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Aug. 17th, 2007 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinnMeme from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
randomalia. For iansmomesq and split into two parts because it's apparently over the post limit. Uh, it was a long story to start with?
When you are thirty-three, you begin to have these dreams: strange, vivid dreams. You are not taking Zoloft or Xanax or anything like that, but there is nevertheless wind. Sea. An immense creaking of lumber, the feel of slightly damp wool. The sound of the ocean, the feel of a wooden deck under your feet, and nothing in sight besides the ship, the gray sea, the blue sky. A British flag above. You are far enough away from land that there are no birds, not even clouds.
Barbara, in a white dress and a white hat trimmed with pink roses. Bush, in blue wool, no red trim, two rows of gold buttons down his chest.
You try to forget the dreams as soon as you wake, but they stay with you for hours, sometimes days.
...
Here is, in fact, how your day begins: you wake in darkness. Barbara is asleep next to you, a book settled on her chest, glasses on the edge of her nose. She has fallen asleep working again, and you think about taking the book off her chest and putting her glasses on the nightstand, but you do not want to wake her. All you do, instead, is look at her for a moment. Study the fine shape of her mouth, her profile. You can see that much by light of the alarm clock.
Then, you slide out of bed and find a shirt, trousers, in the darkness.
You dress in the hallway, put on socks and walk down the hall, down the stars. In the nursery, Richard Arthur turns over in his sleep and says a few syllables -- he is too young to say anything worth making sense yet. The door is open a little, so you can hear him, but you do not go in and look at him. You hold still long enough only to make sure that he has gone back on his sleep, and then you go on your way.
Six months in this house, and it still does not feel like yours.
In the stairway, there are snapshots of Barbara on assignment in Myanmar, El Salvador, Serbia. She is always the least frightened person in the photograph; at the landing, there is a picture of her, looking very young and very beautiful, holding a microphone in her hand and reporting from Berlin on the day that the wall fell. She uses awards that she has won in the kitchen as paperweights for mail. There is a bookshelf next to the refrigerator, and it holds books about politics, dense books about history and economics. A few recipe books. A travel dictionary for conversational Russian. A framed photo of her with the President of France.
When you see pictures of yourself all this, in fact, it is as though you are looking at a stranger. Thus, instead of looking at all of this evidence of your life with her, while making coffee and drinking that first cup, you stare out the big south-facing kitchen windows and the sun light up the trees. You go into the three car garage, get into your car. Start the car, and think about how much you love Barbara, how she is the most beautiful, most wonderful woman in the world. Settle that mug of coffee in the cupholder.
Drive to see Bush.
Eagle, anchor, and globe. Semper fidelis. Seven months and sixty-eight miles south of Rutbah, you came across a munitions depot for one element of the insurgency.
...
Of all the branches of the military, the Marines may be the one for which you are, by nature, least suited. The Navy has Annapolis; the Army has West Point. Even the Air Force has its Academy in Colorado. You would have done well at one of the officer schools; you would have been buoyed by the tradition and the splendor, the sense of belonging. You would have enjoyed, despite yourself, the football games and car loans and rings the size of a baby's fist. It is entirely possible that you would, today, be a happier, saner man if you had gone Navy or Army or Air Force.
Instead, you were seventeen, an orphan with nothing but three semesters worth of accelerated community college credits, another semester of real college. Your father had been a large animal veterinarian, the closest thing that the rural town possessed to a real doctor within an hour's drive, and when your father died when you were two months short of being seventeen. Two months after you were seventeen, a kind lieutenant colonel for whom your father had once saved a brood mare told you that if you enlisted, got through Basic and did well, he would get you to Officer Candidate School when it was time.
You enlisted, got through Basic, made your way to being a corporal, at which point you served under Bush, and then you put yourself through the last two years of school. When it was time, you did not need the lieutenant colonel your father had helped; your own commander got you into OCS, and fifteen years later, you are a captain, and Bush is out of the Corps for good. He is a former Marine now, wearing a t-shirt and neatly pressed khakis, sitting on his front porch and waiting for you.
Somehow, because of those vivid dreams, you expect him to be wearing blue and gold with a sea at his back, but there is only sunlight. Blue sky. Nothern Virginia in the spring. Birds. Two crutches stacked neatly by him on the steps.
There is a small tree in his front yard, room for one car in the driveway. After Bush is settled into the passenger's seat, each time, you have to hand him the travel mug of coffee. He doesn't take it until you tell him to, and when he does, even though it's only half warm at best, he drinks, carefully, appreciatively.
You put the car in reverse, take the car into the street, and try not to watch him.
...
It is not easy learning how you should act with Bush. He is out of the Corps now. You are, nominally, still within it. Even while you were both Marines, though, interacting was occaisionally difficult because you could not understood why Bush respected you so much. You were commissioned, and he was not, but that failed to explain any of it -- he was such an eminently capable soldier, a splendid disciplinarian and fearless fighter. The best part of the Corps were written in the marrow of his bones. He has so many of the good qualities that you lack.
You remember meeting him. You remember having him as your sergeant when you were a corporal; you remember having him as your sergeant and XO when you were a second lieutenant. You remember hearing of the prodigious things that he did as part of United Shield in Somalia; you saw yourself what he did for you in Rutbah. It ought to be impossible for two men to be serve together so many times given the size of the Corps, the scope of global engagement, but currents of fortune and influence brought the two of you together, again and again.
Each time, it became clear to you: Bush was a Marine to the bottom of his soul. He planned to be in the Corps until he died.
And yet. He still smiles when he sees you these days. He tells you about his sisters, talks to you about his desire to rebuild a '66 Thunderbird that he saw advertised in the newspaper. Compliments and asks flattering questions about your new car. Asks after Barbara, too, in the most solicitous, kind way. Drinks more of the coffee and shows every proof of a healthy appetite, of happiness to be sitting next to you on a weekday morning in a car in the suburbs of Washington going to the hospital so that he can learn to walk, to go up stairs, to cope with phantom pain.
There is, in fact, a picture of Bush and Barbara in the hallway by your study.
Barbara is in a utility uniform with the sleeves rolled up and is smiling like an angel. A desert-issue hat is hanging from a string under her chin, and Bush is standing next to her in full pack, holding an M16. He is not smiling, and there is desert behind both of them.
...
You have never been an easy sleeper, but you have never had dreams this vivid: they are filled with texture and sound and feeling. Sometimes, you have dreams about other things, normal things, like riding a bicycle down a street that you recognize from childhood or the cold sweat of the first time you saw action, but they do not stay with you like the dreams of the sea. Men die. Ships burn. There is nothing about desert or mountains or infantry in them, only water. They are like memories, not dreams.
In particular, there is this one particular battle to which you keep returning. It is your ship against four others -- French, you suspect -- in a bay.
....
After his physical therapy session, Bush is tired and white-faced. He has much less to say, and he wobbles a little as the orderly helps him into the car. Sometimes, if it has been especially bad, he cannot manage the crutches and must be wheeled out. You always hold the car door with two hands, and Bush feels doubly embarrassed thouse days.
He is always exhausted, though, and sometimes, when you have the windows down and are stuck in traffic, Bush will drift off into sleep. It is not just learning to walk without the foot, after all. He spent months in bed; he did not get proper medical care until a good two days after the wound, and there were multiple bad bouts of fever. Originally, they thought that they might save part of his foot; later, they had to abandon that. At one point, you were prepared to exert whatever remaining influence you had to make sure that he got to at least hold his Purple Heart before he died. There were times, too, during the last desperate moments at the siege, you thought that about words you might use to plead with your captors for Bush's live and the lives of any other surviving men you might have.
Instead, the two of you are safe again. You are going to be married, and he is tired because he is getting the best rehabilitative care in the world. It is an article of faith among Marines in Iraq that if you survived until you were airlifted to Landstuhl, Germany, you would live. Bush lived until Landstuhl; Bush is alive, and he falls asleep sometimes.
His chin touches the seatbelt, and the grip he has on the arms of his bucket seat eases a little even though it is, generally, an uneasy sleep. He moves a bit every once in a while. Shifts in the seat, and his face is still so pale. He is so tired. Sometimes, his hand twitches a little, as if reaching for you, and you want, more than anything in the world, to take his hand in yours. You can remember, vividly, what his fingers felt like over yours on the chopper ride out of that munitions dump, just before the air strike came. During the plane ride through the night to Germany.
You keep your eyes on the road, though, and you keep both of your hands on the wheel. You concentrate on the traffic, and while Bush sleeps in the seat next to you, tired and pale, you tell yourself over and over that, in your dreams, the two of you go to sea again.
...
You were married when you went to Iraq.
There was no family for you, as your father had died when you were seventeen, but the marriage to Maria had, nevertheless, not taken place you were particularly young.
In fact, Maria had first been a friend to you during those long, lonely days when you were back from Somalia. She worked for the management of the off-base apartment complex that you did, lived there as part of her pay, and you met her in the laundry room, by the Coke machine. It was a confusing time in your life, lonely. The two of you talked for a few months. She baked you things, cooked you casseroles to eat, and helped you with your laundry once she realized that you were alone.
Once it happened, in fact, it went quickly. She was charmed by the fact that you did not want to have sex with her before you were married. Neither of you had much in the way of family, and the way it happened was that you received word that you might be shipped out to Somalia, and one night, on the spur of the moment, while she was on her way out the door after bringing you some chicken that she'd made, you asked her to marry you.
She was short, somewhat round, and she had started to cry because you told her that you might go to Somalia soon. In fact, she turned her head away from you so that you would not see her crying, but you knew that she was, and the question came out of your mouth.
You asked her to marry you without showing her a ring. She said yes without ever seeing or asking for one, either.
...
Barbara is, in fact, the administrator of the Maria Hornblower Memorial Fund. There was a period of a week or so when it was not clear whether you were alive or dead, and it was during that period that Maria went into labor, gave birth, and died from complications. Barbara took up donations, used her contacts, convinced a few influential people she knew, and stepped in herself to make sure that the details were arranged so that Maria was buried well and that the baby was provided for.
In fact, when you got back to the States, the baby was with her at the New York office. You had gone there to do an interview that the Commandant's office had set up for you, and only after you had stepped into the building with the First Lieutenant who was the guide assigned to you did you realize that this was Barbara's channel. This was the building where she worked when she was in New York, and the Lieutenant had grinned at you.
It had all been arranged. The baby was there, in her office. He had been named Richard Arthur after her eldest and second eldest brother respectively. He was small, enormously solen, and after you had studied him, you stared at her. The top of your mouth was dry; a nanny held the baby, as Richard Arthur happened to be visiting, and Barbara looked even more beautiful than you had remembered her as being during all those long months without her. She was even more comforting, even more perfect. Her voice made your head swim, and the sweetness of her smile, the love in her eyes, took your breath away.
There was a backdrop of the skyscrapers of New York behind her, running from ceiling to floor, and you kissed her in full view of the nanny, the baby, the secretary who had come in to ask if Barbara would sign something.
Later, you came realized that it had been arranged like this. They had counted on you to become flustered in the middle of the interview, for you to have to say that you had just seen your son a few moments before, so that was why you had to have a moment. Happiness turned to Dead Sea fruit in your mouth when you realized.
Barbara is still the administrator of the Maria Hornblower Memorial Fund, though. You are still going to marry her.
...
Halfway back to Bush's, it starts to rain -- the rain comes out of nowhere, and since Bush hasn't quite bought that 1966 Thunderbird to restore yet, when you do get to the house, you jump out, open the garage door, and then drive the car in. Bush is embarrassed enough by that, but then you come around the back of the car, as there isn't room in the front, and you help him out of the car.
It shames him, but he needs it. He is still a little foggy from sleeping it seems, and he falls against you while standing up. Leans into you, and you lean him back against the car. Steady him. The two of you are standing very close; the rain is starting to come down on the driveway, and if he were a woman, at this moment, you would have kissed him. Instead, the two of you look at each other for a moment. Your hand is on his hip, and when you look down to see where, exactly, your hand is, you realize that he's actually hard in his pants.
He says something about having that brunette therapist again, but you don't look up to see his face when he says it. You look at your hand on his hip, at the shape of his cock inside his pants, and you open your mouth to say something. Take a breath.
In retrospect, he was just putting a hand on the roof of the car to get better leverage so that he could be sure that he wasn't going to fall out. At the time, though, you took it to mean that he was settling into place, and out of some kind of instinct, you went down on your knees.
You get his dick out of his pants, and you are crouching in front of him on the garage floor. It's fast, quick, almost instinctual, and he is holding onto the roof of the car while you take his dick in your mouth. He lets out a noise between a moan and a gasp, and it's only then that you realize that you have no idea how to do this. You cannot figure out how to breathe; your posture is completely uncomfortable. You bless the fact that there are no cars in this garage normally because otherwise, you would have motor oil and dirt all over your knees. You are frozen, absolutely unsure what to do, so after a moment, you back off.
And then you look up and you realize that Bush is looking down at you.
He's watching you. He's holding himself still aside from his chest, which heaving as though he's just run a dozen miles in the rain, but he doesn't say anything. You bring your mouth a little closer to his dick, and his eyes are still on you. Your lips are less than an inch from him, and he puts one hand on the side of your face, on your cheek. Moves it into your hair, hesitates for a moment, and he's still looking at you with this strange, unreadable expression.
There is rain coming down on the driveway. The car is so large that it blocks out any view from the street -- you'll have trouble getting it out of the garage, in fact, and were lucky to get it in without losing one of the side mirrors.
It's a moment of a hesitation. Bush looks at you. Again, you stare at his hip. Again, you're on the verge of pulling away. In fact, you think you're going to be ill.
And then the hand he has in your hair tightens.
"Like this," he says and puts your mouth back on him.
...
Midway through, he shifts over a little so that he is leaning against one of the closed back doors. You reach up, catch up his newly freed hand, and keep hold of it.
You were surprised, in a way, at how tightly he had held it.
...
Here is another part of the puzzle.
One morning, you were out into the streets of the town that you and your men were holding. It was a show of American strength It was a demonstration that the United States owned the streets. You were using your limited Arabic to converse with one of the marketplace vendors -- it was market day, and the farmers had brought in their wretched, thin produce to the market to sell. You were bargaining with an old woman, sweating into the heat, and cursing yourself for being an idiot. The woman was reluctant to sell to you. You noticed, from the corner of your eye, Bush with his M16 slung over his shoulder, full gear, pretending not to notice the vegetable-seller's good-looking granddaughter, who was at least thirty years younger than he was and scowled at him whenever he glanced at her.
Your walkie-talkie squawked and informed you that a patrol in the adjoining street had foiled an attempt on your life. Men on a roof with projectile incinediary devices and guns. Your men had captured one of them alive, though wounded. Two were dead, and sixteen feet away, there were also two dead.
A boy, six years old. In the dust next to him, his sister. His hand was stretched out towards him; her face had been so badly trampled in the stampede that it was impossible to make out her face. What she had looked like. They had both been shot, the girl through the chest and the boy in the head, in the torso. Multiple times, and since the market was not on even ground, their blood was still running down the slope towards you.
The same dust that covered their faces covered you, in fact. You. Bush. Everything.
That was what had struck you at the moment: the dust. You could not make yourself breathe for a long, terrible moment because you felt as though you would choke on it. And then, you had turned to say something to Bush. You wanted to tell him to find out who the two children had been, and you found that he had indeed, been looking at the two children.
And then he turned to look at you, and that was what struck you: there was no change in his expression. He had unshouldered his gun. He could very well have been the man who shot them both, and there was only the faintest hint of grief in him. Was a dollar unlucky when it was spent? Was it a terrible thing when a man's hair turned gray? It was war, and there would be civilian dead. Bush was ready for his next orders.
At the same time, this.
At the house in Georgetown, there are studies for both you and Barbara. In the attic, she has cleared away room for your books; in the basement, she has a tape library. A number of them are actually DVDs, but Barbara has been in journalism for many years. There are even framed articles from when she was the chief editor of the Choate newspaper. Another article that she wrote for the Lampoon when she was at Harvard. There are clipping files in the cabinets.
The two of you refer to it, nevertheless, as the tape room. One evening, while Barbara is in Russia covering the G8 summit, you go down to the basement, and you select, at random, a tape from the walls. You miss her, after all. Without looking at the label, you put the tape into the machine.
There is a flicker, a moment of darkness, then grainy, dim images. It is night footage from Iraq. You recognize the walls, the tree. It scraped against the side of the building; there were nights when you passed the hours by counting how many times it scraped against thet window, and Bush was sitting at one of the tables in front of the barracks. Most of the light in the video comes from inside the barracks.
"The men worship him, ma'm. They would do anything for him. Look what he has done this bunch -- half of them fresh from Parris Island, the other half from the bottom of their platoons. They love him, not for anything that he does or says, but for what he is."
Barbara said something that the camera does not pick up very clearly -- something involving the world handsome -- and Bush is very solemn.
"I suppose he is, ma'am, now you come to mention it. But it wouldn't matter if he were as ugly as sin as far as we're concerned. We'd die for him."
...
So it is, indeed, a puzzle. Bush is the man in the world to whom you are the closest. He was your senior NCO in Iraq, but you had been with him long before that. He was your best man when you married Maria; he was the only person on your side of the church. During the slow years between Somalia and Afghanistan, when money was tight and if geography permitted, you shared an efficiency and a grocery bill with him.
Nevertheless, you are a little frightened of him. You are little mystified as to why this man who is so much a perfect Marine should respect you so and let you do this to him: he is a tough man. A soldier, a Marine of the original, classic school. He is shorter than you are, but more broadly built and in possession of classic opinions.
The United States is right. The liberals and communists, when he sees a difference between them at all, are wrong. The United Nations is acceptable only insofar as its goals tail with those of the United States, and you remember, very clearly, all the criticism that you have of him. He is unimaginative. He is stupid, incapable of thinking outside the parameters of the Corps, and you have never bothered to ask him what he thinks of homosexuals in society, in general, much less their place in the Corps.
After the garage, both of you go into his house. While he moves about in the living room, you rinse your mouth over the kitchen sink. You do not use one of his cups; you try not to put your hands too much on his faucet. You try to make your exit as quietly, as unobtrusively as possible, but he catches you at the door. Thanks you again, effusively, for driving him to his physical therapy and tells you, as he always does, that if you are busy tomorrow, you do not have to trouble yourself for him.
You get out to the car. You start the car; you drive away from the development with its two bedroom bungalows and flat floor plans. Two minutes onto the highway, that cold feeling still in your stomach, you pick up the phone and call Barbara just so that you can hear her voice.
Barbara is, of course, the best thing about your new life. The house is nice; the respite from being at war is good. There are three hot meals a day if you want them, fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance. Meals that do not include either chicken or syrup, a Sub-Zero freezer and refrigerator filled twice a week by the housekeeper in accordance with whatever you or Barbara write on the notepad by the microwave.
Nevertheless, there are nights when you find yourself dreaming about seeing the world in night-vision goggles again, where you feel like the heat of Harada is the only thing that can make you feel warm even though it is Washington DC in summer. Even though you threw it away before boarding the transport to Germany, you can almost feel the hand-drawn map of the town. Other men startle and hit the ground when they hear a car backfire; you, on the other hand, look toward the sound of the noise.
Her older brother is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee; another older brother was a three star general in the Army. She arrived by helicopter, and you had direct, explicit, rubbed in your face orders to be there to welcome her to Harada and make sure that she and her network had a satisfactory experience before going home.
Unlike Maria or Bush, you had not wanted her to be there. You were expecting a hard woman, but Barbara was kind. You were expecting her to be old, but she was a decade younger than you. Bush, who was acting as your XO, had put her on an infantry rotation squad rotation plan designed to keep her from seeing anything more exciting than munitions sorting, but after a two weeks, he came to you with a proposal to keep her with a single squad and let her see time in the western end of town. Sometimes, you would come out of the comm office, and you would see Gerard walking her up and down in the one strip of greenery in camp, trying his charm on her. She had a spectacular sense of humor.
There had been a long memo issued to you on the fact that the reporter was not a friend, that she was a member of the media, but it was always scrupulously fair.
Barbara ate with the men. She argued with you about Whitman and Ginsberg; she sang the USC fight song with Galbraith. Bush talked to her for hours when he barely managed a letter a month to his sisters; she was the only American woman in a dozen miles, and one night, you overheard one Pfc tell another that he had asked her for an autograph so that he could send it to his little sister, who wanted to be a journalist and was a big fan of hers. She told him that she didn't have time to sign anything then, and the corporal thought that she had forgotten the request entirely until he got an ecstastic e-mail from his sister, telling him that Barbara had taped a three minute long personal message, beamed it to the network, and had gotten the network to courier a copy, in an official FSNBC pouch, to the house in Montauk, New York.
There were times when you were sure that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. It did not seem possible that any single, real human being could be as perfect as she was, and after she left, you heard how she had gotten engaged to a junior senator from Connecticut.
She married him. He died after being struck by a drunk driver two months later; three weeks later, you heard that the wives and girlfriends of your squad had put together a scrapbook of letters and photographs to console Barbara for her loss and to thank her for how she had helped them keep in touch with their men. Maria sent you the letter she wrote for that compilation first, through e-mail, so that you could look it over and make any suggestions and revisions.
It has been six months since you came back from abroad.
You and Barbara are waiting for a decent period to pass before marrying.
...
Some of the dreams you have are terrible -- death and battle, the bay with the four French ships, a black river that sweeps you along from shore to shore. The two dead Iraqi children appear as your children; you stand in your house and watch them die of smallpox. Maria cradles the boy in her arms long after he's dead; she cannot stop holding the corpse, and yet, she will not let herself cry because you have not started crying. She knows that you disapprove of emotional displays, and she does not want to disgrace you in front of your dead child.
Inevitably, you wake after those particular dreams. You lie in bed next to Barbara, and you strain your ears for the sound of Richard's breathing through the baby monitor that is placed on the nightstand. The area around the Georgetown house is very quiet at night, and usually, if you hold yourself still, you can hear your son's slow, steady breathing, as real and seemingly close as Barbara's.
Already, Barbara loves him as few stepmothers ever love the children of another woman. When you arrive home after that first time with Bush, after you have finished talking to Barbara and completed the rest of your drive, it is somewhat past noon. You are thinking about what you would like to have for lunch as you bring the car into the driveway, come up through the walkway to the house, let yourself in, and find, in the foyer, the nanny with Richard. He does not want to be put to bed, and there is a strange moment while you are standing there with the keys in the keys in your hand, watching your son as he is held by a woman known, to you, only by her first name.
Richard is scrubbing at his eyes with his hands, twisting about and trying to wriggle away from her. When he sees you, he holds out his arms -- it is immensely gratifying to see that he wants to be held by you, and you settle him into your arms as best you know how. He smells like fresh diapers and baby powder, as well as something else that you decide, after a bit of examination, must be unique to babies. It is not unpleasant. Sweet, almost like the hay you remember smelling when you were a child following your father on rounds, but without dust at the end. He is soft, surprisingly light in your arms, and you hold very still.
Neither you nor the nanny make any noise, and eventually, Richard yawns and leans against your chest. You still don't dare to move; you have forgotten all about being hungry. You can't even breathe deeply for fear of waking him, but this is the third time that you have been happy all day. It is the first where you have not also felt guilt.
Maria had a mother. Before she was married, she lived with her mother close by. After she married, when you were not at home, she went back to living with her mother, so they were close. You have been to Maria's grave several times since you have come back, but you have not spoken to Mrs. Mason or contacted her in any way.
She was there, presumably, for Maria's death and her funeral. Barbara, presumably, knows about all this.
Still, it has been six months, and you have not contacted Mrs. Mason in any way. Barbara calls you one afternoon to tell you that she's decided to begin a course of fertility treatment.
...
randomalia. For iansmomesq and split into two parts because it's apparently over the post limit. Uh, it was a long story to start with? Even more than most fic, this is a piece of collab work. The hard work on it got hashed out in IM with
When you are thirty-three, you begin to have these dreams: strange, vivid dreams. You are not taking Zoloft or Xanax or anything like that, but there is nevertheless wind. Sea. An immense creaking of lumber, the feel of slightly damp wool. The sound of the ocean, the feel of a wooden deck under your feet, and nothing in sight besides the ship, the gray sea, the blue sky. A British flag above. You are far enough away from land that there are no birds, not even clouds.
Barbara, in a white dress and a white hat trimmed with pink roses. Bush, in blue wool, no red trim, two rows of gold buttons down his chest.
You try to forget the dreams as soon as you wake, but they stay with you for hours, sometimes days.
The dream intro is kind of cliche'd, I know, but it strikes me as a really useful device in crackfic -- all writing is about convincing the reader of some proposition or the other, and in fanfiction, people have a very specific reason to be reading. They expect to read a certain kind of story; they expect to be entertained in a certain way. With crackfics, you're kind of breaking those molds. You're taking the characters away from the beloved canon, so you've got to find some way to convince them to stick with you, either by grabbing their interest with something specific (catchy intro) or giving them reason to trust you until you sell them on the idea (dropping bits of canon and showing strong author control).
Dream intros are pretty good for this, I think. Lots of flexibility with imagery and rhythm, so you can get any catchy intro your heart imagines. And the trust bit here gets conveyed through the stuff at sea, with the canon setting at sea, which the reader will recognize. The Xanax and Prozac -- I have all these theories about modern HH at a shrink -- are cues that this isn't going to be a regular fic, as is, to a lesser extent, the lack of technical specificity about the ship/the weather/the sailing. The specificity about other people (Barbara and Bush) and what they're wearing is supposed to emphasize that lack of technical detail. This is Hornblower, but as something besides a seaman.
So yeah, I really love dream intros. It's probably, uh, you know. WHY I KEEP ON USING THEM OVER AND OVER AND OVER
...
Here is, in fact, how your day begins: you wake in darkness. Barbara is asleep next to you, a book settled on her chest, glasses on the edge of her nose. She has fallen asleep working again, and you think about taking the book off her chest and putting her glasses on the nightstand, but you do not want to wake her. All you do, instead, is look at her for a moment. Study the fine shape of her mouth, her profile. You can see that much by light of the alarm clock.
Then, you slide out of bed and find a shirt, trousers, in the darkness.
You dress in the hallway, put on socks and walk down the hall, down the stars. In the nursery, Richard Arthur turns over in his sleep and says a few syllables -- he is too young to say anything worth making sense yet. The door is open a little, so you can hear him, but you do not go in and look at him. You hold still long enough only to make sure that he has gone back on his sleep, and then you go on your way.
Six months in this house, and it still does not feel like yours.
In the stairway, there are snapshots of Barbara on assignment in Myanmar, El Salvador, Serbia. She is always the least frightened person in the photograph; at the landing, there is a picture of her, looking very young and very beautiful, holding a microphone in her hand and reporting from Berlin on the day that the wall fell. She uses awards that she has won in the kitchen as paperweights for mail. There is a bookshelf next to the refrigerator, and it holds books about politics, dense books about history and economics. A few recipe books. A travel dictionary for conversational Russian. A framed photo of her with the President of France.
Barbara fascinates me. I didn't like her very much the first few times through the books, but as I've read more about CSF's (articulated) reasons for introducing her, I've been come around to being able to appreciate her in theory. I mean, she's as tough and able and smart and competent as any man, it seems. And yet because of the times and her social situation, she's profoundly limited in what she can do with her life, which she's got to feel it at times. It's explicit in the stuff in Lord Hornblower about being deprived of her moment and where she just soaks up the attention because she's with the man of the hour, and I read it as being the motivation for her globetrotting.
At the same time, see her treatment of Hebe and her pulling social class on Hornblower and her ability to host the dinners and school-room French. She's well-read, but not an intellectual, etc. Barbara keeps up with the new-fangled authors. Barbara has a house on Bond Street. Despite being so much tougher than what we're led to expect for the daughter of an Earl, she's very much a creature of her times. There's no flouting of tradition; barbara is very image-conscious.
So yeah, those are the bones of the character that I wanted for USMC Barbara: the smarts and competence and toughness of the Barbara from the books with the high-flying, world-travel career that she would have had then if she'd been male and would undoubtedly have in modern times, what with her connections. I think journalism was actually
Plus, you know. 7000x more glamorous. I love the idea that in modern times, Barbara is likely to have a shinier career than her HH; it really emphasizes the modernity of the story without being obvious about it.
When you see pictures of yourself all this, in fact, it is as though you are looking at a stranger. Thus, instead of looking at all of this evidence of your life with her, while making coffee and drinking that first cup, you stare out the big south-facing kitchen windows and the sun light up the trees. You go into the three car garage, get into your car. Start the car, and think about how much you love Barbara, how she is the most beautiful, most wonderful woman in the world. Settle that mug of coffee in the cupholder.
Drive to see Bush.
Eagle, anchor, and globe. Semper fidelis. Seven months and sixty-eight miles south of Rutbah, you came across a munitions depot for one element of the insurgency.
...
Of all the branches of the military, the Marines may be the one for which you are, by nature, least suited. The Navy has Annapolis; the Army has West Point. Even the Air Force has its Academy in Colorado. You would have done well at one of the officer schools; you would have been buoyed by the tradition and the splendor, the sense of belonging. You would have enjoyed, despite yourself, the football games and car loans and rings the size of a baby's fist. It is entirely possible that you would, today, be a happier, saner man if you had gone Navy or Army or Air Force.
Instead, you were seventeen, an orphan with nothing but three semesters worth of accelerated community college credits, another semester of real college. Your father had been a large animal veterinarian, the closest thing that the rural town possessed to a real doctor within an hour's drive, and when your father died when you were two months short of being seventeen. Two months after you were seventeen, a kind lieutenant colonel for whom your father had once saved a brood mare told you that if you enlisted, got through Basic and did well, he would get you to Officer Candidate School when it was time.
SORRY, PARDON, MAKE WAY FOR THE INFODUMP. IF I HAD TO THINK ABOUT IT; YOU GOTTA READ IT NOW.
You enlisted, got through Basic, made your way to being a corporal, at which point you served under Bush, and then you put yourself through the last two years of school. When it was time, you did not need the lieutenant colonel your father had helped; your own commander got you into OCS, and fifteen years later, you are a captain, and Bush is out of the Corps for good. He is a former Marine now, wearing a t-shirt and neatly pressed khakis, sitting on his front porch and waiting for you.
Somehow, because of those vivid dreams, you expect him to be wearing blue and gold with a sea at his back, but there is only sunlight. Blue sky. Nothern Virginia in the spring. Birds. Two crutches stacked neatly by him on the steps.
There is a small tree in his front yard, room for one car in the driveway. After Bush is settled into the passenger's seat, each time, you have to hand him the travel mug of coffee. He doesn't take it until you tell him to, and when he does, even though it's only half warm at best, he drinks, carefully, appreciatively.
You put the car in reverse, take the car into the street, and try not to watch him.
...
It is not easy learning how you should act with Bush. He is out of the Corps now. You are, nominally, still within it. Even while you were both Marines, though, interacting was occaisionally difficult because you could not understood why Bush respected you so much. You were commissioned, and he was not, but that failed to explain any of it -- he was such an eminently capable soldier, a splendid disciplinarian and fearless fighter. The best part of the Corps were written in the marrow of his bones. He has so many of the good qualities that you lack.
You remember meeting him. You remember having him as your sergeant when you were a corporal; you remember having him as your sergeant and XO when you were a second lieutenant. You remember hearing of the prodigious things that he did as part of United Shield in Somalia; you saw yourself what he did for you in Rutbah. It ought to be impossible for two men to be serve together so many times given the size of the Corps, the scope of global engagement, but currents of fortune and influence brought the two of you together, again and again.
Each time, it became clear to you: Bush was a Marine to the bottom of his soul. He planned to be in the Corps until he died.
And yet. He still smiles when he sees you these days. He tells you about his sisters, talks to you about his desire to rebuild a '66 Thunderbird that he saw advertised in the newspaper. Compliments and asks flattering questions about your new car. Asks after Barbara, too, in the most solicitous, kind way. Drinks more of the coffee and shows every proof of a healthy appetite, of happiness to be sitting next to you on a weekday morning in a car in the suburbs of Washington going to the hospital so that he can learn to walk, to go up stairs, to cope with phantom pain.
There is, in fact, a picture of Bush and Barbara in the hallway by your study.
This photo is actually one of the first things I came up with when I was trying to parse modern Hornblower, and I still love the idea and all the things that it says. Hornblower has a study now. Hornblower looks at framed photographs. It feels as though this is an entirely new life, but here are these two people from that old life present in the new one. And Hornblower is estranged from all of it.
Barbara is in a utility uniform with the sleeves rolled up and is smiling like an angel. A desert-issue hat is hanging from a string under her chin, and Bush is standing next to her in full pack, holding an M16. He is not smiling, and there is desert behind both of them.
...
You have never been an easy sleeper, but you have never had dreams this vivid: they are filled with texture and sound and feeling. Sometimes, you have dreams about other things, normal things, like riding a bicycle down a street that you recognize from childhood or the cold sweat of the first time you saw action, but they do not stay with you like the dreams of the sea. Men die. Ships burn. There is nothing about desert or mountains or infantry in them, only water. They are like memories, not dreams.
In particular, there is this one particular battle to which you keep returning. It is your ship against four others -- French, you suspect -- in a bay.
More confidence-building. No, Hornblower reader, I have not forgotten about you! This story is, indeed, built around the Hornblower canon-verse! And so forth. I really tried to dial up the imagery and language intensity in these dream sections because I don't have a lot of room for them, but they need to pack a punch -- in additoin to confidence-building for the reader, I need them as lead-ins for description of the fighting in Iraq and Hornblower's current emotional crisis.
....
After his physical therapy session, Bush is tired and white-faced. He has much less to say, and he wobbles a little as the orderly helps him into the car. Sometimes, if it has been especially bad, he cannot manage the crutches and must be wheeled out. You always hold the car door with two hands, and Bush feels doubly embarrassed thouse days.
He is always exhausted, though, and sometimes, when you have the windows down and are stuck in traffic, Bush will drift off into sleep. It is not just learning to walk without the foot, after all. He spent months in bed; he did not get proper medical care until a good two days after the wound, and there were multiple bad bouts of fever. Originally, they thought that they might save part of his foot; later, they had to abandon that. At one point, you were prepared to exert whatever remaining influence you had to make sure that he got to at least hold his Purple Heart before he died. There were times, too, during the last desperate moments at the siege, you thought that about words you might use to plead with your captors for Bush's live and the lives of any other surviving men you might have.
In a way, my fic and
So yeah, in my head, this story is basically about how Hornblower and Bush and Barbara make it out of Iraq alive and physically OK, but aren't quite emotionally fine. In terms of setting and events that occur, it's the happy ending between Flying Colors and Commodore, but in terms emotions, it's still Flying Colors, stuck at Rosas Bay, or stuck in Portsmouth, yearning after what another man's wife has. The reader comes with the expectation of one book; I repsent them with another in hopes of showing them that emotional landscape is the true determinative factor.
Now how's that for wank?
Instead, the two of you are safe again. You are going to be married, and he is tired because he is getting the best rehabilitative care in the world. It is an article of faith among Marines in Iraq that if you survived until you were airlifted to Landstuhl, Germany, you would live. Bush lived until Landstuhl; Bush is alive, and he falls asleep sometimes.
His chin touches the seatbelt, and the grip he has on the arms of his bucket seat eases a little even though it is, generally, an uneasy sleep. He moves a bit every once in a while. Shifts in the seat, and his face is still so pale. He is so tired. Sometimes, his hand twitches a little, as if reaching for you, and you want, more than anything in the world, to take his hand in yours. You can remember, vividly, what his fingers felt like over yours on the chopper ride out of that munitions dump, just before the air strike came. During the plane ride through the night to Germany.
You keep your eyes on the road, though, and you keep both of your hands on the wheel. You concentrate on the traffic, and while Bush sleeps in the seat next to you, tired and pale, you tell yourself over and over that, in your dreams, the two of you go to sea again.
...
You were married when you went to Iraq.
There was no family for you, as your father had died when you were seventeen, but the marriage to Maria had, nevertheless, not taken place you were particularly young.
In fact, Maria had first been a friend to you during those long, lonely days when you were back from Somalia. She worked for the management of the off-base apartment complex that you did, lived there as part of her pay, and you met her in the laundry room, by the Coke machine. It was a confusing time in your life, lonely. The two of you talked for a few months. She baked you things, cooked you casseroles to eat, and helped you with your laundry once she realized that you were alone.
Once it happened, in fact, it went quickly. She was charmed by the fact that you did not want to have sex with her before you were married. Neither of you had much in the way of family, and the way it happened was that you received word that you might be shipped out to Somalia, and one night, on the spur of the moment, while she was on her way out the door after bringing you some chicken that she'd made, you asked her to marry you.
So yes, this is the start of the Maria theme. There's lots of specific stuff in the intro section because I wanted to mark her strongly. I wanted the reader to remember her, and even more importantly, I wanted make her sympathetic so that the reader could feel part of why Hornblower and Barbara are alienated from another -- Hornblower still feels guilty about it all, and Barbara knows that she stole a good woman's husband. Maria is also a really handy way to tell the story of Hornblower's loneliness, I think.
Also: there's an inconsistency with regards to Hornblower's career in this fic, and half of it is in this section but I don't actually care all that much. XD The brain, it disremembers.
She was short, somewhat round, and she had started to cry because you told her that you might go to Somalia soon. In fact, she turned her head away from you so that you would not see her crying, but you knew that she was, and the question came out of your mouth.
You asked her to marry you without showing her a ring. She said yes without ever seeing or asking for one, either.
I am goddamn proud of having that sentence to close the section.
...
Barbara is, in fact, the administrator of the Maria Hornblower Memorial Fund. There was a period of a week or so when it was not clear whether you were alive or dead, and it was during that period that Maria went into labor, gave birth, and died from complications. Barbara took up donations, used her contacts, convinced a few influential people she knew, and stepped in herself to make sure that the details were arranged so that Maria was buried well and that the baby was provided for.
In fact, when you got back to the States, the baby was with her at the New York office. You had gone there to do an interview that the Commandant's office had set up for you, and only after you had stepped into the building with the First Lieutenant who was the guide assigned to you did you realize that this was Barbara's channel. This was the building where she worked when she was in New York, and the Lieutenant had grinned at you.
It had all been arranged. The baby was there, in her office. He had been named Richard Arthur after her eldest and second eldest brother respectively. He was small, enormously solen, and after you had studied him, you stared at her. The top of your mouth was dry; a nanny held the baby, as Richard Arthur happened to be visiting, and Barbara looked even more beautiful than you had remembered her as being during all those long months without her. She was even more comforting, even more perfect. Her voice made your head swim, and the sweetness of her smile, the love in her eyes, took your breath away.
There was a backdrop of the skyscrapers of New York behind her, running from ceiling to floor, and you kissed her in full view of the nanny, the baby, the secretary who had come in to ask if Barbara would sign something.
Later, you came realized that it had been arranged like this. They had counted on you to become flustered in the middle of the interview, for you to have to say that you had just seen your son a few moments before, so that was why you had to have a moment. Happiness turned to Dead Sea fruit in your mouth when you realized.
Barbara is still the administrator of the Maria Hornblower Memorial Fund, though. You are still going to marry her.
Annnd there's the payoff. The intro Maria section tried to establish her as a sympathetic character the reader could identify with -- homely, unglamorous with a crappy job, a little shy, amazed that Hornblower could take any interest in her and feeling that she was dating way out of her league. The idea is to contrast her in this section with Barbara, who is beautiful, who has an incredibly glamorous job, who loves Hornblower, but then. You know. At least from HH's perspective, kinda uses him for ratings.
Yeah, it's kind of weird, but it's my attempt to express the end of Flying Colours, whichis not only home of the infamous "Happiness was a Dead Sea fruit that turned to ashes in the mouth" bit, but also this:Freedom that could only be bought by Maria's death was not a freedom worth having; honours granted by those that had the granting of them were no honours at all; and no security was really worth the loss of insecurity. What life gave with one hand she took back with the other. The political career of which he had once dreamed was open to him now, especially wcoith the alliance of the Wellesley faction, but he could see with morbid clarity how often he would hate it; and he had been happy for thirty seconds with his son, and now, more morbidly still, he asked himself cynically if that happiness could endure for thirty years.So Hornblower as part of the Wellesley faction, and Hornblower being horribly uncomfortable with his success and how his joy has come at the price of Maria's life. On re-read, it kinda seems that I didn't lay the misery on thick enough.
...
Halfway back to Bush's, it starts to rain -- the rain comes out of nowhere, and since Bush hasn't quite bought that 1966 Thunderbird to restore yet, when you do get to the house, you jump out, open the garage door, and then drive the car in. Bush is embarrassed enough by that, but then you come around the back of the car, as there isn't room in the front, and you help him out of the car.
So what's the solution to this malaise and profound uneasiness over his dream woman? Why, to give your sergeant/best friend a blowjob! It'll solve everything.
Or not.
It shames him, but he needs it. He is still a little foggy from sleeping it seems, and he falls against you while standing up. Leans into you, and you lean him back against the car. Steady him. The two of you are standing very close; the rain is starting to come down on the driveway, and if he were a woman, at this moment, you would have kissed him. Instead, the two of you look at each other for a moment. Your hand is on his hip, and when you look down to see where, exactly, your hand is, you realize that he's actually hard in his pants.
He says something about having that brunette therapist again, but you don't look up to see his face when he says it. You look at your hand on his hip, at the shape of his cock inside his pants, and you open your mouth to say something. Take a breath.
In retrospect, he was just putting a hand on the roof of the car to get better leverage so that he could be sure that he wasn't going to fall out. At the time, though, you took it to mean that he was settling into place, and out of some kind of instinct, you went down on your knees.
You get his dick out of his pants, and you are crouching in front of him on the garage floor. It's fast, quick, almost instinctual, and he is holding onto the roof of the car while you take his dick in your mouth. He lets out a noise between a moan and a gasp, and it's only then that you realize that you have no idea how to do this. You cannot figure out how to breathe; your posture is completely uncomfortable. You bless the fact that there are no cars in this garage normally because otherwise, you would have motor oil and dirt all over your knees. You are frozen, absolutely unsure what to do, so after a moment, you back off.
And then you look up and you realize that Bush is looking down at you.
He's watching you. He's holding himself still aside from his chest, which heaving as though he's just run a dozen miles in the rain, but he doesn't say anything. You bring your mouth a little closer to his dick, and his eyes are still on you. Your lips are less than an inch from him, and he puts one hand on the side of your face, on your cheek. Moves it into your hair, hesitates for a moment, and he's still looking at you with this strange, unreadable expression.
There is rain coming down on the driveway. The car is so large that it blocks out any view from the street -- you'll have trouble getting it out of the garage, in fact, and were lucky to get it in without losing one of the side mirrors.
It's a moment of a hesitation. Bush looks at you. Again, you stare at his hip. Again, you're on the verge of pulling away. In fact, you think you're going to be ill.
And then the hand he has in your hair tightens.
"Like this," he says and puts your mouth back on him.
...
Midway through, he shifts over a little so that he is leaning against one of the closed back doors. You reach up, catch up his newly freed hand, and keep hold of it.
You were surprised, in a way, at how tightly he had held it.
...
Here is another part of the puzzle.
One morning, you were out into the streets of the town that you and your men were holding. It was a show of American strength It was a demonstration that the United States owned the streets. You were using your limited Arabic to converse with one of the marketplace vendors -- it was market day, and the farmers had brought in their wretched, thin produce to the market to sell. You were bargaining with an old woman, sweating into the heat, and cursing yourself for being an idiot. The woman was reluctant to sell to you. You noticed, from the corner of your eye, Bush with his M16 slung over his shoulder, full gear, pretending not to notice the vegetable-seller's good-looking granddaughter, who was at least thirty years younger than he was and scowled at him whenever he glanced at her.
True fact: Bush is a dirty soldier who hasn't gotten laid in about six months. XD This section is all about ambiguity and showing why Hornblower is ambiguous about really just straight-out loving Bush. There's a bit of scary in the man.There was shooting. The vegetable stand disintegrated; you felt Bush's hand on your shoulder, heard him shout to the detail that he had insisted you bring along as protection. Your instinct was to remain standing, to determine the precise nature of the shooting and the disturbance, but it was over in seconds.
Your walkie-talkie squawked and informed you that a patrol in the adjoining street had foiled an attempt on your life. Men on a roof with projectile incinediary devices and guns. Your men had captured one of them alive, though wounded. Two were dead, and sixteen feet away, there were also two dead.
A boy, six years old. In the dust next to him, his sister. His hand was stretched out towards him; her face had been so badly trampled in the stampede that it was impossible to make out her face. What she had looked like. They had both been shot, the girl through the chest and the boy in the head, in the torso. Multiple times, and since the market was not on even ground, their blood was still running down the slope towards you.
The same dust that covered their faces covered you, in fact. You. Bush. Everything.
That was what had struck you at the moment: the dust. You could not make yourself breathe for a long, terrible moment because you felt as though you would choke on it. And then, you had turned to say something to Bush. You wanted to tell him to find out who the two children had been, and you found that he had indeed, been looking at the two children.
And then he turned to look at you, and that was what struck you: there was no change in his expression. He had unshouldered his gun. He could very well have been the man who shot them both, and there was only the faintest hint of grief in him. Was a dollar unlucky when it was spent? Was it a terrible thing when a man's hair turned gray? It was war, and there would be civilian dead. Bush was ready for his next orders.
This fic runs a long way from the standard Hornblower canon, and since it really doesn't follow the plot of any particular book, I needed a way to keep the story tied to the books. The flake-out solution was to bring the text of the books explicitly into the story. This is from Lieutenant Hornblower where Bush is thinking about the press -- there's not too much to say about the Bush in this. The sections previous were about Barbara and Maria; this section and the two following are about Bush, with some reference to Barbara....
At the same time, this.
At the house in Georgetown, there are studies for both you and Barbara. In the attic, she has cleared away room for your books; in the basement, she has a tape library. A number of them are actually DVDs, but Barbara has been in journalism for many years. There are even framed articles from when she was the chief editor of the Choate newspaper. Another article that she wrote for the Lampoon when she was at Harvard. There are clipping files in the cabinets.
The two of you refer to it, nevertheless, as the tape room. One evening, while Barbara is in Russia covering the G8 summit, you go down to the basement, and you select, at random, a tape from the walls. You miss her, after all. Without looking at the label, you put the tape into the machine.
There is a flicker, a moment of darkness, then grainy, dim images. It is night footage from Iraq. You recognize the walls, the tree. It scraped against the side of the building; there were nights when you passed the hours by counting how many times it scraped against thet window, and Bush was sitting at one of the tables in front of the barracks. Most of the light in the video comes from inside the barracks.
"The men worship him, ma'm. They would do anything for him. Look what he has done this bunch -- half of them fresh from Parris Island, the other half from the bottom of their platoons. They love him, not for anything that he does or says, but for what he is."
Barbara said something that the camera does not pick up very clearly -- something involving the world handsome -- and Bush is very solemn.
"I suppose he is, ma'am, now you come to mention it. But it wouldn't matter if he were as ugly as sin as far as we're concerned. We'd die for him."
...
So it is, indeed, a puzzle. Bush is the man in the world to whom you are the closest. He was your senior NCO in Iraq, but you had been with him long before that. He was your best man when you married Maria; he was the only person on your side of the church. During the slow years between Somalia and Afghanistan, when money was tight and if geography permitted, you shared an efficiency and a grocery bill with him.
Nevertheless, you are a little frightened of him. You are little mystified as to why this man who is so much a perfect Marine should respect you so and let you do this to him: he is a tough man. A soldier, a Marine of the original, classic school. He is shorter than you are, but more broadly built and in possession of classic opinions.
The United States is right. The liberals and communists, when he sees a difference between them at all, are wrong. The United Nations is acceptable only insofar as its goals tail with those of the United States, and you remember, very clearly, all the criticism that you have of him. He is unimaginative. He is stupid, incapable of thinking outside the parameters of the Corps, and you have never bothered to ask him what he thinks of homosexuals in society, in general, much less their place in the Corps.
After the garage, both of you go into his house. While he moves about in the living room, you rinse your mouth over the kitchen sink. You do not use one of his cups; you try not to put your hands too much on his faucet. You try to make your exit as quietly, as unobtrusively as possible, but he catches you at the door. Thanks you again, effusively, for driving him to his physical therapy and tells you, as he always does, that if you are busy tomorrow, you do not have to trouble yourself for him.
You get out to the car. You start the car; you drive away from the development with its two bedroom bungalows and flat floor plans. Two minutes onto the highway, that cold feeling still in your stomach, you pick up the phone and call Barbara just so that you can hear her voice.
A major theme of this fic was the push-and-tug that Hornblower feels. On the one hand, Barbara is beautiful and accomplished; on the other hand, she's allied with an image-making machine that could eat the rest of his life. On the one hand, Maria was not particularly attractive and originally something that eased his loneliness, but on the other hand, she loved Hornblower when he had nothing. Bush is a wonderfully polite, emotionally generous man who doesn't react to a gay blowjob the way you might expect him to; on the other hand, he just watched two kids die without seeming to feel anything....
Backwards. And forward. Into real life, then back into the dream again.
Barbara is, of course, the best thing about your new life. The house is nice; the respite from being at war is good. There are three hot meals a day if you want them, fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance. Meals that do not include either chicken or syrup, a Sub-Zero freezer and refrigerator filled twice a week by the housekeeper in accordance with whatever you or Barbara write on the notepad by the microwave.
This is my second least-favorite section of the story. It needs editing, but I didn't have the discipline to really do it -- yeah, I needed a long section to create variation in the rhythm of the fic, but this really needed to be edited. But I came up with it, and I couldn't cut it because awww, doesn't everybody need to know all the painful details?
Ugh.
Nevertheless, there are nights when you find yourself dreaming about seeing the world in night-vision goggles again, where you feel like the heat of Harada is the only thing that can make you feel warm even though it is Washington DC in summer. Even though you threw it away before boarding the transport to Germany, you can almost feel the hand-drawn map of the town. Other men startle and hit the ground when they hear a car backfire; you, on the other hand, look toward the sound of the noise.
One of the touchstones for this fic was the intro to Jarhead, which I skimmed uh. Once-ish. Many years ago in a NY Public Library where my parents were sitting for a little bit to soak up the free AC. But I did read the prologue pretty carefully, and the stuff stuck with me -- Swofford opening up the map and seeing the sand from Iraq fall out. I was aiming for a similar mix of desire and fear and loathing and excitement.As bad as it ever gets, though, all Barbara has to do is look at you, and the petty frustrations drop away. You are happy to be with her in the house in Georgetown. You do not mind waiting at the Reagan Airport for hours, waiting for her shuttle to arrive. You will even stand next to her at a black tie charity, at a Democratic fundraiser, at an award banquet where she will be receiving something else to use around the house as a paperweight, and it has always been different for her.
Her older brother is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee; another older brother was a three star general in the Army. She arrived by helicopter, and you had direct, explicit, rubbed in your face orders to be there to welcome her to Harada and make sure that she and her network had a satisfactory experience before going home.
Unlike Maria or Bush, you had not wanted her to be there. You were expecting a hard woman, but Barbara was kind. You were expecting her to be old, but she was a decade younger than you. Bush, who was acting as your XO, had put her on an infantry rotation squad rotation plan designed to keep her from seeing anything more exciting than munitions sorting, but after a two weeks, he came to you with a proposal to keep her with a single squad and let her see time in the western end of town. Sometimes, you would come out of the comm office, and you would see Gerard walking her up and down in the one strip of greenery in camp, trying his charm on her. She had a spectacular sense of humor.
There had been a long memo issued to you on the fact that the reporter was not a friend, that she was a member of the media, but it was always scrupulously fair.
Barbara ate with the men. She argued with you about Whitman and Ginsberg; she sang the USC fight song with Galbraith. Bush talked to her for hours when he barely managed a letter a month to his sisters; she was the only American woman in a dozen miles, and one night, you overheard one Pfc tell another that he had asked her for an autograph so that he could send it to his little sister, who wanted to be a journalist and was a big fan of hers. She told him that she didn't have time to sign anything then, and the corporal thought that she had forgotten the request entirely until he got an ecstastic e-mail from his sister, telling him that Barbara had taped a three minute long personal message, beamed it to the network, and had gotten the network to courier a copy, in an official FSNBC pouch, to the house in Montauk, New York.
There were times when you were sure that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. It did not seem possible that any single, real human being could be as perfect as she was, and after she left, you heard how she had gotten engaged to a junior senator from Connecticut.
She married him. He died after being struck by a drunk driver two months later; three weeks later, you heard that the wives and girlfriends of your squad had put together a scrapbook of letters and photographs to console Barbara for her loss and to thank her for how she had helped them keep in touch with their men. Maria sent you the letter she wrote for that compilation first, through e-mail, so that you could look it over and make any suggestions and revisions.
It has been six months since you came back from abroad.
You and Barbara are waiting for a decent period to pass before marrying.
...
Some of the dreams you have are terrible -- death and battle, the bay with the four French ships, a black river that sweeps you along from shore to shore. The two dead Iraqi children appear as your children; you stand in your house and watch them die of smallpox. Maria cradles the boy in her arms long after he's dead; she cannot stop holding the corpse, and yet, she will not let herself cry because you have not started crying. She knows that you disapprove of emotional displays, and she does not want to disgrace you in front of your dead child.
I think that paragraph is probably one of the better ones I've put together for Hornblower fandom. The contraction "he's" still bugs me sometimes when I read the paragraph because it seems like a departure in tone, but I love the tightness of the sentence overall, how oblique it is in referring to strong emotions, and how tightly it ties the insanity in Hornblower's head with what happened in the past. This was the paragraph when the fic actually came together in my head.
Inevitably, you wake after those particular dreams. You lie in bed next to Barbara, and you strain your ears for the sound of Richard's breathing through the baby monitor that is placed on the nightstand. The area around the Georgetown house is very quiet at night, and usually, if you hold yourself still, you can hear your son's slow, steady breathing, as real and seemingly close as Barbara's.
Already, Barbara loves him as few stepmothers ever love the children of another woman. When you arrive home after that first time with Bush, after you have finished talking to Barbara and completed the rest of your drive, it is somewhat past noon. You are thinking about what you would like to have for lunch as you bring the car into the driveway, come up through the walkway to the house, let yourself in, and find, in the foyer, the nanny with Richard. He does not want to be put to bed, and there is a strange moment while you are standing there with the keys in the keys in your hand, watching your son as he is held by a woman known, to you, only by her first name.
Richard is scrubbing at his eyes with his hands, twisting about and trying to wriggle away from her. When he sees you, he holds out his arms -- it is immensely gratifying to see that he wants to be held by you, and you settle him into your arms as best you know how. He smells like fresh diapers and baby powder, as well as something else that you decide, after a bit of examination, must be unique to babies. It is not unpleasant. Sweet, almost like the hay you remember smelling when you were a child following your father on rounds, but without dust at the end. He is soft, surprisingly light in your arms, and you hold very still.
Neither you nor the nanny make any noise, and eventually, Richard yawns and leans against your chest. You still don't dare to move; you have forgotten all about being hungry. You can't even breathe deeply for fear of waking him, but this is the third time that you have been happy all day. It is the first where you have not also felt guilt.
This is another reference back to the happy for thirty seconds with his son, and now, more morbidly still, he asked himself cynically if that happiness could endure for thirty years from the end of Flying Colours. Hornblower is only happy with Richard Arthur; every other pleasure in his life has all kinds of guilt, and the additional implication is that even Bush, who had been the one relatively less guilty pleasure in HH's life, has turned into a source of lgkj;ldkfjlaekjrf....
Maria had a mother. Before she was married, she lived with her mother close by. After she married, when you were not at home, she went back to living with her mother, so they were close. You have been to Maria's grave several times since you have come back, but you have not spoken to Mrs. Mason or contacted her in any way.
She was there, presumably, for Maria's death and her funeral. Barbara, presumably, knows about all this.
Still, it has been six months, and you have not contacted Mrs. Mason in any way. Barbara calls you one afternoon to tell you that she's decided to begin a course of fertility treatment.
...
