen/Cougar, but this just sort of happened and.... *shrug* I have a thing for angst. It's a problem. :D
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Date: 2010-07-31 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 07:25 pm (UTC)I have a thing for genderbending/genderfuck/genderswitch. It's just so interesting to think about how a person would be the same and how they would be the same. Though I don't know how I would be if I were a guy/woke up one day a guy. I'd like to think it wouldn't be too bad, since I'm not really attached to my gender as it is, but realistically, there's no knowing how I'd take it.
Though Jensen is always-a-girl in this, and I have a thing were I tend to make every character bisexual - probably because I don't understand just being attracted to one gender but whatever. Cougar's a darling, so it's all good. :D
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Date: 2010-07-30 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 05:32 pm (UTC)Yeah, I had a bit too much fun with the tags one day. I always like getting to add a new one. :D
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Date: 2010-07-31 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 05:33 pm (UTC)<3
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Date: 2010-08-01 02:22 am (UTC)no subject
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