QED
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/10542276.
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M/M, Other
Red vs. Blue
Dexter Grif/Dick Simmons
Dick Simmons, Dexter Grif, Michael J. Caboose, Sarge (Red vs. Blue)
read with caution, mood disorders, Eating Disorders, Slow Burn, Mostly
Canon Compliant
English
Published: 2017-04-04 Completed: 2020-02-04 Words: 216,671
Chapters: 99/99
QED
by relationshipcrimes
Summary
Simmons is thankful that men don’t have bulimia. Otherwise, it’d be really fucking difficult
to explain why he never keeps his dinner down. (Updates first Tuesday of every month.)
Notes
gets up on soapbox and takes out my megaphone and yells a disclaimer that you can skip if
you really want to but you have to do it at your own risk:
(1) no numbers will be mentioned, which means no weight, BMI, or calorie counts, so don't
worry about them. on the other hand, if portrayals of ED behaviors are going to fuck you up
due to past ED history, i think you should click out of this window. please don't sabotage
whatever peace you have. (2) this is only ONE portrayal of a disorder, which affects many
different people in many different ways, is experienced in many different ways. the portrayal
here is just one look at eating disorders. (3) as a general PSA, since we’re on the subject: if
you’re worried about your own or a friend’s eating behaviors/attitudes regarding food and
body image, consider this me looking you dead in the eyeballs through the internet: talk to
someone. sort that shit out now before it goes rancid. but i suspect that you know this, or
should know this, or knew this at one point, and that if you’ve made it all the way through
this monolithic paragraph you don’t really need me to tell you again. (4) no character here
shares my opinions on the situation, thank fucking god. they all have their own
misconceptions about mental health, gender and gender roles, sexualities, relationships, et
cetera, as is canon-typical of their characters as seen in the red vs blue show, and this extends
to eating disorders, too. (5) if, for the odd reason, you’re here because you want to read ED
literature that isn’t a smoking piece of bullshit, please enjoy this fanfic of a halo fanfic
featuring orange guildenstern and maroon rosencrantz in a sci-fi war-story existential
romantic comedy.
PART 1: RED VS BASE
Chapter Summary
“Oh, god, don’t tell him,” says Simmons. “You’ll never have anything with sugar in it in
stock ever again.”
Private Richard “Dick” Simmons, male, twenty-seven, of the Red Army, is being transferred
from his five-year station at Blood Gulch outpost to a new station at Rat’s Nest, alongside
fellow private Dexter Grif, male, thirty-one, also of the Red Army. “Say your goodbyes,
boys,” calls the CO from the shotgun seat.
The truck begins to pull away. The Red Base is shrinking in the distance. “I suppose we were
stationed here for five years,” says Simmons.
“Uh-huh,” says Grif.
“Leaving behind Blood Gulch. It’s a big moment.”
“Uh-huh,” says Grif.
Simmons has no idea where Sarge and Lopez are, and sort of wishes that he’d tried harder to
convince Sarge to come with them. But Sarge is also a fucking team-killing maniac, and he’d
rather take a bullet to the remaining fleshy bits of his body than admit missing anyone on his
team, especially out loud to Grif . “Well,” says Simmons, holding himself straighter, “if you
won’t say anything, then on our behalf, I’d like to say—”
“Suck it, you big ugly canyon,” says Grif. “Fuck this place up, down, and sideways. Good
riddance .” Then he holds up both middle fingers and blows smoke out through his helmet
vents.
Simmons shoves him hard in the side of the head. “Grif! What the hell! You’re giving my
lungs cancer!”
“No, they’re in my chest, they’re mine , they say you break it you bought it and—”
“They were still mine! I grew them! With my own two hands in my own chest! With love and
care! Organically!”
“Simmons, if I have to put up with your nasty-ass acid reflux and jacked-up windpipe and
nonexistent gag reflex, I will put whatever I goddamn want down your throat.”
The CO turns around to stare at them. “Put what down whose throat?”
Simmons sputters. Grif looks the CO dead in the visor. “Sir,” says Grif, “I’d like to let you
know that command shipped off our token homosexual to some other outpost, and I am hard
at work filling in for him and his entendres, there’s a whole quota to fill, and without it the
—"
“Grif, shut the fuck up, you’re making me look bad in front of our new commanding—”
“—the whole Red Team dynamic will not survive, the—”
“—we’ll never advance our military careers, promotion is—”
“—the very strength of the Reds depends upon my ability to make as many references to
dicks as humanly possi—”
And that’s how Grif gets promoted.
Simmons will say again: Grif was complaining about Simmons’ esophagus being busted
from years of purging (not that Grif knew that), then Grif’s shit sense of humor realizes Sarge
is gone and rears its sarcastic head, and then Grif gets promoted .
Grif’s promotion, and their introduction to Rat’s Nest, goes like this:
“Here’s the dorm,” says the lieutenant, and points at the dorm.
“Here’s the showers,” says the lieutenant, and points at the showers.
“Here’s the storage room,” says the lieutenant, and points to a rusted shack.
“Here’s the training grounds,” says the lieutenant, and points to half an abandoned road.
There’s a dead rat lying in the middle.
“Here’s the—”
“Yeah, okay, cool,” says Grif. “Where’s the kitchen?”
“The dining halls are one corridor left of the west storage room—”
“No, dude,” says Grif, “I mean the actual kitchen . Where you guys keep the good stuff.” He
waggles his eyebrows.
“We try to keep the weed off the premises,” says the lieutenant. Simmons chokes.
“No—wait, actually, yes . But I meant chips, cookies, the shit with the high fructose corn
syrup, plastic sugar, the stuff of Americans—”
“Oh, god, don’t tell him,” says Simmons. “You’ll never have anything with sugar in it in
stock ever again.”
“I’m an emotional eater , we’re in the middle of a war—”
“You ate Oreos out of the trash! It’s disgusting!”
“I was stressed!”
“The kitchens,” says the lieutenant, “are restricted to those of rank Sergeant or higher—” He
breaks off and listens to something on his helmet radio. “Alright, go put your things in your
dorm. Dinner’s in twenty. Don’t be late or you won’t have a plate.”
“Sir, yes sir. Thank you for the warning, sir. I like the rhyme, sir,” says Simmons. By god, he
swears he can make up for the nonsense Grif was up to in the car; he can and will make these
COs like him. The lieutenant doesn’t look at him twice.
“Whoa, buddy--I mean sir. Buddy sir,” says Grif, as the lieutenant turns to leave. “Only
Sergeants or higher?”
The lieutenant crosses his arms. “That’s indeed what I said, Private.”
“Well, okay,” says Grif. “Then can I get promoted?”
“No, you idiot,” says Simmons, “you can’t just ask for—”
“Sure,” says the lieutenant. He claps Grif on the back. “Your Sergeant didn’t come with you
from Blood Gulch, you’re obviously hard at work filling in the role of token homosexual, and
we gotta keep up our equal-opportunity quota. You’re in. Congrats, Staff Sergeant.”
“Holy shit,” says Grif.
“What?” says Simmons.
“Nice,” says Grif.
“Wait, wait,” says Simmons, “if we’re filling in Sarge’s vacant spot, does that mean I can—”
“No, sorry, only one homosexual per cast allowed,” says the lieutenant, and walks away.
“What the fuck,” whispers Simmons.
“Nnnnnice,” says Grif.
Simmons gives him a poisonous look. “You,” he says. “You motherfucker. You aren’t even
actually gay.”
And Grif says, in the highest, most stereotypically RuPaul’s-drag-race voice he can manage:
“Don’t talk to your superior officer like that, dah-ling."
Simmons lunges. Grif bolts. “Homophobia! Discrimination!” Grif hollers. “Prejudice against
minorities!”
Chalkboard Sulk
Chapter Summary
Or like they’re doing one of those mildly-inconvenient imprisonments with the Blues
and they’ll go back to Red Base in a day or two.
But, you know, Simmons is cool with Grif’s promotion. No, really. He’s the chillest, calmest
guy in this army right now. Really. Truly. Absolutely.
He just needs some time to himself. To chill. To become even more cool with it. Maybe
splash some cold water on his face. Blow his nose. Apply a cool, damp towel to the redness
of his eyes.
So when they’ve shoved all their belongings under their bunks and organized their bedsheets-or rather, Simmons organized his and Grif’s bedsheets--he throws himself on the bed in full
armor and groans. Oh, and he has to share a room with Grif until Grif gets moved to the
quarters with the other Sergeants --no, no no, Simmons is cool, Simmons is super cool.
“C’mon, dude, it’s food time,” says Grif.
“You go ahead,” says Simmons.
“Oh my god,” says Grif. “You’re sulking.”
“I’m not sulking.”
“You’re totally sulking. Like a teenaged girl,” says Grif. “As soon as I leave you’re gonna
write in your princess-pink diary about how nobody understands, and it’s not a phase—”
Simmons throws a pillow at him. “No! Shut up! And it’s not pink, it’s—”
“—wait, so you actually have a—”
“No! Fuck! Go away! You don’t understand!”
Grif is cackling , the son of a bitch. “Wait until Donut hears about this,” he crows, and ducks
the next pillow by fleeing out the door.
Now Simmons has to pick up his own damn pillows by himself, and sit on the bed by
himself, and realize that Grif isn’t going to tell Donut anything, because Donut got shipped
out to some-fucking-where, and Sarge is back at Blood Gulch with Lopez, and it’s just Grif
and Simmons here in this base they don’t know. Even though it feels like they’ve gone on a
vacation, or something. Or like they’re doing one of those mildly-inconvenient
imprisonments with the Blues and they’ll go back to Red Base in a day or two. They’re not
going back to Blood Gulch ever again, actually.
Good riddance to that shithole, honestly. Grif is right--which Simmons will never admit but,
y’know, Simmons can let Grif be right about the approximate degree of shittiness of Blood
Gulch Outpost One, if only because Simmons hated Blood Gulch Outpost One just as much
first .
A canyon where nothing happened, nobody died--except that Church guy, Simmons
supposes--a canyon where Simmons knew all the routines, what to expect, knew every corner
of the base, knew everyone in the base, knew everyone in both bases to boot, knew every
inch of the canyon, every view and angle of the alien sun-star, right down to the canyon
mountains, where everyone knew everyone even when they pretended not to, where everyone
was a piece of shit to each other all the time …
Simmons throws his pillows back on the bed and cleans off the dirt marks. Thinks again: Grif
was right. No sane person would want to stay at Blood Gulch.
Unfamiliar voices troop past the door. Something falls and clatters against the metal floor. It
grates at his chest like nails on a chalkboard, and he scowls. He’s working himself into one of
those moods where everything irritates, everything rubs raw and awful. He can practically
hear the buzzing in the back of his head.
Simmons shucks his armor and buries himself under the covers. He waits for dinner to be
over. He’s a twenty-seven year old man in the army, for god’s sake, and he most definitely
doesn’t sulk.
Assignment Down
Chapter Summary
"I actually like being useful.”
By the time Grif comes back with their position assignment, Simmons thinks that he’s
probably hungry from skipping dinner, but the truth is that he can’t tell. Simmons has long
since thought that nobody actually knows when they’re hungry. People just eat when they’re
told and call it a day, like it’s no big deal. Do people actually know what hunger feels like, or
are they all just pretending at his expense?
But to be fair, Simmons has tried to make a career out of doing what he’s told.
Speaking of, Simmons has been assigned, according to the slip of paper Grif hands him, to
various cleaning duties and a perimeter patrol routine. “ What ?” he says, somehow in
disbelief that a base that doesn’t know him would assign him to the one post he hates. “Grif,
did you write this up?”
“Nah, otherwise I’d’ve assigned myself to bed inspection,” Grif sighs. “Getting promoted is
overrated, man. What’d you get?”
When Simmons tells him, even Grif bursts out laughing. “Oh, congrats! You get to stand
around and stare at the Blues all day! Just like old times!”
“I’m gonna go crazy,” Simmons laments.
“Come on, that’s like the chillest, easiest job in the army! An actual cakewalk! Provided you
don’t like, get shot and die, of course.”
“Yeah, Grif, of course.” Simmons tosses the paper onto his bedsheet. “I’m not a lazy turd like
you, asshole. I actually like being useful.”
“Sucks to be you, dude,” says Grif. “That’s the army for you.”
“I’ll beg a CO to be reassigned to the armory or something. Maybe ammo cataloguing, since
I got so good at it doing your job at Blood Gulch,” Simmons mutters. “Somewhere I can
organize stuff...”
“That’d get your rocks off, wouldn’t it?”
“Shut up, Grif.” Simmons sits up. “Actually--hey. Since you’re a staff sergeant now, how
about you reassign me?”
“No fucking way, dude. That’s way too much effort. I’d have to actually talk to people. File
papers. Oh, the horror…”
Simmons groans and grits his teeth. “How on earth did a lazy piece of shit like you get
promoted over me ?”
“See, Simmons, you gotta work the system: the goal is to carefully avoid all the positions
where you’re actually expected to—” He stops, staring at his position assignment. “Ah, fuck
.”
“What? Where were you—”
Grif’s schedule reads in bright red letters: Ammo inventory.
“No fucking way,” says Grif. “Ammo inventory is for sergeants . Fucking hell, that’s the
boringest job in this whole damn place! I can’t sleep, I can’t slack off, there’s nothing to look
at but bullets ‘n shit! No, no fucking--hey. Hey, Simmons. Simmons .”
“You better not be asking to switch,” says Simmons.
“Let’s switch,” says Grif.
“Now you want to switch?”
“C’mon,” says Grif. “Simmons. Think of sexy organizational boxes. Organized by size and
shape.”
“I don’t actually jack off to organization, asshole.”
“Color-coded, Simmons.”
Simmons groans and rolls his eyes. “Look, it says right on the paper that only sergeants get
those jobs. Okay? I’m not eligible to begin with.”
“C’mon, what’s the point of being part of the systematic chain of command if you can’t be
corrupt as fuck?”
“How the hell did you even join the army?” Simmons asks, then says, “No, never mind, I
don’t care. Ugh—okay, fine, but —”
Grif pumps his fist.
“—the only person who can file to change our assignments is a commanding officer,” he
says, and adds, primly: “Staff Sergeant Grif, sir."
Grif’s eyes narrow. “Oh, man,” says Grif. “I think I actually, really, truly hate you.”
Single Stalled
Chapter Summary
He still watches other people eat, going down the mental list of everything they’re doing
right and everything they’re doing wrong.
After two hours of rolling on his bed and complaining like a two-hundred pound baby, Grif
drags his ass back out to find a file to change their positions. Then Simmons bounces his leg
at a furious pace for all of ten minutes before he heads out to find him.
By now, it’s almost twenty-two-hundred, and military bases never sleep but they do quiet in
time for the night patrol. The halls are mostly empty. The night guards are along the outer
walls, sliding in and out of the halogen lights.
Simmons spots a fellow private in the halls and asks for directions. He stutters five thousand
times, receives directions, can’t hear what he said, asks him to repeat the directions, still
doesn’t hear, pretends he heard the directions instead of asking for a third repeat, and speedwalks away. He pauses to bang his head against the wall. He tries to remember what little he
heard. Walks with purpose towards where he thinks the captain’s quarters are. Winds up in
the armory.
“Great,” he mutters, “I guess I found the armory, if Grif manages to actually switch the jobs,
which knowing him, he probably won’t, so I’ve just found his job for him. A brilliant start at
your new base, Simmons! Really making a quality impression on your fellow men!”
He immediately spins in place see if anyone heard him talking to himself. There’s nobody in
sight. Thank god.
“And now you’re worried about someone hearing you talk to yourself,” he goes on. “And
now you’re doing it again! Of course! Honestly, if you put half the effort you do in chattering
to yourself into actually figuring shit out, you might have actually—”
Around the back of the armory’s aluminum walls, under the light of a crusty halogen lamp,
there’s a pair of bathrooms. Presumably because the armory was a bit out of the way, and it
was easier for soldiers working there to hop into a bathroom close-by.
Simmons has some habits he has never broken. He still inspects every trash can he passes. He
hates a cluttered room, but has never encountered a messy kitchen because he will clean a
dirty kitchen, compulsively, on sight. He still watches other people eat, going down the
mental list of everything they’re doing right and everything they’re doing wrong. He still
dreads physical exams and was frankly relieved when Sarge didn’t give a single shit about
them ever. He still checks every bathroom, out of what he pretends might be curiousity, but
sometimes, when he tries to stop himself, he can’t. Now his hands reach out to the men’s
door like they’re not his. He can’t say what he’s thinking, because he might not be thinking at
all. He hasn’t had to think about these habits in five years.
The bathroom has only a single stall, the purpose of which is defeated by the fact that the
door locks. It’s dirty in the cracks, the mirror above the sink is broken, the sink itself is more
grey than white, there’s half a lightbulb working, and the air has the vague tang of fermented
piss. Simmons squints in the light.
But not a bad size. Not cramped at all. Out of the way, with a door that locks for privacy, and
no apparent staff around at this time of day. The only caveat is the women’s bathroom right
next door and what Simmons bets are thin walls, but there’s not a single woman in Red Base
anyway, so it’s a moot issue.
These are the kinds of bathrooms that Simmons still looks for, after all these years. These are
the kinds of bathrooms someone could get away with throwing up in.
He reaches to test the sink, because he’d always liked to wash his face after—
Oh, for fuck’s sake , Simmons thinks. He’s only been here one day, and he has a whole cast of
commanding officers to suck up to. He has business to do, doesn’t he? People to please, asses
to kiss, organization to do. And the swelling in his jaw? Not a good look (says Simmons’
internal monologue, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like Donut’s).
Christ, can he even purge anymore now that Sarge replaced his throat? Would his breath still
smell like vomit afterwards? Do the seven metal teeth in the back of his jaw even have
enamel to erode? He bets Grif would be able to smell the puke on his breath and Grif, the
motherfucker, would absolutely ask about it at the worst possible time.
He pulls his hand away. He makes a face in the mirror. Leaves the bathroom and shuts the
dirty door and walks off without a backwards glance. “Honestly,” he begins again, “if you put
half the effort you do in chattering to yourself into actually figuring shit out, you might have
actually found Grif by now, and then you’d have leftover effort to figure his shit out for him,
which would solve about seventy-five percent of your own shit anyway…”
“Okay, so, I can explain,” says Grif the minute Simmons gets back.
“You were here?”
“Uh, yeah, I got back like thirty minutes ago. And I have a good reason why it didn’t work
out--”
Simmons groans loudly. “Let me guess," he says. "the good reason is that you got lost, and
decided it wasn’t worth it, but then you got turned around and wound up involved with the
‘weed they keep off the premises,’ and then you said something stupid and now a whole
bunch of COs are pissed off at you?"
Grif pauses. “Is that... not a good reason...?”
Rat's Wheel
Chapter Summary
He’d know that perfectly-generic blue armor set anywhere.
For your information, Simmons hasn’t thrown up in almost a decade. Not a whole decade,
because Simmons hasn’t really been keeping track of the dates; there’s no Very Special
Anniversary Of Simmons Getting His Young Adulthood Out Of The Toilet. But he knows he
was twenty-two when he purged last, and he knows he was twenty-two because that’s when
he was in Basic, just before they shipped him off to Blood Gulch Outpost One.
Simmons is twenty-seven now, which means it’s been five years. That’s almost a decade.
Right? It counts. Rounding up the five to a seven, rounding the seven up to an eight, and then
rounding up the eight to a ten. That’s definitely how math works. Right? Right?
For Christ’s sake, he’s trying to be optimistic. Five years is a long fucking time, okay?
It felt like a long time.
“Sorry, what?” says Simmons.
Private Sissy--apparently short for “Sissel”--gives him a Look. “I said,” he repeats, “take a
look at the new Blue guy.”
They’re standing at the base of the wall, looking across at the Blue Base, which is an
identical wall with two Blue guys standing right where Simmons and Sissy are. In short, Grif
did not get their jobs switched, and Simmons is standing here in forty degree weather while
Grif presumably fucks up whatever organization system they had in the armory. Simmons
wrinkles his nose, but takes the binoculars when Sissy offers them. He squints down at the
side entrance as Blue Base opens their doors for a jeep, and the new guy jumps out—
Wait a minute, Simmons thinks. He’d know that perfectly-generic blue armor set anywhere.
That’s Caboose .
“I wonder why they’re bringing in a new guy now?” wonders Sissy. “And just one, too.”
“Well, Grif and I were just transferred, so…”
“That just makes it more suspicious,” says Sissy. “Both Bases getting new guys one day
apart?”
“Well, if Grif and I were just transferred because our Base was giving up the canyon, then it’s
not implausible that the other Base would also think the canyon wasn’t worth…”
“No, you’re not thinking big enough, Simmons,” says Sissy.
“Oh,” says Simmons. Right, so, Sissy isn’t his superior, but Simmons is trying to not hate all
his coworkers on sight--trying to hate everybody on sight--anyway, some butter couldn’t hurt
. Make eye contact. Nod your head. Be agreeable. No need to kiss as much ass as with
superiors, but like--maybe a half-ass kiss. A quarter?
“Uh... Right,” is what Simmons comes up with. “Yes. Absolutely.”
“They must have intel on us. They know that we received new troops.”
“A true state of emergency,” agrees Simmons.
“But they only received one guy,” mutters Sissy. “And we received two guys.”
“An astute observation,” says Simmons. He’s trying not to sound sarcastic, he swears , he’s
just shooting for the quarter-ass-kiss ratio, which is a lot harder than his usual default modes
of pure brown-nosing and full-tilt superiority.
“And if they have intel on us, but they only got one guy and we got two,” Sissy goes on, “and
they know we got two, then…”
“Blue Command is running out of reinforcements to send?” says Simmons.
Sissy gives him a Look. “Not big enough, Simmons,” he says with distaste.
Oh god, Simmons thinks, this is just like junior high all over again. Or maybe it’s been junior
high ever since junior high. How come nothing ever changes?
“Clearly, Blue Command has sent in a soldier of unprecedented talent and skill.”
Ohhh, my god, Simmons thinks. Simmons looks through the binoculars again. Caboose is
patting the jeep’s windshield with tender care and affection. His CO’s are giving each other
Looks.
“I, uh,” says Simmons. “I dunno if he looks the type. In my... opinion.”
“Oh, Jesus,” says Sissy, “look at that madness he’s doing to that car. Treating it like it’s got
intelligent life—the behavior of mad geniuses around the universe. He’s probably a tech
expert, too. They’ve sent in a specialist, Simmons.”
“What an inference,” says Simmons.
“They intend to take this base with the aid of one man. To end this war in one fell swoop.”
Simmons is trying not to despise his coworkers on sight. He reminds himself of this. He’s just
chosen the completely wrong fucking idiot for his pilot test. “Oh, diabolical!” says Simmons,
and thinks about maybe pushing Sissy out a window.
“And look!” says Sissy, pointing vigorously. “Look at that blue armor! Nobody wears the
generic recruits armor anymore. He’s trying to stay under the radar. And the further you want
to stay under the radar, the more you have something to hide.”
“Hmmmmm,” says Simmons.
“His ingenuity and intellectual prowess must be even moreso than I had initially assumed,”
says Sissy. “A tactical mastermind .”
“HMMMMMMM,” says Simmons.
“But I’ve never heard of Blue Command having any such person before,” says Sissy. “Which
means that wherever he was before--locked up in some remote outpost, presumably--it was to
keep the secret .”
Sissy never shuts the fuck up. “You don’t say!” says Simmons. At least when Grif never shuts
the fuck up, he at least makes himself either stupid enough, familiar enough, or entertaining
enough to be worth listening to. Usually all three, nowadays.
“A covert military operation,” says Sissy, “that engineers genetically-modified humans
spliced together with the strength and intellect of a thousand soldiers. A one-man army,
possessing inhuman strength and intelligence that we can barely comprehend.”
Caboose drops his gun, which fires into the tire of the jeep. The jeep begins to sag. “No,
Candice!” he shrieks so loudly that Simmons can hear him at the opposite base. He’s doing
that thing again where he names giant metal vehicles after women, Simmons thinks, which is
usually the precursor to the giant metal vehicle woman trying to kill a small fleshy human
man.
“Candice,” says Sissy. “A code word for some torturous, heartless experiment he plans to
inflict upon his prisoners…”
“UHHH,” says Simmons. “Yyyyyeah."
“…in a chilling recreation of the mind-breaking torture he suffered in captivity.”
“That sounds. HmmmMMm. EXACTly right,” Simmons says.
“No doubt his mind, incredibly powerful as it may be, is hopelessly shattered into anxiety,
misanthropy, and suicidal self-loathing as a result of his torture, which he cannot remember
because he’s been rebooted and placed at a remote outpost for years to hide him from himself
and other prying eyes; as simultaneously, the multiple personality fragments that emerged
from his torture were harvested and placed into the AI implants of other supersoldiers…”
As is something that outlandish could ever happen, thinks Simmons. It breaks the suspension
of disbelief, is all he’s saying.
Then Sissy says something and Simmons blinks and didn’t catch it. “Sorry, what?” says
Simmons.
Sissy gives him a Look. Simmons has the feeling that the agreeable-ness tactic is not
working.
Well, okay, fine, Simmons didn’t like Sissy anyway.
“I said, I’m going to radio in that the Blues have a new guy,” he says. “News this catastrophic
cannot be left unreported. We have a one-man apocalypse coming in, Simmons, just you
wait.”
“A brilliant idea,” says Simmons, through gritted teeth.
“Anything you want to add to the report?”
Simmons watches the blue COs wrestle the distraught Caboose inside the Blue Base. Sissy is
going to be pissed when he figures it out, and Simmons can’t wait for Sissy to figure it out.
Preferably in front of everyone who held Sissy in moderate- to high-esteem and all his COs.
Simmons’ll video it on his helmet cam, and if he’s not there when it happens, he’ll make Grif
do it.
Basically, screw this guy. “Nope!” he says. “Nothing at all! A great report.”
“Good,” says Sissy, satisfied. “We’ll wrap that up, and then our shift will be over, and we can
head down for lunch.” And he turns away to fiddle with his radio.
The thought of lunch makes Simmons almost nauseous. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, because a
staff sergeant told Grif to move all his shit to his new room at four in the fucking morning,
and he’d had to help because Grif, of course, began complaining very loudly about being
woken up at four in the fucking morning, which woke up Simmons at four in the fucking
morning, and he’d figured that he had to help Grif move all his shit or he’d never get Grif and
Grif’s complaining out of his room--not that it mattered in the end, because Simmons was
moved to the common dorm right after that, anyway. Therefore, Simmons assumes that the
tight ball of dread in his stomach is because he hadn’t eaten breakfast. Or dinner the night
before, come to think of it.
He hasn’t skipped a meal, unless there was absolutely no food available, in five years.
Almost seven, which is almost eight, which is almost a decade, right? There were no
opportunities to miss a mealtime with Sarge breathing down everyone’s necks and yelling
about how they couldn’t defeat the dirty Blues if they didn’t eat Command’s freeze-dried
cardboard. Hadn’t been his choice--Sarge loved MREs. (“Builds character! Can be used to
bludgeon people to death! Pisses Grif off! What’s not to love about MREs?”) And there were
no single-stalled bathrooms with doors that locked in Blood Gulch, either.
Now that Simmons thinks about it--in Blood Gulch, there were no options to consider:
Simmons ate the MRE, and he ate all of the MRE, and he kept it down, and it drove him nuts
. There was nothing else he could do, but that didn’t stop him from thinking about it
constantly, like rubbing his fingers over a scab--or wanting to keep marathoning a TV show
he’d already finished and instead just thinking about it all day long--or itching to solve a set
of math problems (which, apparently, was uniquely a Simmons thing). And with all the time
he’d had while stand around with Grif--back before Grif and Simmons had filled the time
with sniping at each other--he’d waste entire hours, staring at the Blues, thinking about
throwing up, wondering what they actually put in those MREs, listing and relisting every
processed fake ingredient that he’d sworn to avoid, all of which could be in his intestines
right then, until Grif came by to piss him off.
But nothing changed. Sarge still made him eat. Sarge stared at him until he did, sometimes
with a shotgun. Grif was still always in the communal bathroom, and the hallways echoed
like the biggest tattle-tale waiting to happen. Simmons, grudgingly, accepted that mealtimes
and what happened at meals was now entirely out of his hands, and there was no point to
thinking about it anymore. He had no choice but to go with what the rest of Red Team did.
So sometime after he was posted in Blood Gulch, he just… stopped thinking about it. And by
“sometime,” he means he stopped thinking about it after four straight years .
(But at least he did better than Church. The asshole never stopped pining after Tex.)
“Sorry, what?” says Simmons.
“I said, what’s your first name? Colonel wants to know,” asks Sissy. His Look is only
growing stronger.
“Uh,” says Simmons. “Dick.”
Sissy snorts and turns away again. Simmons feels dry and strung-out and wonders if
throwing himself out a window would be less painful than the mortification in his stomach.
He kind of wishes Caboose could come back out of the Blue Base--not that he had any
particular fondness for any of the Blues from Blood Gulch, but so that it really could be like
old times: Simmons standing on the wall, staring at the Blues, thinking about throwing up,
wondering if he should go with Sissy to lunch and what will happen if he does.
Well, no, that bit’s new, since he’s never had the option to skip. For that matter, he will go to
lunch. That’s how the routine went in Blood Gulch.
He doesn’t have to.
But he should. That’s how the routine…
But he doesn’t have to.
Just--look. Come on. Before he goes any further, don’t get him wrong--there’s a conventional
word for a person who eats food and throws up, and that’s not Simmons.
See, Simmons doesn’t have--ugh, what’s that word? Bulimia.
How gross. Bulimia is for teenaged white girls who want to be thin but don’t want to diet,
frittering around in high school before they grow out of it and join a yoga class and flip back
and forth between varying degrees of veganism. Alternatively, bulimia is for gay men-skinny twinks with no muscle and 6% body fat. Bulimia is lazy, hedonistic, and a waste of
food. Simmons is a white straight man (part grey cyborg?), far past his teenage years, and
doing his best to be the antithesis of lazy and gay and hedonistic.
And Simmons definitely knows he doesn’t have bulimia because Simmons doesn’t think he’s
fat. Fucked-up girls look in the mirror and think oooh, oh nooo , I’m so fat , I have to stop
eating for ever , but really they’re stick-thin, and Simmons knows this because that’s what the
old anorexia commercials said, and those are real and good and totally accurate depictions of
what it’s like to have an eating disorder.
No, Simmons knows that his weight is within the normal BMI range--a little on the low side,
even, because Simmons is much taller than average. And for that matter, being a shapeless
stringbean with no muscle definition isn’t fun, either. He’s a soldier, right? Where’s his
ripped set of abs and pair of biceps? Instead, he has a tiny pouch of gut-fat that never goes
away, a knobbly chest, no chest, bony elbows, flabby arms. He looks normal in a size
medium shirt, and disproportionate in his underwear. He can see himself just fine, when he
can bear to look, and when he can bear to think of anyone else looking at him.
Simmons’s body suits him, down to his personality, his face, his intelligence, his education,
his family history, his outpost at Blood Gulch, his entire military career: Sub-par to mediocre,
plain and unappealing. To no point, purpose, or consequence to anyone.
QED: Simmons is a mentally healthy and functioning individual with absolutely zero hangups whatsoever.
“Sorry, what?” says Simmons.
Sissy gives him a Look.
“Never mind,” Sissy says. “Shift’s over now. Lunchtime.”
Simmons looks back at where Caboose disappeared into Blue Base. Sissy still has the Look
on his face, like how Caboose’s CO’s did when he accidentally shot their jeep, and Simmons
doesn’t really want to sit at a table across from that Look. Makes him nauseous up to his eyes
just to think of it. But he should go.
He will.
He doesn’t have to.
He should.
He doesn’t have to.
He-“You go on ahead,” says Simmons.
He sits by the gate for the next four hours and watches the new shift come and go. He thinks
about getting lunch and throwing it up for just for something to do, like back in the day,
anything but being here; this is why he waits until the kitchen has closed and all the leftovers
are packed away before he stands to find something (anything) to do, even as he wonders
what the point of not throwing up even is, what he stands to gain by not giving in. He can’t
remember why he ever wanted to stop.
Prissy Sissy
Chapter Summary
“I know, it’s practically five-star dining."
“That guy sounds like an asshole,” says Grif the next day.
Simmons kicks a box of spare armor bits. “Yeah, he was,” he says, but without much
certainty.
“Dude, his name is Sissy . No way he’s not a dick.”
Everyone’s who’s ever not liked Simmons is a dick. This has been Simmons’s personal
policy for ages. But that means Simmons is surrounded by dicks. Thousands of dicks.
Around every corner, in his face, riding his ass—
Oooookay , Simmons should have used the word “douchebag” instead of dick, because this is
getting weird.
“Sorry, what?” says Simmons.
Grif gives him a look, but it’s not a Look. “I said, I guess this place really does suck,” says
Grif. He lifts the box of spare armor and shoves it on a shelf with more force than necessary.
“I figured it’d be better since fucking Sarge isn’t here, but I guess there’s CO’s no matter
where you go, and being made a CO turns you into a hard-assed lunatic--Simmons, if I ever
start yelling at subordinates for being lazy fuckers, you have to shoot me.”
“Rules exist for a reason,” sniffs Simmons. This, Simmons believes. This, Simmons believes
more than Grif could ever possibly know.
“Ugh. Rules. Routines. Regulations . No thanks. I’m more of a free-spirited kinda guy. Take
it my own speed. Go with my gut. Let my passions lead. Actually, my passions are taking me
to breakfast. Let’s get outta here before they steal all my ketchup packets.”
“Yeah,” says Simmons, “because following no schedule and no rules and no principles
whatsoever has really helped you do something with your life, huh?”
“My career in sleeping on demand, mediocre to sub-par performance, and disappointing my
friends and family is really taking off,” says Grif. “I said come on.”
This is Simmons’s third day on this base. It is the first meal he has eaten since arriving. He
knows this is a bad idea because the idea of food sounds divine right now, and it’s never a
good idea to eat when he’s hungry, and especially never a good idea to eat when he’s tired
from not having been able to sleep. But he’d been up all night worrying about being tired
from being hungry which made him unable to sleep in the first place? But—
“Sorry, what?” says Simmons.
Grif frowns. “Geez, are you out of it or what?”
--Right. He’s reaching the point where he can’t focus, which he vaguely remembers being a
thing that used to happen sometimes, back In The Day.
Going with Grif might not be so bad, Simmons thinks.
(This, later, is what Simmons realizes was a Mistake. Having a friend is no substitute for
having a battle plan.)
The mess hall doesn’t just serve standard meals. There’s a serving line--poor schmucks who
get assigned to kitchen duty ask what main course, what side, what condiment you want on
your tray, and you have to tell them what you want. There’s a main course, a side, a fruit, and
a drink.
“I know, it’s practically five-star dining,” says Grif. “Wait, you haven’t been here yet? Isn’t
this like, your third day on this base?”
“I’ve had some snacks in my bunk,” Simmons lies.
“Shit, where’d you get them? Hook me up, dude.”
“Hell no. You’ll eat them all,” Simmons lies again, without thinking twice. Like riding a bike.
Grif goes through the line first. The options are oatmeal, eggs, toast, jam, apples, bananas,
apple juice, orange juice, and Grif’s ketchup packets. Simmons stares at the food line until
the first server gives him a dirty look from under his cap. “Hurry up,” he snaps. “What do
you want?”
“What the guy before me had,” says Simmons without thinking. Ah, shit , he’s taking dietary
advice from Grif.
Grif, as it turns out, got the oatmeal (main course), the jam (the side), the ketchup (the fruit
(???????)), and the milk (the drink). Simmons stares at his plate. “Grif, what the hell is this,”
he says when they find a table. “None of these go together.”
Grif, oddly enough, seems mock-offended. “Don’t look at me. I thought you’d get the eggs
and the toast, and then I could put the jam on the toast, and then you’d have the eggs and the
milk, and I’ll save the ketchup for the freeze-dried meat patties at lunch…”
“When did we decide to turn our breakfast into a jigsaw puzzle?!”
“You’ve literally eaten the same fucking thing for breakfast every day for the last five years,”
says Grif.
Grif is right. Those were the rules: Simmons eats precisely four eggs and a coffee with one
ounce of milk every morning. But here they serve coffee that he can taste the pre-added sugar
in, plus one egg not four, and they expect him to supplement the rest of the meal with a bunch
of other shit that Simmons really would rather not deal with and all their consequences. And
even if he were going to build a new breakfast plan, were they going to have eggs and milk
tomorrow? The answer was that Simmons didn’t know. In Blood Gulch, there was always
those awful instant-egg packets with the even-awfuller instant-milk powder with the
strangely-decent instant-coffee, they literally never ran out, he could always rely on them, it
was a permanent solution to a temporary station, and once he got used to it and he didn’t die
he figured it’d be okay to keep eating it; but here, what could he expect? A new menu every
day, ingredients he doesn’t know--this shit is like 75% processed grains? How was he
supposed to fend off all this—
“I guess we’ll find out what ketchup in oatmeal tastes like,” says Grif, and rips open his
packets.
“ No , that is disgusting--Grif, don’t you dare —”
Over Grif’s shoulder, Simmons sees Sissy come in through the front entrance. Grif takes the
moment to pour ketchup all over his oatmeal. “Ugh, Grif, that’s gross!”
“Gotta live to eat, man,” says Grif, and shoves it into his mouth.
Simmons shoves his own tray at Grif. “Well, thanks, asshole, now I’m not hungry.”
“Perfect. More for me.”
Simmons sits across from Grif and pretends there’s nobody else around. He waits to escape.
He definitely does not make eye contact with Sissy. Sissy is a toolbag and Simmons does not
want to talk to him and this is what Simmons tells himself over and over. There’s literally
nothing happening but Grif eating his abomination of a breakfast, and somehow Simmons
still feels like he can’t handle everything happening so much and so fast all at once.
Simmons snags his tray back. “Hey!” Grif says, but Simmons ignores him. Now that
Simmons thinks about it, oatmeal always did come up smoother than eggs. This is the fastest
and easiest decision Simmons has ever made.
Old Habits
Chapter Summary
“At least tell me who he was!”
All their old habits are back within the week. Caboose teamkills his first CO, according to
rumor. Grif’s entire squad requests to be moved to a more competent leader. Simmons begins
to throw up again.
See, Caboose turned out to be very fond of Candice the Warthog, and Candice was also
equipped with autofiring machine guns, and Caboose did have that habit of disassembling
mechanical equipment just to put it back together in ways that were technically functional,
but not quite--what was that thing people said about creating in one’s own image? And Grif
says that he was only a useless piece of shit back at Blood Gulch because the only person he
hated more than Simmons was Sarge, but it turns out (to Simmons’s utter lack of shock) that
Grif is actually just a useless piece of shit who wouldn’t do a pull-up unless it was to prevent
his own imminent demise off an icy cliff, and even then he’d probably wheedle Simmons into
doing it for him. After all, theory says that humans are creatures of habit, by which theory
means that humans preserve limited conscious cognitive resources by automating common
routines and skills in the subconscious, which in turn—
“Holy shit,” says Grif. “You got laid.”
Simmons chokes. “I what ?” When? Where? Did Simmons miss it? Is Grif talking about
some other person in the empty armory with just the two of them?
“You,” declares Grif, “got laid.”
“No I didn’t! I mean—I—I just—”
“Oh my god, I’m saying you got laid, not that you killed a man, no need to sound so guilty,”
says Grif.
“Grif, I have killed a man. Multiple men. I’m a soldier.”
“Who, you? When? The Flowers guy died from aspirin, the Church guy died from Caboose,
the Tex chick died from—”
“We killed a man in Basic within two hours of meeting each other.”
“Yeah, whatever,” says Grif (but he still makes a sign of the cross for Hammer). “But for real,
dude. I know these things. You have the face.”
Simmons frowns. “What face?”
“And the chill,” says Grif.
“What chill?”
“Yeah, like that,” says Grif. “Like, if this was unfucked-Simmons, you’d be like—” Grif
pitches his voice two octaves higher: “‘Fuck off, Grif, I’m super chill all the time, I’m the
chillest and the coolest and I need everyone to love me to compensate for my leaky-boat selfesteem—’”
“Fuck off, Grif, I am super chill all the time,” snaps Simmons—
Grif bursts out laughing.
“--and I do not have leaky-boat self-esteem! What the fuck is leaky-boat self-esteem?”
Grif waves a hand. “You’re relaxed! You’re not freaking out over the S-E-X word! You
definitely got laid.”
“I did not!”
“What, you’re proud of being an unfuckable virgin, now?”
“I’m not unfuckable—”
“You got someone who disproved that?”
Simmons slams his pistol down. “I’m swapping this in for a new one! Good-bye!” he halfyells with an awful nervous crack in his voice, takes the first gun he can see, and leaves.
“At least tell me who he was!” Grif yells after him, and Simmons almost shoots Grif right
there for the pronoun.
Functionally speaking, nothing happened. There’s no true, real, magical moment that breaks
him. Simmons didn’t have any oath or commitment to not throwing up his food--he would
have if Blood Gulch had let him. And it’s not like he can’t dabble in his old habits and also
hunt for promotions, right? So when Simmons tries to make sense of the whole affair, his
usual fall-back is: “Old habits.”
The whole throwing-up affair is, in fact, so old and habitual and therefore mundane that it’s
boring to think about. It’s boring to even recount. When telling a story, no narrator talks about
the mundanities: he woke up and brushed his teeth; he put on his clothes; he walked outside
his room; he stared at the Blues for five hours with Grif; Sarge yelled about nothing;
Simmons and Grif argued about nothing; Grif tried to leave for the Vegas quadrant
—”C’mon, Simmons, let’s go”—”We can’t”—”Why not?”—”Because we’re waiting for—”
— literally anything other than Simmons’s life to happen. Yeah, see, this is why Simmons
isn’t exactly going to be part of the main cast of a hit TV show anytime soon, let alone the
main feature of an individual novel-memoir. Who the fuck wants to hear about a life spent
doing nothing?
Here’s how the newest iteration of old and fucking dull habits roll over and drag their groggy
asses out of bed to better Simmons’s career in doing nothing: Simmons is, as it turned out,
very hungry after not eating for three days. What a shocker ! Almost as if the body desires to
maintain a state of homeostasis in terms of energy regulation and storage! Well--that is not to
say that biology isn’t more than the sum of its parts, or that bodily stored energy mass isn’t
more than the sum of its laws of thermodynamics, but--oh, he digresses; he’s had this
argument with himself before, vehemently, throughout his high school and college years; he’s
had the low carb debate and the low fat debate and the vegan debate and the thirty-bananachallenge debate (which, for the record, is the one debate he refuses to ever have ever again,
thanks). Old news. Old debates. Old habits. He can rattle off a thousand different arguments
over a topic he's not sure he cares about. Simmons is twenty-seven and he’s already crusty
and calcified and old.
Anyway, he eats breakfast with Grif. He goes to the bathroom behind the armory and he
throws it up. Then he washes his face in the sink and leaves.
A thrilling tale, right? Like brushing teeth: apply toothpaste to brush, drag brush across teeth,
spit, rinse, leave. Again: functionally speaking, nothing happened.
After that, Simmons doesn’t have anything to do. He feels light-headed, actually--a friendly,
protective buzz that makes him a little unsteady. His stomach hurts a bit with the pain of how
fast it’d become empty, but it’s a familiar sort of hurt, one that he’d thought he’d forgotten
but had only forgotten to miss. He floats down the hallway and into the sleeping quarters and
sits on his bed.
Just sat. Staring off into space. Not thinking about anything. He doesn’t have anywhere to be,
no drills until the afternoon. Voices troop past the door outside and he can barely hear them,
let alone care.
He pulls off his armor and lies back in his bed, tucking his arms behind his head to prop
himself up--not to go to sleep, but to relax and do... nothing. To just lie there and do nothing
at all. To lounge around in a head that feels scooped clean of its junk and chatter. It’s nice. It’s
really nice. He wants to enjoy it and not think too hard for just a little while.
For the first time in over five years, it’s peaceful, both inside and out.
Like he said: nothing happened.
By the time Grif suspects that Simmons is have illicit gay sex to de-stress behind his back,
Simmons is throwing up dinner twice a week and going to sleep tired and content.
Fudged Smudge
Chapter Summary
“Oh my god,” says Grif, “you do not believe that, do not give me that shit.”
Caboose is such a teamkilling menace that Red Base is actually starting to lose.
“He’s killing his own team,” says Simmons, “and we’re losing?”
They’re sitting at the window where Grif, in theory, swaps weapons for anyone who comes
by needing a weapon or ammo change. But mostly Grif just uses the window and the
accompanying desk to slam his helmet against in frustration and boredom. “I know . I don’t
know how that’s possible, either. I think the people leading ops against him right now are just
so shocked that they stand there until Caboose sets something else on fire, which starts
spitting bullets, which hits a nearby alien-moose wildlife, which gets pissed and spears them
through the gut.”
“That’s an oddly specific example,” says Simmons.
“And you know whose problem this is?” Grif complains.
“Not mine,” says Simmons gleefully.
“No, of course it’s not,” says Grif. “It’s mine."
“Because you got promoted,” says Simmons, “unfairly.”
“Y’know, Simmons, I don’t complain to you so you can use your snotty Irish ‘I told you so’
voice on me. Nothing’s unfair in this piece of shit world and you know it.”
“Nothing except you having to lead an actual military operation to take out Caboose, which is
why you’re complaining to me about it.”
“Exactly,” says Grif.
“I didn’t think you could possibly become more of a piece of shit,” says Simmons, and stands
up. “I’m out. I have to patrol for the Blue Menace in twenty. Have fun doing nothing at your
disorganized, un-color-coded armory, and hating your job.”
“Hey, I’m your CO, dude,” says Grif. “Shouldn’t you be kissing my ass?”
Simmons makes a long and exaggerated noise of disgust.
“Oh thank god,” says Grif. “To be honest, I’d lose my mind if you started treating me like
Sarge.”
“Wow, really?” says Simmons, in his dryest, most brown-nosing voice: “Then I’ll do my best
not to, sir!”
Grif makes an equally long and exaggerated noise of disgust. “Uh, no, no no, no no no, don’t
you dare use your ass-kissing voice on m—”
“No idea what you’re talking about, sir!”
“NO, holy shit—”
“I would never do anything to make you uncomfortable, sir!”
“Simmons you’re freaking me the fuck out—”
“Whatever it is you need, just let me know, sir!” parrots Simmons.
Grif gives a small shriek and slams the window closed. Simmons snickers to himself. Takes a
moment and realizes what it was he’d just said.
“Wait a minute,” he mutters. “Do I really sound that?”
“Yes you do! And it’s really fucking annoying, too!” says Grif’s voice through the shutters.
“What the hell?” Simmons demanded. “How come nobody ever told me I sound like a giant
tool?!”
“What the fuck,” says Grif’s voice, “do you think I’ve been telling you for the last five
years?!”
Simmons scowls at the metal shutters.
“You’re absolutely right, sir!” says Simmons. “A source of wisdom as always, sir!”
The shutters clang angrily. “Shut up, Simmons!”
But apparently, Grif really hates the armory job. More than even Simmons banked on.
Grif hates the armory so much that Grif was selling the armory to the fucking Blues just so he
wouldn’t have to deal with it. Simmons is completely unsurprised, and is still riding the high
from having thrown up not two hours ago, and thus remains calm.
“WHAT THE FUCK,” Simmons shrieks. “You’re going to get yourself SHOT, or COURTMARTIALED, or—”
Grif grabs Simmons by the visor--puts his sticky black glove right on Simmons’s clean,
finger-print-less, smudge-free helmet glass and drags him down so their faces are inches
away. “Shut,” Grif hisses, “up, Simmons!”
Simmons flails his arms and Grif scrabbles his sticky black gloves all over Simmons’s helmet
and Simmons yells “Get your nasty hands off my helmet!” to which Grif yells “I will when
you stop screaming like a girl ” and then they have a silent standing wrestling match of Grif
trying to rub his filthy fucking hands all over Simmons’s armor and Simmons trying to slap
Grif’s hands away like a game of whack-a-mole that turns into Simmons getting revenge by
rubbing his dirty gloves all over Grif’s visor and Grif not giving a single shit about
cleanliness per se but he can’t stand Simmons rubbing his hands on Grif’s visor on the
principle of being a stubborn bastard who doesn’t like to lose so in the end they stand there
rubbing greasy gloveprints on each other’s helmets like fucking toolbags.
“Okay, we look stupid,” says Grif. “Truce?”
Simmons shoves him. “I said truce!” says Grif, and shoves him right back. Simmons moves
to shove him again but Grif ducks and Simmons knows he isn’t athletic enough for another
try so he cuts his losses to his meager, damaged, non-athletic dignity and instead pops his
helmet off in the snootiest, huffiest manner he can manage. “Simmons, it will not kill you to
have germs on your helmet,” says Grif.
“I can’t believe you,” Simmons says, pulling out a cleaning rag. “Betraying the Reds, selling
our ammo to the Blues so they can use our own ammo against us to kill our men, betraying
our cause—”
“Oh my god,” says Grif, “you do not believe that, do not give me that shit.”
“Well, maybe I do! How would you know!”
“Because I’ve been standing post with you at the same base for five years,” says Grif.
“Fuck,” whispers Simmons.
“Yeah, dude, every time you ask ‘how would you know,’” says Grif, “that’s literally always
the answer. Every time.”
Simmons plants his helmet on the ground. Simmons does not think that that should literally
always be the answer, especially since they never talked about anything of substance, or at
least tried their best not to. “Fine, whatever,” says Simmons. “But I am not associated with
you, got it? I don’t know anything about this. In fact, I’m going to pretend this all never
happened, and I’m going to go on my merry way, and when you get caught because you were
lazy and messed up some paper trail, I’m not going to do diddly-fucking-squat to get you out
of this crooked path of thievery and embezzlement.”
“What? No, dude, I’m not going to get caught,” says Grif. “I covered my trail perfectly. I’m a
master of this. I’m the thievery and embezzlement king.”
“No,” says Simmons, “you watched your ass the first couple of times, and then you got lazy,
and started cutting corners, and now you’re barely watching for—”
“Fuck off!” says Grif. “How would you know?!”
“Because I’ve been standing post with you at the same base for—”
“Fuck,” says Grif.
“Uh-huh,” says Simmons. He puts his helmet back on and stands up. “Well, it’s been nice
knowing you, Grif. But I’m not intending to go down with you, so—”
“Stop, stop, wait,” says Grif.
Simmons stops. But waiting would be a waste of time, honestly, because he knows exactly
what’s going to come out of Grif’s mouth next: “No," says Simmons, "no, no, nope, do not
say what you’re about to say. What part of I’m not intending to go down with you did you
not--”
“Sure, you might not be intending to,” says Grif. “But you’re definitely going to.”
“What kind of logic is that?!”
“And I think you’re gonna cover my paper trail,” Grif muses.
“Why the fuck would I?”
Grif thinks about this. “Beeeeeeecause I’m your commanding officer?”
“Sir, yes sir!” chirps Simmons.
“No! Christ! Not like that! Okay, okay,” says Grif. “I’ll give you a cut.”
“You’re going to pay me your dirty money,” says Simmons, “to cover up your dirty money
trail. So you can continue to squander our resources, cripple our army, send our troops in
circles, lead our men to tactical ruin, and make a meager amount of pocket money that you
can barely spend at the tiny, shitty commissary that doesn’t even sell tissues.”
See, this is Grif’s thing: there’s no consequences to him. Or at least, none that count. Nothing
really matters, and because nothing really matters, there’s no reason to do anything, and
there’s no reason not to do anything. In short, enabling thinking that justifies all sorts of
awful bad habits. It’s obnoxious, horrendous, reprehensible behavior that’s frighteningly
consistent, to the point that they both know how this conversation ends seconds before it
does:
Grif says, “What else are you gonna do at this shithole of a base?”
Simmons says, “I need to know what ammo you sold, on what days, and where they were
stored."
Battle Plate
Chapter Summary
Barely? Somewhat? Completely?
Chapter Notes
short but important chapter yall. dense like cheesecake
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Grif’s not giving a single shit about anything makes him a good partner-in-crime. It also
makes him an objectively awful leader.
“You’re an objectively awful leader,” Simmons tells him at breakfast.
“Boo hoo, take it to someone who cares,” says Grif, yawning, then scratches his asscrack and
rubs his nose with the same hand, which is so fucking gross.
“You’re so fucking gross,” Simmons complains.
“Boo hoo, take it to—”
“I get it,” Simmons groans, “you don’t care.”
They’re sitting in the corner of the mess hall. Soldiers eyeball Grif with wariness. And, okay,
Simmons is no social butterfly. It doesn't come naturally to him, either. But he knows a bad
job when he sees one, and by god, he is always 100% attuned to the imminent possibility that
everyone hates him, which also seems to be the current reality. And it doesn't take a genius-or paranoia--or anxiety--or shit self-esteem--okay, whatever, let's get off this train of thought.
All you need is like, two brain cells to comprehend that the last operation against Caboose
put eight of their men in the hospital. Add a third brain cell and kick that logic into high gear:
leaders that let enemies put their men in the hospital aren't liked. They didn’t trust Grif’s
orders off the field, they didn’t trust Grif’s orders on the field, and now they don't trust Grif.
He wonders what they're thinking. Do they know that Grif and Simmons are sitting at the
same table not out of choice, but because they have to? How transparently are they just two
sad losers who can’t play nice with anyone else they haven’t been stationed together with for
five years beforehand? Barely? Somewhat? Completely?
He spears at his rubbery eggs and watches the yolk bleed. He ate eggs in Blood Gulch
because there’s no fun in throwing up eggs. Always chunky. Never dissolves right. It’s
always like that with proteins. It’s the consistency that’s key to both getting it all up and not
getting weird chunks stuck in your throat and nose, and proteins and dairies never play well
with the stomach acids and liquids. Doesn't feel right.
“Yeah, keep up that glare,” says Grif, sounding appreciative. “I don’t want any of these
assholes coming near me before I’ve gotten at least my first plate down. Fuckin’
subordinates, always needing junk… expecting me to do my responsibilities…”
“Yeah,” says Simmons. Another soldier turns away from them. He thinks he sees Sissy in the
food service line. His throat squirms with something like guilt, with something like need.
"Let's hurry up and get out of here," he says. He's not sure if he wants to throw up the eggs
yet, but it's starting to look like a good idea, and he has to be early if he wants to hit the
armory bathroom and not be late. "I have first shift,” explains Simmons, “and you need to get
your ass to the armory, because I know that everyone else on the first shift is terrified about
the Blue Menace and they all want better weapons and chest-pieces, so the armory is going to
be their first stop.”
“Ugh,” groans Grif, and mutters: “First stop Zippy’s, or whatever.”
“What’s a Zippy?” asks Simmons.
Grif does a doubletake. Clears his throat.
“What? Oh, nah, it’s nothing.”
“Yeah, based on the fact that this is you ,” says Simmons, “I somehow don’t believe that.”
“No, I’m for real, it’s just an inside joke from home--”
“This is some kind of sex thing that I didn’t get, isn’t it,” says Simmons.
Grif chokes. Bursts into sniggers.
“I knew it,” says Simmons. “What is it really?”
Grif is laughing in his hands.
“What? What’s going on? Why do we need to stop at Zippy’s? Why first? Is it important? Is
this an STD joke, or a--no, wait, this is a drugs thing, isn’t it? It’s--what?”
Sissy is looking at them with disdain. Everyone in the hall gives Grif and his laughter fit a
wide berth. Simmons figures he probably should too; he should drop Grif like a hot potato
and make a break for the career ladder. Doesn't matter that Grif's a CO anymore. Simmons is
shooting himself in the foot by being seen with him. He has to scout out who to cozy up to,
has to tell Grif to pretend they don't know each other, has to, has to...
"Grif, shut up," snaps Simmons.
Grif shuts up. Grif, in fact, freezes altogether and gives him a dirty look that could sour
milk. "Oh, Jesus, Simmons. What've you got against enjoying yourself? What crawled up
your ass this time?"
"I don't--nothing crawled up my ass, we just... need to go."
"Then you can go," Grif mutters. "I'm going to sit and enjoy my breakfast like a normal
human being who doesn't have a freakishly early internal body clock."
"The HUD Sarge installed in my eyepiece can't be set early because it's synced to--"
"Simmoooooons," Grif whines, and sighs. "I just... Come on. Can you be a prissy know-itall after eight o'clock?"
Simmons stiffens. "I'm not..."
"Okay. Whatever," sighs Grif. "Christ, I'm so tired of..." But he stops before he completes the
thought, and mutters again, "Okay, whatever," and shoves a piece of toast in his mouth
instead.
Simmons and Grif sit there, not looking at each other and not looking at everyone else
looking at them and not looking at themselves. Instead, Simmons looks down at his plate.
Yeah, he’ll make do with the eggs.
Chapter End Notes
zippy's is a local restaurant chain that serves local kine hawaii food! they had a
commercial that used to go around (idk if it's still airing) that shows people who grew up
on the islands coming back to hawaii by plane, and their first stop is zippy's where they
can get all the foods they missed on the mainland lol.
insofar as i know, this is the only instance of a commercial telling a completely true
statement.
Letter Day, pt. 1
Chapter Summary
Therefore: Sissy.
On the third time Simmons pre-arranges an ammo trade with the Blues, Grif comes back with
his dirty Blue money and complains, “Caboose gets letters.”
“Like paper m--wait, you sold ammo to Caboose?” Simmons says. “What, are all his friends
turrets or something?”
“He needs bullets to keep them fed,” says Grif. “He drives a hard bargain.”
“I’m terrified to ask,” says Simmons, “but. Does Caboose even know how money works?
Grif dumps a mass of tangled necklaces, unidentified mechanical parts, two watches, a car
battery, a party horn, a pack of edible red chalk, a paper letter, and a bottle of headlight fluid
on the ground.
“That’s not payment,” says Simmons.
“Dibs on the chalk,” says Grif.
“What--no, dibs on the watches—”
“Dibs on the other watch—”
“I called dibs on both!” cries Simmons.
“And dibs on the necklaces!”
“Then I call dibs on the battery and mechanical parts!”
“Yeah, good luck doing anything with that without Lopez.”
--Which leaves the letter and the headlight fluid.
Grif holds up the headlight fluid. “Do you, uh, need this, uh… thing?” asks Grif.
“Why would I need it?” asks Simmons. “You run the armory.”
“Yeah, the armory, not the car shop. Don’t you need this for like--your new car battery?”
“It’s headlight fluid, not battery fluid.”
They look at the headlight fluid again.
“Headlight fluid is a real thing?” Grif asks.
Simmons shrugs.
“Chuck it?” asks Grif.
“Chuck it,” says Simmons.
--Which leaves the letter. Which was technically paper mail, but was really just a regular
digital message that had been printed.
“This is addressed to Caboose,” says Simmons.
“I can read, Simmons.”
Simmons glares at him. “I mean, we can’t just take this as payment. First off, it’s worth jack
shit. And second off, it’s private. It’s written for Caboose, not us.”
“He said that he thinks we miss the Blues as much as he does,” says Grif. “Except Tucker. By
which I think he meant he thinks we miss Tucker, but he doesn’t, because apparently Caboose
can hold a grudge like a motherfucker.”
They pause.
“Do we miss Tucker?” Grif asks.
“Do you wanna watch Reservoir Dogs again?” asks Simmons.
“We don’t miss Tucker,” says Grif.
“This letter isn’t even from Tucker,” says Simmons. “Where’d he go, anyway? And--this
letter still isn’t adequate payment. Grif, you have to take this back to Caboose.”
“He said he wants us to have it,” says Grif.
“He doesn’t want it?"
“He says he keeps digital copies of all the letters he gets from his sisters, and from Church,
and apparently also from Donut, who I assume is what Caboose meant when he said he was
corresponding with Admiral Cheesecake,” says Grif. “He keeps it in his helmet. He likes to
print them out so he can read them, quote unquote, ‘more softly,’ but now he’s just going to
stick to the digital copy.”
“What? Why?”
“One of his COs got pissy about it. So now he prints it out and later destroys the evidence.”
“He gave us contraband,” says Simmons.
“What? No. Why would letters be contraband?”
“I dunno, Grif. How come we don’t get letters?” says Simmons.
Simmons says that just to bitch, because he really can’t sell this letter for cash and he’s
cranky. In truth, if he actually received a letter from his parents--his parent--each parent
separately?--anyway, if he received a letter from either one of those two, Simmons doesn’t
know what he’d do. He thinks his head might implode with the urge to both set the letter on
fire and to keep it under his pillow every night, or possibly just do both simultaneously and
resultingly set his own head on fire, which might be less painful than actually reading the
letters. But—
“Yeah,” says Grif. “Why don’t we get letters?”
--Simmons doesn’t think before he talks because he never learned how to converse with
another human being. Only himself and his own head, and he can’t even do that without
fucking it up.
“Well, uh, in terms of paper letters,” says Simmons, “digital messages largely dominate most
of modern communication, and physical paper letters are only shipped for inter-planetary
travel where digital messages have to travel in offline hardware through space that might
interfere with delicate messa—”
“I just said Caboose prints regular digital letters,” says Grif. “I’m saying, why don’t I see
anyone in Red Army getting those kinda letters? Don’t you think that’s odd? C’mon, don’t
you wanna send your love to Sarge?”
“No!” yelps Simmons.
“Not even a little bit?”
“--What, I mean, we were stationed with him for five years, so, I dunno, maybe a postcard or-it would be okay, to check in—”
“Aww, you miss him,” says Grif.
They both pause.
“You miss kissing his ass,” amends Grif.
“I do not! I—” Simmons groans. ”Look, only a little, like an infinitesimally small—”
“I’m just saying,” says Grif. “We should check that out, send some letters to good ol’ Blood
Gulch—”
“Aren’t we getting distracted from the issue that Caboose didn’t really pay us?!”
“We’ll get to it,” says Grif. “Come on, don’t you wanna find out?”
“As if you’d do the legwork to find out,” says Simmons.
“Of course not,” says Grif. “You’re definitely going to find it out for me.”
“Hell no,” says Simmons. “I won’t fall for that shit again.”
Grif doesn’t bring it up again, but the next day a group of Reds are complaining loudly over a
shared cigarette pack about how they’d never heard of Blood Gulch and it wasn’t fair for
their CO to order them to--and then Simmons didn’t hear the rest. Then and only then does
Simmons remember that Kaikana Grif is still in Blood Gulch with Sarge and Lopez, and
Simmons groans very loudly for a minute straight, because now Simmons has to fall for that
shit again.
Simmons shares almost all his shifts with Sissy, but Sissy, for the most part, avoids him in
favor of meticulously tracking the “Blue Menace.” Simmons knows that his best bet for
getting answers is from (1) someone he actually knows, (2) someone who can’t escape him
for several hours, in case he fucks it up somehow, which he probably will, and (3) someone
who is so fucking stupid that Simmons won’t feel stage fright pressure and resultingly fuck
up.
Therefore: Sissy.
In times like this, Simmons hates how easily he cracks under pressure, and he tries to
remember all the great military leaders who’d never cracked under pressure before ever ,
even tries to envision himself as some Great Military Hero Dude who is, somehow, Cool and
Respected and (most importantly) Invulnerable. But by the time his shift comes around,
Simmons is itching for lunch. Sissy is always a prat. Sissy is fucking nuts, with delusions of
grandeur, and looks at Simmons like he’s barely worth the dog shit on his boots. Can’t he put
this to another day, right? Or he can ask someone else? Is there anyone else to ask?
Simmons stews in stress for four hours. Hitting the mess hall and then the bathroom would
have made this easier. He should have done that before his shift, actually, just to psyche
himself up for this conversation. He almost wants to smack himself, but then Sissy would
really think he’s nuts, so instead he just imagines an internal verbal smackdown: The hell are
you worried about? What’s the worst Sissy could say? What’s the worst that could happen?
Why’s he so hellbent on not fucking up something that he can’t fuck up?
On the fifth and last hour of their shift, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he’s ready. He’s
rehearsed what he’s going to say down to the letter, and imagined a minimum of seven
different responses from Sissy, all with according responses. He opens his mouth and—
“If I was going to sleep my way to the top,” Sissy says suddenly, “I wouldn’t have picked the
fatass.”
There’s a silence.
“What?” Simmons says, faintly.
“I’m just saying,” Sissy says, as if remarking on the weather. “Like, for one, he’s not gonna
give you a promotion. And even if he did, nobody’d respect you for it. You know that, right?”
The earth is tilting. "What?" Simmons says again, or at least he thinks he does.
Sissy snickers. Actually fucking laughs. “What’s with the scandalized voice? You’re not the
first person to sleep their way to—”
“I-I’m not sleeping with—!” Simmons lowers his voice and looks over his shoulder and,
seeing no one, hisses vehemently: “I’m not sleeping with Grif!”
Sissy gives him a doubtful look, or maybe just a look of disdain. “You don’t need to deny it
—”
Simmons wants to grab him by the fucking throat. “I’m not denying anything! I--wait, I am,
I’m saying I didn’t sleep with Grif because I didn’t ! Who told you this?! Why? When?! Why
would they think such a thing?! This is completely unwarranted, we were only stationed at
the same post before our transfer, you can't--!”
“Then why d’you hang out with him all the time?”
“Where the fuck did this come from?!” Simmons snarls. “Why the hell is this your business,
anyway?!"
Sissy puffs out his chest. Simmons wants him dead. “We’re in dire straits, Private,” Sissy
declares. “We need strong leadership. A united, unanimous effort from the Red Army--”
“You’re questioning my loyalty because I’m sleeping with Grif? WHICH I'M NOT,”
Simmons amends quickly, “I’m definitely not, this is speaking entirely hypothetically—”
“Staff Sergeant Grif isn’t the cause, Private!” says Sissy. “The cause is staying alive against
the Blue Menace.”
“The Blue—” Simmons stops and groans. Right, right, Grif being a useless leader against
Caboose, of all people. “Who gives a shit about the Blue Menace?! I need names--who's been
saying that I'm sleeping with--!?"
“Come on, Private,” says Sissy. “I hear you talk shit about him all the time.”
The earth is tilting again. “So what?” snaps Simmons.
“So we think it's odd that you're sleeping with him, but you obviously don’t like him.”
“You don’t know that!”
“Why else would someone talk as much shit about someone as you do?” asks Sissy.
(Because it’s what they do? This isn’t a fair question! Why isn’t supposed to be part of the
deal!)
Simmons backtracks: "I meant you don't know that I'm sleeping with him, not that I don't--"
“Relax. You don’t have to say anything,” Sissy goes on, as if Simmons hadn't spoken. “None
of us like him. We all talk shit about him. What I'm trying to tell you is: it's fine. You agree
with us, don't you? That we have to stay alive, that we have to do it together, and that strong
leadership is the way we're going to do it?”
There's an 'us'? Simmons wonders, and feels his eyes narrow to slits. A plurality of people
who think that Grif's inadequate, and that Grif needs to stop being inadequate or they'll all get
Caboosed? A plurality that's cohesive?
Simmons's teeth are gritted: "Sorry," he snaps, "but I'm not agreeing with anyone, or taking
any offers from anyone, who thinks I'm a fag."
Sissy takes it as the conversation ender that it is: "And I'm saying we have a spot at our table
if you want out--if you'd like to stay alive against the Blue Menace--if you’d like to find
some fame and glory in this army that isn’t dependent on your… nightly extracurriculars,”
says Sissy, in that gently condescending voice. As if Simmons is a poor despicable animal but
not quite as despicable as Grif—admittedly a new and revolutionary experience, considering
Simmons’s usual position at bottom of the social hierarchy when not in Sarge's presence. As
if Simmons would be an idiot not to know when he's being offered a leg up the social ladder,
and he should be grateful for the scraps Sissy throws him.
Simmons says nothing.
Sissy shrugs and turns away, obviously thinking it's Simmons's loss. Simmons cradles his gun
and tries not to agree.
Simmons slams open the door and Grif nearly falls out of his seat. “Can we pay Caboose to
assassinate one of our own Reds?” Simmons demands.
“I'm betting he only takes payment in form of letters from Church,” says Grif.
“And I said that’s not real payment!”
“If you wanna take it up with Caboose and his petting zoo of turrets,” Grif says serenely, “be
my guest." He looks over the edge of his magazine. "Geez, what’s up with you?”
“Nothing,” Simmons snaps, and sulks for the rest of the day.
Letter Day, pt. 2
Chapter Summary
Yeah, Simmons thinks that now would be a good time to retreat. Dinner ends in sixteen
minutes, anyway.
Simmons passes a trio of privates walking down the hall. He can feel them watching him all
the way down the hall. They probably heard the rumors--rumors that Sissy started, if it could
be called “starting a rumor” when the idiot actually believed his own conspiracy theories. He
can hear them laughing. He’s trying not to turn around and glare at them, because they
always say that stupid shit like “don’t acknowledge the bully and they’ll get bored,” even
though that never worked for Simmons ever at any point in his entire life, but-He spins around at the last second. The privates have disappeared. Nobody is laughing.
Simmons thinks about trying to correct the rumors. If he told someone no, he’s not sleeping
with Grif, then perhaps the word would get around and if he got enough people to believe
him, then it wouldn’t matter what Sissy says.
But then he remembers that he doesn’t have any friends, and he can’t just go up to any
random soldier he sees and say “Hi, so I’m straight and I’m pretty sure Grif is too, but who
really knows and if he wasn’t that’d be okay with me, right, because I’m totally okay with
gay people, I promise, and also you should pass that message along so that people don’t think
we’re banging,” because he’d die of mortification.
How’re you supposed to fix your own reputation? He’d tried, a few times, particularly in
high school. He wasn’t one of those nerds who took pride in being a pasty-faced, acneridden, Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing, fanfic-writing little shit. One time he tried
purposefully flunking his math class to prove that he wasn’t a nerdling who enjoyed math and
numbers and computer science, but his teacher found out that Simmons was still doing his
homework for fun and just not turning it in and then she gave him an A-minus because she
“understood that he was going through a tough time in his life.” And then Jake Obana, the
asshole, found out and laughing him out of the PE locker room, so...
Simmons hated being in high school. He’d figured that he’d escape to college, where nobody
knew him and people actually enjoyed their majors; but people liked to drink and party and
do stupid shit and that kinda stuff made Simmons feel like he needed to lock himself in his
room and organize his calendar just to have something to organize.
So then he decided he’d dress well and wear contacts and nuke his skin with salicylic acid
until his acne went away, and if he was going to be a loser with no friends, he would at least
look like he wasn’t; but then he never managed to go on any dates with any girls because
he’d get nervous and stammer and eventually he just started turning girls down from the start,
and then the rumors started about how no straight man would avoid dates like he did...
So he figured he’d escape to the military, but now Simmons is beginning to think that no
matter where he goes or how much he pretends, it won't be enough. People look at him and
they just... know.
He’s reaching the point where he’s becoming bored with purging. At some point, he’d started
throwing up dinner every night; and when you’re spending every night eating a little more
than you should have and then feeling so nauseous that you have to throw it back up, it
becomes irritating, and tiring, and a chore. He should probably stop it, then, if it’s becoming
so tiring. Yeah, he’ll stop.
...Well, he’ll stop tomorrow.
When tomorrow comes, Grif is outside the back of the garage, sitting in a Warthog and
fiddling with a radio with one hand. The other hand is dangling a cigarette, which Simmons
promptly swipes and steps on. Grif’s look is unamused. “Y’know how much those cost
around here?” Grif asks.
He actually sounds irritated, which isn’t Grif’s job. It’s Sarge’s job to come up with
something stupid, Donut’s job to do something stupid, Simmons’s job to get irritated with the
something stupid, and Grif’s job to mock the shit out of the something stupid.
Simmons’s tactic of “ignore the uncomfortable thing until it goes away” hasn’t failed him yet,
except when it has, multiple times in numerous situations. Okay, whatever. “How much does
it cost to replace your lungs again?” he retorts.
Grif doesn’t say anything. Instead, he goes back to fiddling with the radio. Yeah, Simmons
thinks that now would be a good time to retreat. Dinner ends in sixteen minutes, anyway.
“Well, don’t let them know you stole their jeep,” Simmons says, and turns—
“Did you know Blood Gulch isn’t even on the map?”
“Uhh,” says Simmons. “It’s kind of a small place, that’s for sure…”
“No, I mean that it’s not in any of the files at all,” says Grif. “And could you sit down?
You’re making me nervous.”
Simmons isn’t entirely sure he wants to get in a car with Grif right now. Something about it
sends alarms ringing. He stays outside the driver’s side door instead. Grif continues, “Like, I
asked some other guy about Blood Gulch, and he was like, oh, that place you guys came
from? And I was like yeah that place, I wanna look it up, and he was like okay here it is, and
he pointed to a map thing. And I was like what the hell is this, I don’t need a map, I meant
like, records ‘n shit, documents, Command orders going in and out, and he was like uhhh
well we can look it up, so we typed it into the database, and there was nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” says Grif.
Simmons chews on that for a while. Somehow he’s not surprised, considering how odd the
canyon placement was, and Tucker’s whole conspiracy thing with “Red and Blue are the
same!” and Tex, and Wyoming, and the fact that Command was somehow capable of running
a war but incapable of giving any orders that were actually worth shit--so the pieces add up,
yeah, but that means that everything they did in the canyon was...
“Well, that’s weird,” says Simmons, and leaves it at that.
“Yeah, it’s whatever,” says Grif. “I didn’t really wanna send anyone in the canyon anything.
I’d rather see people in person ‘cause, y’know, if I send a letter, I’d have to actually say
something worth sending a letter for, y’know what I mean? Can’t just talk story.”
“What’s a ‘talk story’?”
“Never mind,” says Grif, without a trace of humor.
Simmons hesitates. “Then you’d have to put up with Sis--uh, people’s nonsense in person,
though.”
“But then at least I can yell at people about their nonsense in person,” says Grif darkly. “And
then they won’t listen to me, and it’ll all be for nothing, and we’ll end up talking about
nothing. Just the way I like it.”
“Lazy,” says Simmons.
“Talking about nothing is a ton of work,” says Grif.
There’s a pause.
“Well,” says Simmons, “at least we have… this thing.” He holds up the Caboose’s letter.
“Have we figured out what we’re doing with this, anyway?”
“I tried to give it back. He says he doesn’t want it,” says Grif. (Right--Grif was getting shit
done while Simmons twiddled his thumbs and spun his wheels in the mud.) “He says he
reads them when he’s sad, so we should save it for a day when we’re sad.”
“Wow, yeah, I’m super sad,” says Simmons flatly, “look at me, crying sad emo tears and
writing in my diary.”
“Yeah, but you actually have a diary.”
“I do not!”
“Whatever you say. Give me that,” says Grif, and swipes the letter.
“Why, are we sad?”
“We’re Red Team, and intercepting important Blue Team communication. Why, you see
anything better to do?”
“Ugh,” says Simmons. “Well, alright, but--no, don’t open it like that, you’re going to rip it!”
“Okay, fine, you do it!”
Simmons takes the next three minutes to carefully open the sealed paper letter. “This way you
can put it back, idiot,” he says, while Grif rolls his eyes and complains about Simmons being
neurotic and uptight. But Simmons does get the letter open, entirely undamaged, thanks, and
pulls out the first page. “It’s from... Church,” says Simmons with surprise.
“Didn’t Church hate that guy? Caboose, I mean.”
“Bet you Church sent him a bunch of mission files by mistake,” says Simmons.
“Bet you it’s just the words ‘fuck off’ written in all caps,” says Grif.
Simmons leans over the car door so they can stick their heads together as Simmons reads
aloud:
“For the last time, I don’t fucking CARE, okay, Caboose? I didn’t—”
“Ha!” says Grif. “It’s not a mission file by mistake after all.”
“ —I didn’t get my ass transferred to the middle of no-fucking-where with no-fuckingbody so I have to put up with more idiots. So, like I said before—and I really fucking
hope your reading comprehension is good enough to get this through your thick skull—
I’ll keep this fucking BRIEF to get this over with, because like I said, every moment I
have to talk to you is another moment of my life wasted—”
“Told you he was only going to tell Caboose to fuck off,” says Grif. “Church hates Caboose.
Everybody knows that.”
Simmons dumps the contents of the envelope on the ground. A wad of twenty pages hits the
floor. “So uh, how many pages, exactly,” Simmons says, “does it take to ignore someone you
hate?”
“Holy shit,” Grif breathes.
Half an hour later, Simmons is still reading:
“ —and ANOTHER fucking thing—who the FUCK put this bigass hole in my wall?
Yeah, MY wall, because if they’re going to shove me in this base all by myself, then let’s
all agree this base is fucking mine, which includes this fucking wall, which is a beautiful
fucking wall which does a great job of walling, except there’s A HUGE FUCKING
HOLE IN IT. ANY ASSHOLE COULD JUST COME BY AND WALK THROUGH MY
WALL WHICH DEFINITIVELY DEFEATS THE POINT OF WALLING. WHAT’S THE
FUCKING POINT OF HAVING A WALL IF THE WALL DOESN’T WALL ANYTHING
IN OR OUT??? And for fuck’s sake, where did the hole come from????? Of all the
stupid shit Command’s done over the years, Caboose, this one is REALLY grinding my
gears—like, if Command isn’t going to send me the materials to repair it, can’t
Command at least tell me how it happened? Was it some sort of special wall-crushing
aliens that leave invisible anti-repairs residue that prevents—”
—the twenty-page-count does not include the additional enclosed selfies of a disgruntled
Church pointing with extreme disgruntlement at aforementioned wall hole, and a smattering
of other even more disgruntled selfies with various architectural decisions Church chose to
have a disgruntlement with, usually with red circles drawn in to indicate what exactly
Caboose should share Church’s disgruntlement about—
“—but anyway, don’t bother to write back. But also, if you post the letter to this address
directly, then it doesn’t have to go through that piece of shit Command, it isn’t likely to
get lost, and it travels a fuckload faster, dumbass, so for once in your life, do the smart
thing and just post it directly here next time. Signed, Leonard Church.”
Simmons folds up the letter. Grif looks practically in awe.
“So. Uh,” says Simmons. “Who’s going to tell Church that he’s a big Blue baby who misses
Caboose?”
They look at each other. “Not it,” they say together.
They agree that Caboose’s payment is more than worth it. Simmons scans the letter to his
helmet hard drive and Grif pockets the letter for future blackmail, in the unfortunate incident
that they ever getting dragged into Church’s girlfriend/Freelancer/Blue Team drama again.
But mostly for entertainment, honestly, because what were the odds of that happening?
Oh No
Chapter Summary
If approached by a large dangerous mammal, shriek like a little girl and bolt.
Just so we’re all clear—so we’re all on the same page about this—so none of us have the
wrong ideas about anything: Simmons does not like Grif.
Fuck off with that dubious look. Yes, really.
Yes, fucking really, okay?
People just rub raw on Simmons’s skin like sandpaper, running from mild but constant
abrasion to tiny gouges that feel miles wide. Grif, on the other hand, gets under Simmons’s
skin like barbs, even when he’s doing nothing at all— especially when he’s doing nothing at
all. He sits there like a fat, out-of-shape weight holding Simmons in place. Every moment
with Grif is a lesson in lowering standards and expecting not just nothing, but less than
nothing—an endless self-sabotaging tirade against success that Simmons is certain takes
more energy to keep up than actually doing the work. He never worries about anything
because he refuses to care, and he never cracks under pressure because he’s never accepted
any stakes.
It pisses Simmons off every day of his life. It should be illegal to think that way. In the army,
it is illegal. (Well—kind of.) And yet here Grif is, by some sadistic design of duality, all up in
Simmons’s business, which only makes Simmons resent him more for all the reasons stated
above, and absolutely no other reasons that Simmons avoids thinking about or thinking too
closely about, because Simmons is a completely logical and rational human being who is the
pinnacle of good judgment.
QED: Spending a shitload of time with someone because you don’t have any other options
isn’t the same thing as liking someone. It isn’t even the same thing as respecting them. It’s
just a matter of—
“It’s too early for drinking yourself sick!” Grif calls through the door. “And hurry up, I gotta
piss!”
Simmons, on this fine afternoon, has thus far: failed to be promoted; failed to curry any favor
with anyone at Rat’s Nest; screwed however-many-years of pseudo-sobriety from purging;
failed to establish human contact with literally anyone except Grif; re-established his
reputation as an outcast; re-established his reputation as a homo; has been in zero battles and
accomplished zero things to write home about (metaphorically speaking); failed to even help
Grif contact his sister; failed to say literally anything of use to Grif after he found out he
couldn't contact his sister; and on top of all that, has gotten himself wrapped up in a traitorous
backdoor dealing with Caboose to feed Caboose’s turrets with Red ammunition. In sum,
nothing has happened, and because Red Army isn’t doing anything at Rat’s Nest at all,
nothing is going to happen.
But who’s thinking about that? Who even gives a shit about that? Not Simmons. Nope, no sir,
not he.
See, on do-nothing afternoons like these, Simmons likes to build up a nice haze as he empties
the contents of his stomach into the toilet behind the armory. His stomach is already half
empty, he’s mildly dehydrated, he was thinking more about old science textbooks and what
they had to say about the degradation and expansion of food according to macronutrient
content—
Grif bangs on the door again. “Seriously!”
—but Simmons’s special superpower is that no matter what situation he’s in, no matter what
he was doing or thinking about, no matter who he’s with or not with, Simmons is always,
always equipped with a great mental tape reel that’s ready to go from zero to meltdown. It
goes something like:
YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP AND THE WORLD IS ENDING AND IT’S ALL
YOUR FAULT BECAUSE YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP AND THE WORLD IS—
Change the tenses to YOU’RE GOING TO FUCK UP in the event of the world ending not
having happened yet . Insert specifics to any situation as necessary! A certainty of impending
injury and death with unlimited versatility! Adapts to every and all unjustified fears and
deep-seated complexes! One time purchase, lifetime warranty! You’ll never be able to
uninstall!
“And dude, if you have enough booze to throw up, sell me some next time!” Grif’s voice
says.
Here’s another clarification: in all the years that Simmons has kept up his—habit, or
whatever—in all those years through junior high, through high school, through the years of
college he made it through—nobody has ever interrupted him in the middle of throwing up.
Or people have, sure, but it never mattered. When some stranger comes by, they’d knock, he
wouldn’t answer, they’d assume he was taking the longest piss in history, leave, and it’d be
done with! Generally speaking, strangers don’t question why someone else is throwing up. It
could be anything from the flu to birth control. Not that Simmons takes birth control but—
“Dude, what’s happening in there?” Grif’s voice goes on. “I don’t wanna walk all the way to
the main building just to take a leak!
There is no contingency for this situation.
Except that Simmons always has a contingency. If he drops something in a crowded place,
pick it up quickly and pretend it didn’t happen. If a CO gives him orders, don’t think and
insert compliments when available. If in combat, don’t think and insert compliments when
available. If approached by a large dangerous mammal, shriek like a little girl and bolt. If a
girl approaches, avoid eye contact and back away slowly.
So—what, if someone did have the balls to insist on interrupting, it’d have to have been his
parents, right? In a house where you also have a right to live in, with someone you know and
love, is the only place someone could insist on asking what’s wrong—but then he can claim
food poisoning, or—headache, whatever; he could probably have told his mother he was
sticking his fingers down his throat to throw up and she’d have nodded and said “Well as
long as it’s not my toothbrush”—see, because, these kinds of things happened with people
you had history with, some sort of… meaningful relation to—
Grif says, “Between the choice of using my legs and using the ladies room, I’ll use the ladies
room. Don’t make me use the ladies room!”
—not this random douchebag with a shit sense of humor who got shunted into Blood Gulch
with him—not Grif, of all fucking people!
“Okay, okay, fine, using the ladies room,” says Grif. “See what you made me do?”
Simmons doesn’t move. He tracks the ladies door opening and closing, Grif banging around
and muttering about why ladies bathrooms were always cleaner--ugh, Grif didn’t flush again,
he always fucking did that back at Blood Gulch, too. Grif bangs on the men’s door again.
“Seriously, sell me that booze next time!” he says, and then Simmons doesn’t hear anything
else.
He listens some more.
He listens harder.
Nothing.
He makes himself breathe a sigh of relief, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when
you’ve just avoided a nightmare so awful that you avoided even thinking about it, and he
feels all the blood rush to his head. Ah, shit, he forgot to breathe again. He’s probably
shaking, too.
Then he remembers he hasn’t gotten it all up yet, steadies himself, and cleans off his fingers.
He shakes his head and tries to forget about it. He doesn’t deserve to have gotten away with
it, but he has, so there’s nobody to stop him from taking it for granted. He can’t believe this.
Too good to be true, of course, but true nonetheless.
Four hours later, Grif taps Simmons on the shoulder and says, “So, uh, why were you
throwing up earlier?”
Simmons shrieks like a little girl and bolts.
Your WHAT
Chapter Summary
"What kind of racism is this?"
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
“Seriously, Simmons,” says Grif, “are you sick or something?”
Simmons shrieks and b—
“Calm down, Jesus H Christ!” Grif says. “Why’re you so twitchy today?”
“Twitchy?” Simmons says. “Not me. I’m completely calm and rational and I will go on with
my day after a smooth and inconspicuous conversational transition that diverts atten—”
No, sorry, what really happened was:
“T-t-t-t-twit-tchy?” Simmons says, twitchily. His voice cracks four times and hits three
different octaves. “I-I-I’m n-not, not twitch—”
“Yes, you, twitchy. I thought you didn’t drink?”
Yes, drinking! Of course, a perfectly acceptable and manly reason to be throwing up. “Of
course I do!” Simmons says automatically.
“Since when?”
“Since I, uh…”
“So you don’t drink. So what’s—” Grif’s helmet snaps around and he suddenly yanks it off.
His eyes are wide. “Oh my god. Simmons.”
Simmons’s head is screaming HE KNOWS HE KNOWS HE—
“You accidentally swallowed, didn’t you,” says Grif.
“I—” Simmons doesn’t know what— “I—what? Swallowed? Swallowed what?”
“Swallowed your boyfriend’s cum,” says Grif.
“My WHAT,” says Simmons.
“Yeah, the guy you’ve been shacking up wi—”
“No! I—!” Why does everyone think he’s having copious amounts of sex with men?! “I don’t
have a boyfriend , Grif, I already said—”
“But you’re definitely having sex—”
“No!”
“Oh my god, you’re supposed to take credit for sex you’re not having if other people assume
you’re having sex!”
“Not if you’re going to assume it’s with a guy!” Simmons cries.
“What else am I supposed to think?” says Grif, except that he has that stupid shit-eating
goblin grin that usually precedes something like Yeah Sarge I didn't see any tank. “There’s
like, two ladies at this outpost, both of them are Blues, you haven’t choked under pressure
during the ammo trades, you’re never around after dinner, you’re almost chill some mornings
—”
“That doesn’t mean I’m having sex—”
“Then why the hell are you acting so—”
“I just felt sick!” Simmons says desperately.
Which might not have been the thing to say, because now Grif looks bewildered. “What’re
you talking about?”
“Wait—what’re you talking about? Wait,” says Simmons, “never mind, this conversation is
stupid, so I’m leaving. What a shame!”
“No, no no no no you don’t,” says Grif, “come on, I know something’s…” He snaps his
fingers. “I got it! You’re pregnant !”
“Grif I swear to GOD—”
“Well if Tucker can do it, so can you, right?”
“Uh, no? Because I’m don’t have a laser sword and an Sangheili prophecy?”
“I dunno, Simmons,” Grif says, “I figured you’d be jumping at the opportunity to out-do a
Blue…”
“Sorry, I think that’s physically impossible!” Simmons says with false cheer. “Okay, well,
gotta go—”
“Okay, then it’s something about the new base, right?” Grif continues. “So it’s either a person
or a place…”
“You’re right! It’s the place! It gives me the creeps!”
“Every time you say something in your nervous voice, I believe you less, you know,” Grif
says. “You’re not drinking, you’re not pregnant… you’re sick? Allergies from the new base?”
“That’s what I said the first time.”
“That’s it!” Grif cries, snapping his fingers. “It’s that Sissy guy!”
“GRIF—”
“Yeah, I heard hatefucking’s the new trend nowadays? People going around drawing little
spades around their names instead of hearts?”
“Grif I swear to god —”
“Actually, nah, it’s all of them,” says Grif, grinning gleefully without any pretense at a
straight face, and ticks off his fingers: “So, so far, you’re throwing up because you
accidentally swallowed, but you also have morning sickness because you’re pregnant with
his kid, but you’re also drinking like a lush because he introduced you to his stash of vodka,
which is bad for the kid, you irresponsible parent, and you’re sick because the pollen at Rat’s
Nest—”
Simmons puts his head in his hands.
“—therefore,” Grif concludes, “you’re dying.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense,” Simmons moans.
“Yeah, it does. See, the sheer mortification of hatefucking a guy as nasty as Sissy causes your
cyborg heart-replacement to short-circuit, which is already doing double-time to support you
and the kid you’re killing with all your vodka-drinking, which induces more shame and
mortification because now you’re a shittier dad than Tucker who’s a filthy Blue which means
you’re letting down Red Team, which weakens your immune system just enough for the
parasites in the pollen to take hold and—”
“I was just throwing up!”
“Yeah, because you’re dy—”
“I did it on purpose!” Simmons snaps, before he can think.
“You—” Grif stops. “Really?”
“Yes, really. God!” Simmons says. “Now will you give it a fucking rest?!”
Grif blinks rapidly, like he’s trying to make himself remember the original point of this
conversation. “Uh, what? Why would you make yourself throw up?”
“It’s just a thing that happens sometimes.”
There’s a pause.
There’s a really long pause.
“…What?” says Grif.
Back up.
Simmons’s mother used to describe a very old Earth cartoon when talking about her
screaming matches with his father. The coyote would be chasing the bird and the bird would
somehow trick the coyote into running straight off the edge of a cliff, and the coyote would
be so hellbent on catching this fucking bird that he’d keep running through empty air, and the
audience would laugh because it was so apparent to everyone but the coyote that he wasn’t
dead yet, but he’d already killed himself, ha ha ha ha ha. Then the coyote would look down,
and see all the empty space underneath him, waiting to kill him, and only then, only after
he’d realized how badly he’d fucked up, would he begin to fall.
She said that his father was the coyote, but he never looked down. Never bothered to check
how deep the shit he was getting into went or how rude or unhinged he sounded as long as he
could win the fucking argument, so long as he could just be a little more right than her; so
long as he just ran fast enough and hard enough and never looked down, then he could run on
empty air forever. “But he wouldn’t do it if he didn’t love me,” she’d say. “He wouldn’t do it
if he didn’t know I love him. I’m the only person in the whole world who’ll put up with his
insanities.” Then Mrs Simmons would laugh at her husband. Little Dickie Simmons would
laugh with her, feeling more than knowing that it was his only option if he didn’t want his
mother to laugh at him, too.
So what comes out of his mouth is:
“I’m pretty sure you heard me the first time,” says Simmons.
“Uh, sure, I heard you,” says Grif. “I’m just like… ‘what,’ because what I mean is ‘what the
hell’?”
“Oh, good. God forbid your laziness reach your ears.”
“Give me credit, I’m trying, but I don’t have cyborg ears to turn off like you and—wait, what
the hell are we talking about?” says Grif. “Simmons, go back to the—to the—the what we
were talking about. That’s weird."
“What, my ears are weird? What kind of racism is this?”
“No, the—thing, the one we were just talking about, that’s the weird thing—”
“You’re the one who said I have a boyfriend!” Simmons protests. “Now you’re homophobic,
too?”
“Simmons ,” says Grif, to exasperated to dodge, “the thing, about you —” and there’s a
moment where Grif verbally trips over himself before he spits it out: “about you throwing
up.”
“What about it?”
Grif stares at him. Blankly, mostly, like he doesn’t know where to start. Finally, at length:
“Isn’t that weird?”
Simmons crosses his arms. “I dunno, maybe a little. I don’t think it’s weird. Not that weird.
It’s just how it is. What do you care?”
“I…” Grif trails away. “Can I not talk to a helmet for a second?”
The look Simmons gives him the moment the helmet comes off is unimpressed.
“Holy shit,” says Grif. “You’re not kidding.”
“Why would I be kidding?” Simmons asks.
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” says Grif. “Hang on.”
And that’s when Grif up and walks away.
Chapter End Notes
hey so remember that author's note from the first chapter that was like two months ago?
all that stuff is for real, plus like, a boatload of really drawn-out hurt/comfort because i
love that shit. blueballs forever in the emotional department lolol. so, uh, i guess what i
mean to say is... read with caution and take care of yallselves?
also since im on my soapbox my tumblr is hylian-reptile come yell at me about rvb
bye and love you all
Leaky Boat
Chapter Summary
“Uh, wow. Impressive."
Chapter Notes
yeah, the formatting really is this way. and, like, no hard feelings if you wanna just
like...... skip it...... lol.........
Sometimes, Simmons's head has a bad time.
See, Simmons shouldn’t have done that. Admitting to throwing up on intentionally was the
actually worst thing that Simmons could have possibly done in that situation. He had a free
out. He could have taken it. Grif hadn’t been suspicious at all, because nobody ever is.
Why’d he do that? Why’d he do that? In all the years that Simmons has been throwing up,
nobody but Grif has ever interrupted him, either in the middle, or the after, or the beginning,
or the in-between of throwing-up, because who wants to deal with that? And he never
worried—or he did, actually, wildly, obsessively, thought about it all the time, like wanting to
watch a show he’d already finished, or itching to solve a series of math problems; he hated
when his fingers smelled and his voice went to shit and his eyes were puffy and his cheeks
swelled and he broke his braces every fucking month in high school or when his braces
rubbed against his fingers and broke the skin; Russel’s sign has nothing on the damage a
hunk of metal superglued to his teeth can do to your knuckles, your nails, the webbing in
between the ring and pinky fingers. So why’d he do that? Why’d he do that? He knew,
sometimes--when he was really feeling up to picking apart the parts of himself that were
separate from the overthinking and the stressing and the jumping at shadows and paranoia
and what was that, Grif? Leaky-boat self-esteem , is what he called it? (How fucking dare he
? Whose business is that? Not his , is it?)--when he was feeling really up to picking apart
himself from all of that, he knew that logically speaking, so long as he locked the door,
locked it once and then again and the check it again , make sure to touch it twice with your
fingers to make sure that it’s completely locked , if you don’t touch it twice it won’t be locked
that’s just how logic works sorry but if you do then there’s no need to worry, there’s no need
to think that he might ever get caught, HE NEED NEVER TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR
WHAT’S WRONG WITH HIM, which he can leave peaceably behind closed doors, away
from everyone else who will tear it apart and tear him apart for being the way that he is, so
long as he has the strength to keep those doors closed with his own willpower and his own
willpower alone. To go the distance entirely alone, because that’s what it takes, to keep your
shames and wrongs to yourself. Then the only person he has to worry about is himself, and
avoidance is the name of the game; he can ignore his own acne, until others don’t; he can
ignore his own braces, until others don’t; he can ignore his own awful tin laugh, until others
don’t; he can ignore how he sucks shit at keeping a conversation going, until others don’t; he
can ignore loneliness, until others don’t; he can ignore his short temper and irritations, until
others don’t; he can ignore how pathetic he sounds when he tries, until others don’t; he can
ignore how nasty he sounds when he doesn’t try, until until until until, until he could
disappear--until he could crawl out of his own skin--he could peel apart all his different parts
and remake himself, Simmons one-point-oh, two-point-oh, three-point-oh four-point-fivepoint-six-seven as many versions as it takes until there’s nothing left of the first, a thorough
annihilation of weakness and aberration and vulnerability. But even if he gets away with
lying to himself every day of his life, even if other people get away with lying to each other
every day of their lives, he’s not quite as stupid as he’d like to be and it’s too easy to know
what people aren’t saying and he knows better than anyone that moment is all it takes--just a
slip for the rumors to start--hell, Sissy started rumors out of nothing , because Sissy is an
actual fucking idiot of proportions that Simmons could never have expected of a schoolyard
bully. The slightest sign of weakness and it’s blood in the water, you can’t undo damage like
that, you have to be prepared beforehand, even if, even if in all the years Simmons has been
throwing up nobody has ever interrupted him . Apparently there are the damages that are not
undone, no matter what people say about time healing all wounds, about people forgetting
and moving on, about leaving your ghosts and forgetting your exes; no, there are ( these are )
the damages that do not heal but change in you and change you, make you something else
just to survive yourself--there is no way out of this but to cease to be as he is now, as if that
wasn’t what he wanted to begin with, as if he’s not utterly incapable of doing so; so he locks
his wrongness up in his closet, among other shames, all the things he’d never speak of, things
he’d never admit to, things he never, ever, ever, wants to talk about, and most certainly does
not want to see reflected in other people’s eyes, he thinks he’d rather die than have to look at
someone and see them seeing him for who he is. So why’d he do that? Why’d he do that? He
didn’t have to tell Grif; Grif didn’t want to be told; he shouldn’t have told Grif. He does
everything he can do to keep his secrets close; he has a safeguard for every mistake he’s ever
made; he ran the shower when he threw up; he used single-stall bathrooms; he makes sure to
drink water before and during eating; he watches the amount of vomit that goes into the
toilet, because of the time he threw up so much junk that the toilet clogged at three in the
morning and he had to walk to the corner store because he was too young to drive and even if
he could have the garage door screamed like a banshee when it opened so he had to crawl out
the window in the middle of the cold night chugging water from a milk jug to replace all the
fluids he’d just dumped into the toilet until he thought too hard about maybe there were trace
calories in the milk jug plastic and then he had to throw it away in a backyard and ran to the
corner store with his brain screaming water sounds divine right now but you threw it away so
why don’t you replace all that water with two family-size bags full of chips and fuck he’d
been so tired he was fifteen and going through four thousand calories a day just by growing
to his new awful height of 6’3” (six fucking feet and three inches?) that everyone teased him
for and his stomach hurt and his nails hurt and his jaw hurt and he still had to walk back to
his house and sneak back through the second floor window and unclog the toilet but they
didn’t have plungers at a corner store, you fucking idiot of course they don’t; so he bought a
bucket and a soup ladle and one of those long fuzzy things that you’re supposed to use to
clean dust off bookshelves and ceiling fans and also two gallons of ice cream and no plastic
spoon to make himself walk faster than he’d ever walked in his life all the way home right
past the milk jug in the neighbor’s yard because the point-two trace calories were worse than
the five-thousand calorie bomb in his bag and he climbed through the window and used the
ladle to dig out all the soggy protein bars and honey nut cheerios and spaghetti from its
congealed solid paste that had settled (like a slug the size of a human baby) along the floor of
the toilet, except for some of the paste was actually recognizable as spaghetti because shit
never dissolved fast enough in the stomach to turn to mush, which meant that if those noodles
didn’t dissolve, then all of them shouldn’t have dissolved, but he’d definitely eaten more than
what he’d thrown up so where was the rest of it?? where was the rest?? the rest??? the rest
???????? how much was he getting up what was the damage how could he know his heart
was pumping electrolytes he didn’t have his hands were steady but he was sweating now, hot
then cold, and he was sure that this was how he was going to die, covered in sweat and
teenaged boy hormones and smelling like the vomit he was shoveling into a fucking bucket
because he’s honest-to-god threw up so much food that the poor toilet wouldn’t flush it all
away—but he didn’t die, because he had two family-size bags of chips on the counter, so he
cleared out the food and jammed the feather duster in the pipes until they came clear. And
then, tired and shaking and dehydrated, he dragged himself to the kitchen, where he downed
six cups of water in a minute to replace all the fluids he didn’t have to begin with and then
threw up anyway, opened the freezer, and decided he’d drink another two glasses of water,
not because he needs water to survive but because he’s going to need it to get all these
fucking chips back up and maybe the spaghetti from the last go that was still hanging out in
his stomach if he was lucky. Nowadays, he’s been at this shit forever , you know, all through
high school and college and now at Rat’s Nest, and he learns from his mistakes--well,
sometimes, anyway, or at least marginally more than not at all, and only when he has the
energy to really give it his all. The secret is that an eating disorder is no spiraling tragedy, but
a long and grueling marathon, one that intends to kill with mind-numbing, esteem-crushing
exhaustion as you run towards a recovery always just out of reach; he’s so tired, he just wants
to stop thinking about it, he wants to stop thinking about the food at the dining hall and he
wants to stop thinking about the options and where Grif keeps his snacks and he wants to
stop thinking about other people and what they think about how he’s eating and what they see
when he walks and talks and breathes and what they might hear if they pass the bathroom at
the wrong time and he wants it to end even though he hasn’t even started again, throwing up
every other night is just the beginning , but he already wants it to be over, he wants Rat’s
Nest to be over, he’s only had to interact with ONE PERSON at this entire fucking base and
it’s been fucking trials and tribulations up and down, he’s sitting in place and wanting to run
but when he stands he’s exhausted and wants to sit, he doesn’t want to be in this base this
base THIS FUCKING BASE , crawling up and down the walls with eyes and laughing and
opinions and options and mirrors and fucking nothing better to do than waste the remains of
his military career and he doesn’t know how anyone could possibly stand to live in this
hellhole, except the moments of clarity when he’s just thrown up and everything’s quiet. His
head will hurt, and he’ll be exhausted and tired, and his throat will be sore and abused, but
it’ll be quiet, and he can rest. And then he’ll go talk to Grif, and Grif is--he doesn’t know
what Grif is, but it’s all right. But he can’t anymore, he’s ruined it, why the fuck did he do
that? How could he possibly have fucked up so bad that he just--what, blurts it out like that?
Yeah, Grif, I throw up sometimes --what? What? What the fuck ? What was he thinking? No,
no no no it’s not weird unless he admits it’s, remember, run run keep running and if he
doesn’t look down then he’ll never fall, right? It’s—” Isn’t that weird ?” How would he
know?! How is anyone supposed to know what’s weird and what’s not?! He’s been at this for
years, most of his adult life, scouting out the single-stalled bathrooms and drinking water
between each bite and disappearing after each meal is business as usual, he’s never lived any
other way except when he had to at Blood Gulch, and even then he’s not entirely sure who
that person was, like Simmons was just playing at being someone else who eats like other
people for five whole fucking years because Sarge wouldn’t have it any other way--no, Grif
doesn’t know what’s normal, Grif doesn’t know what’s weird, as if Grif scarfing down two
packs of Oreos every day is normal ? As if Grif whisking away all the food after every
supply drop is normal ? Nobody talks about it! He’s never talked about it! It’s just him and
his closet full of bad memories and his mirror full of wrongs and a long, long track record of
failed dates and friendships because nobody talks about anything, and frankly, SIMMONS
DOESN’T WANT TO, HE SWEARS HE DIDN’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT,
BECAUSE HE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO WANT TO. Because here’s how the story’s
supposed to go: a straight white female athlete is introduced to calorie counting; she’s broken
up with her boyfriend and she’s looking for a way to feel okay; within the year, she’s lost
forty pounds and is cold inside and out, head full of fog and nails brittle and blue; she’s
dainty and beautiful and envied in her frozen death, there is nothing more spectacular for the
voyeurs than a girl dying in pain; her parents notice; her friends notice; she doesn’t want
them to notice, she wants to be left alone with her spreadsheets full of numbers and five
thousand facts about nutrition and the weight of the growing knowledge that she’s abnormal,
that she’s somehow gone wrong, that something’s broken on the inside and it’ll never be
repaired the same. Nevertheless, a friend in her fifth period class hands her a Vitamin Water
Zero and says she’s concerned, that she’s been there, that she knows what it’s like and she’ll
be here when she thinks she wants to get better, without saying that “getting better” is a crock
of nonsense and theory about substances the DSM doesn’t fully understand, without saying
that talking about it miles, miles, leagues away from understanding--but for at least a
moment, the girl thinks she’s not the only one who’s gone a little crazy. Here’s how Grif and
Simmons’s story goes: he woke up and brushed his teeth; he put on his clothes; he walked
outside his room; he stared at the Blues for five hours with Grif; Sarge yelled about nothing;
Simmons and Grif argued about nothing; Grif tried to leave for the Vegas quadrant
—”C’mon, Simmons, let’s go”—”We can’t”—”Why not?”—”You haven’t taken your turn for
‘I, Spy,’ yet, asshole,” and Simmons’s voice is so dry that Grif cracks up— but he doesn’t
know what he expected from Grif. He doesn’t know how he thought Grif would react. He
doesn’t know what he’d wanted just then, and if he does, he’s not saying, because he swears
he didn’t want to talk about it because he’s not supposed to want to, because there’s nothing
to talk about, et cetera et cetera. But now that’s over, isn’t it? He screwed the pooch, it’s over,
nothing else to do, thank god for that, because if it’s over that means he doesn’t have to think
about it, if he just never talks to Grif again then loneliness would be better than--than--than
whatever it is that he thinks Grif will think--he doesn’t really know , okay?! But he let it slip,
god knows why he did that, what kind of desperate ploy that was, so it’s over, he’s on his
own, Red Team is officially gone, he’s stuck here at Rat’s Nest forever, just he himself and
the toilet behind the armory and the moments where he doesn’t have to think and every other
moment where he can’t stop thinking and if that’s the case then he wonders if he can stockpile food from multiple meals at the mess hall in order to eat enough to get a proper fucking
binge for once because oh that sounds like a good idea, since he has all this free time from
having no friends and no hobbies and nothing to do , no point to even being here , for god’s
sake, he might as well up his game, get back to the good old days where he hated every time
he threw up but he hated the time he spent throwing up a little less than he hated every
moment he was awake, because those days had to be better than right now, anything
anywhere would be better than—
“Shift’s over,” says Sissy. “Heading to lunch?”
“Yep,” says Simmons.
Lunch is a good idea up until Sissy sits down in front of Grif.
“Oh, uh,” says Simmons, “I think I have something conveniently happening right now that I
have to do, immediately, urgently, and not because I don’t want to—”
“C’mon, man, you said you’d join me,” says Sissy, in an eerily even tone.
Grif takes one look between Sissy and Simmons and dumps his fork on his plate. “Not that I
also don’t enjoy your sterling company,” says Grif, “but I also have conveniently
remembered—”
“Isn’t that a bit rude, Sergeant Grif, sir?” says Sissy.
“Nah,” says Grif. “I’m a higher rank, so I can do whatever I want. But if I wasn’t your CO,
then it wouldn’t be a bit rude; it’d just be fuckin’ rude.”
Sissy forcibly pulls Simmons down onto the seat next to him. Grif gives him a look, but
Simmons is too busy avoiding looking at Grif. “Yikes,” says Grif.
“Sergeant, sir, I believe I have valuable information on the Blue Menace,” says Sissy.
Simmons gives Sissy a bewildered look, but he looks serious. Except Sissy is always serious,
because he can’t tell delusion from reality. “Uh, wow. Impressive,” says Grif, sounding
unwowed and unimpressed. “Wanna file a report like everyone else?”
“I thought you’d like to know as soon as possible, sir,” says Sissy. “Considering that he’s
wrecked another two of our Warthogs, and the upcoming counterattack.”
“Whoa, counterattack?” Grif asks. “Where? Who? Why?”
“Why?” Sissy demands. “For the Red cause—”
“The Red cause,” Grif scoffs, under his breath.
Christ. Simmons just wanted to take his food and throw it up in peace. He didn’t ask for this.
“Sir,” Sissy says. “Considering the casualties that we’ve taken so far, the diminishing food
supplies, and our low ammo stores, I do think that many of us, myself and Private Simmons
included, believe it’s time for decisive action."
Grif seems oddly delighted by this. “Whoa, really? Yourself and Private Simmons?”
Wow, Simmons does not want to be here. “I mean,” Simmons starts.
“That is to say, many of us, myself included, hope that Private Simmons agrees on this point,
regardless of how Private Simmons might feel on other matters,” Sissy says.
Simmons stares at Sissy. Sissy stares back. Simmons looks at Grif instead, but Grif is already
staring at him, so he looks away. “Well, from what I know about yesterday’s skirmish that
injured two—”
“Three,” Sissy interrupts.
“—three men, and what I know about our inventory and the fact that our next supply isn’t
supposed to drop until next week at the earliest, then…” Simmons has an awful feeling he’s
walking into a trap even as he says it: “Yeah, we should… do something. I guess? Ca--the
new Blue guy is really doing some damage.”
Sissy’s eyes narrow.
“Sir,” Simmons adds. Somehow, it’s not very entertaining when Grif’s eye twitches.
“And you might say that the best course of action in this scenario is to strike back, correct?”
Sissy prompts.
“The only other option would be to do nothing, but that’d result in a pseudo-siege... even
moreso than we’re already doing,” says Simmons. “So, uh, yes. We should probably fight
back, sir. Especially if we don’t want to, uh… let down the Red cause."
Grif groans loudly. To be fair, that sounded stupid to Simmons, too. “Jesus,” Grif mutters.
“The Red cause.”
“Sir,” Sissy says irritably, “I have valuable intel, but am I to understand that you don’t see
sufficient reason to either hear it or take action?”
“Sufficient reason?” Grif says incredulously. “For what? Why? Do we even want their base?
What's the point? For what agenda? Who're we even fighting and why? Like, c'mon, dude.
Don't you ever wonder why we’re here?”
Sissy frowns. “I don’t understand the question, sir.”
Grif sighs. “Okay, I think it's time for my nap. Or maybe my scheduled slacking," he says,
apparently deaf and blind to Sissy’s furious glare. “How about all go back to what we were
doing, instead of… whatever this interrogation is.”
“Private Simmons and I are just eating lunch,” says Sissy through gritted teeth.
“Yeah, Private Simmons looks real hungry,” says Grif, nodding at Simmons’s untouched
plate.
There’s half a moment where Grif freezes, the only point in the entire conversation where his
laid-back nonchalance seems less infuriatingly impenetrable and more frighteningly thin.
Simmons knows he’s reading into what Simmons said yesterday, what Simmons is doing
now, trying to piece together odd behavior with odd claims. For the first time, being around
Grif feels like being shoved through a grater. Simmons looks away from the plate. “I’m just
not hungry,” says Simmons.
This is true. He doesn’t feel like eating. He feels like putting food in his stomach and then
throwing it back up, which is not the same thing.
“Cool,” says Grif, a little faintly. “Got it. I’m gonna, uh…” He motions vaguely in the
direction of somewhere else, and scrams. Simmons barely waits before grabbing his own tray
and booking it in another direction.
But Sissy’s hand seizes Simmons’s cyborg forearm in a vice. “I know you’re happy cozying
up with your little sugar daddy,” Sissy hisses, “but for god’s sake, you see it just as well as I
do. Convince him to do something, or the Red Army loses Rat’s Nest.”
Simmons shakes Sissy off. Right now, he isn’t interested in pretending he gives a damn about
the Red Army. Right now, he's hard pressed to give a damn about anything.
Outrageous Liars
Chapter Summary
"Good thing my esteemed and higher-ranking self is here to put your fears to rest."
Chapter Notes
slides in at the end of Tuesday but it still counts because it's still Tuesday morning where
I am
fingerguns
Simmons figures out Sissy’s game a moment too late, as per his usual esprit d’escalier: Sissy
wants Grif to move his ass, Grif moves zero ass whatsoever, Sissy appeals to Grif’s
theoretical fuckbuddy (Simmons) to ask Simmons to convince Grif to move his ass, Simmons
tells Sissy to fuck off, Sissy sulks until he comes up with “valuable intel,” Sissy nabs
Simmons and talks Simmons into agreeing with his logic in front of Grif in an attempt to
manipulate Simmons into inadvertently convincing Grif to move his ass, Simmons is too
slow to realize what Sissy is doing and neglects to tell Sissy to fuck off, and Grif still moves
zero ass whatsoever.
And now there’s a private Simmons doesn’t recognize running the armory, and Sissy is
asking questions.
“Give it a rest,” says New Window Guy. “Didn’t Sergeant Larson say we’re attacking the
Blues tomorrow, anyway?”
Simmons shifts uncomfortably from where he’s eavesdropping. There’d been a debriefing
about it this morning, and the plan looked tactically sound, and under normal circumstances
he’d be thrilled to participate in some stupid ploy for glory, but… He shakes his head. No, no
buts. He’s excited. Right? He is. He’s itching for his machine gun. Or itching for something,
at least.
“Relax. We’ll get a proper fight,” says Window Guy.
“Look at the records one more time,” Sissy says. “I promise, something’s off. It makes sense
that the Blues have so much firepower and our armory is always almost empty if...”
“The records check out, Sissel. Signed off by a Sergeant and everything.”
“That Sergeant was Sergeant Grif.”
“Shit,” says Sergeant Grif.
Simmons jumps. “Jesus!” he hisses. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
Grif’s face is covered by the helmet, but Simmons knows exactly which bemused look he’s
giving him. “Why, were you not expecting to find me where I work shifts at exactly this
time?”
“Well, I was, but—”
He’d wanted to see Grif, as is the usual custom when Simmons is bored, but he... doesn’t
want to see Grif. Not this Grif, anyway. He wants to see the Grif that he’d been talking to
before he’d shot off his mouth and said shit he wasn’t supposed to. The Grif he didn’t have to
worry about.
But what is he supposed to do about that, hm? Talk to him about it? Actually finish the
conversation they were having almost a week ago? Yeah, Simmons would rather die.
“They’re planning some attack on the Blues or something, remember?” says Grif. “So I got
swapped out with that dude over there so I can do like, orders and responsibilities and shit.”
“Shit,” says Simmons.
“Don’t worry, I told him not to mess with your color coding system.”
“No, Grif, that means neither of us have an in to the records of what ammo’s been signed in
and out,” says Simmons, “which means neither have access to the records that can put us in
jail for treason. Oh, shit. Oh, shit, oh shit--”
“Wow, that might be a problem,” says Grif.
Simmons stops. “Might be,” repeats Simmons.
“Potentially.”
“Possibly.”
“A conceivable probability.”
“Everything’s a joke to you,” Simmons mutters.
"Oh!" says Grif, and smacks Simmons in the shoulder to get his attention. "I've got an idea."
"What? What idea?"
"Follow my lead," says Grif.
The person at the armory window is a private in standard red, and is utterly indistinguishable
from literally anyone else in this base. He’s talking in low tones to two other people behind
him, apparently discussing the placement of a crate, and salutes when Grif approaches.
“Sergeant Grif, sir,” he says.
Sissy gives Grif a look that could melt steel.
“Helmets must be on at all times, Private,” Grif says lazily.
Sissy puts his helmet back on like he’s doing Grif a fucking favor.
“And Private… Simmons, right?” says Window Guy, nodding at Simmons. Simmons has half
a second to think of as many awful reasons for why this guy Simmons has never seen before
would know his name and to despair over the fact that now Simmons will never be able to
ask Window Guy’s name without looking like a jackass, before Window Guy says to Grif,
“Do you need a weapon change, sir?”
“Nah,” says Grif. “Just checking to see how you’re holding up at your new job ‘n all.”
Window Guy’s confusion is palpable. “Thank you for your… uh, consideration…?”
“No problem,” says Grif. “But since you’ve had the armory to yourself for a day, I thought
I’d swing by and see if everything’s been kept in order.”
“We didn’t touch the color coding system, sir,” says Window Guy.
“Cool, cool. Good job or whatever. Simmons and I are gonna take a peek inside anyway.”
Window Guy, somewhat reluctantly, pulls out the small datapad the armory uses to keep track
of its inventory.
“Wait a minute,” says Sissy.
"Oh c'mon, Sissel, I just work here," Window Guy mumbles.
“You got a problem, Private?” Grif asks.
“Private Sissel thinks someone has been tampering with the ammo inventory records, sir,”
says Window Guy.
“Is that true?” asks Grif.
Sissy says nothing.
“Well,” says Grif, “good thing my esteemed and higher-ranking self is here to put your fears
to rest. Myself and Private Simmons, of course.”
“Is Private Simmons authorized to do inspections?” asks Window Guy.
“No, but he loves organization. Seriously, I heard he jacks off to color-coordi—”
“Sergeant Grif, sir,” Simmons snaps, “can inspect the armory by himself if he really wants to,
which it sounds like he does.”
“Anyway it’s good to have a neutral third-party look at the records, too,” says Grif, handing
the datapad off to Simmons. “Right, Simmons?”
Simmons takes the datapad and looks down at the records that he himself replicated, fudged
for Grif, and re-encrypted to cover both their asses from being court-martialed over
tradimg ammo for Church's emotionally-repressed letter.
“Yes, that is me,” says Simmons. “The most neutral of third-parties, someone who’s never
looked at these records, or has any connection to anyone who’s handled the records, or has
any stake in the records all checking out.”
“Man, isn’t it convenient that Simmons was just standing there when I happened to walk by,”
says Grif.
Window Guy and Sissy exchange a Look. Simmons is reminded of his burning urge to throw
Sissy out a window. Simmons opens the file records and pretends to scroll.
The nature of fudging the records is very simple: all ammo that gets checked in is recorded in
terms of who, when, and where it came from; all ammo that gets checked out is recorded in
terms of who, when, and where it went. It’s the checking-out bit that’s harder, since Simmons
doesn’t need to fudge anything coming in, only where and to whom it went. There's only so
many places and people to whom ammo can go in a small base like Rat's Nest, after all.
Simmons had done his best with what he'd had.
“Well, Private?” Grif says.
“Everything checks out, sir,” says Simmons, because that's what he's supposed to say, so of
course it does.
“Yep. Of course it does,” says Grif.
“And where did the last assignment go?” Sissy asks.
Simmons checks the datapad. “Uh, a hundred and twenty magazines to the evening, night,
and afternoon patrol shifts.”
“Why on earth would patrol shifts need that many bullets?” Sissy demands.
“Er, yes,” says Window Guy. “We did think that was a bit odd, but, um…”
“Uh, well,” says Simmons. “Everyone knows that the patrol guards always need bullets.
‘Cause what if they’re attacked?”
“They can use the bullets from yesterday,” says Sissy, “because they didn’t fire any of them.”
Window Guy nods. “The Blues haven’t really had a coordinated assault on us in…”
“What if the Blue Menace comes near us?” asks Simmons. "He's not a coordinated assault."
Sissy’s helmet swings around accusingly towards Window Guy. Window Guy groans. “Okay,
okay, I get it, he’s a threat…”
“But that doesn’t explain why they needed replacement bullets in the first place,” says Sissy.
"The Blue Menace doesn't show up that often."
“Have you never taken a potshot at a bird when you’re bored, Private?” Grif asks.
“A hundred and twenty potshots?”
“Mmm, really bored,” says Grif.
Sissy looks at Window Guy. Window Guy shrugs.
“And the check-out before that?” Sissy asks.
Simmons looks back to the datapad. “Ten explosive rockets to the kitchen staff.”
“What do the kitchen staff need rockets for?” demands Sissy.
“Cooking,” says Simmons.
“Obviously,” says Grif.
“And before that?” Sissy asks, with gritted teeth.
Simmons feels a small, ugly stab of pleasure, watching him squirm. He scrolls down the
datapad.
“A shipment of a hundred grenades to Private Biggus Dickus,” says Simmons.
“Private Biggus Dickus,” says Sissy.
“It’s bad form to poke fun at other people’s names,” says Simmons, “Private Sissy.”
“Well!” says Grif, before anyone can protest. “Sounds like everything is perfect and totally
unsuspicious.”
“Wait—” says Window Guy.
“Okay, see you later! Try not to die tomorrow. And, uh, kill the Blues and try to win the war,
all that shit Command says, okay, bye!”
Grif strides out of the armory like he owns the place. Simmons fumbles, dumps the datapad
on the window counter, and gets the fuck out of there, half-wishing that Sissy just do them all
a favor and get shot and killed tomorrow. Simmons could do it himself, too! Nobody would
have to know! Bullets flying, chaos everywhere, he could say the Blues did it...
“Think that threw them off?” asks Grif, when they're out of sight and out of earshot.
“Are you sure I can’t just get Caboose to kill Sissy to be safe?” Simmons mutters.
“The guy’s delusional,” says Grif. “I’d be surprised if anyone believes him.”
“Even if he’s right?”
Grif shrugs. “Oh well.”
“‘Oh well’?"
“Hey, I did my bit. We threw him off, did our best. Nothing else for it. Even if they insist, it's
still damn hard to accuse a CO. You getting dinner?”
The transition from “Private Douchenozzle” to “life or death” is so fast that Simmons almost
doesn’t catch it. Almost doesn’t see Grif’s body language going stilted, like an actor playing
a caricature of himself. Mental alarm bells begin flashing. “Uh,” says Simmons.
Grif doesn’t look at him. “Y’know, people going out to the no man’s zone tomorrow, most of
us are having some kind of get-together with people they know—talk stuff out—so—”
“No,” says Simmons, before he can think, and leaves before Grif can speak.
Simmons is washing his hands, cleaning his face, and hacking up the sort of thick, viscous
saliva that appears when his throat is unhappy with the number of fingers that have just
fucked with its epiglottis. His helmet is in the corner, so he doesn’t know how long it took,
but he’d be surprised if anything less than fifty minutes had passed since he shut himself up
in this bathroom.
The wildest secret about all this is: for all these years that he spent doing all kinds of crazy
shit with what he eats, he’s still not very good at throwing up. On the first day, everything
comes up clean. On the second consecutive day of throwing up, he can fool himself into
thinking it’s just as easy as the first day. On the third consecutive day, it’ll take a good ten
minutes before he can even gag. On the fourth day, he might get up half of what he ate--after
an hour of panic, sweat, and choking. On the fifth day, he might as well not even bother.
The fourth days are the worst, of course. An entire hour, bored and disgusted with himself?
Throwing up is not fun. It’s tedious. It’s work. His throat, as semi-replaced by Sarge’s cyborg
parts as it is, is still an uncooperative little shit. Sometimes there’s so little liquid in his
stomach that everything comes up almost like a solid; it feels like he’s trying to pull a brick
up through his throat by a string.
He remembers that back In The Day, the fourth days were always the days where he swore
this time, for real, was the last time.
He turns off the tap. Wipes water off his face. Pats at the swelling under his slightly-red eyes.
Shakes his hands dry. Picks up his helmet. The HUD tells him that a solid fifty-six minutes
have indeed passed. An entire fifty-six minutes of his day he wasted by staring at a fucking
toilet, puking his guts out.
He remembers, now, why he wanted to stop, back in junior high and high school and college.
But he’s not stupid anymore. He knows better.
He could try, but he’s not going to stop.
There was no point in telling Grif anything.
Simmons pulls on his gloves, puts on his helmet, and checks the bathroom one more time for
any splatter. He stretches out his spine, then his legs, which’ll be sore tomorrow from all the
strain he put on them today by bending over for so long. Then he leaves.
Hidey Hole
Chapter Summary
"It must be so nice to be with your best friend all the time.”
Chapter Notes
so speaking of shitty simtrooper situations
In the morning, Red Team of Rat’s Nest packs up their Warthogs, checks out their weapons
and ammo, meets up with their new squads, and sets off to spread hell across Blue Base.
There are two COs on site—Sergeants Josephson and Engel—while Sergeant Grif has been
left behind to coordinate the remaining soldiers who decided to stay at Red Base.
Simmons has a minor headache from dehydration, but nothing that adrenaline won’t fix, so
he chugs a water bottle, gears up, joins his assigned group of Reds who he’s never met
before, packs up the Warthog, and settles himself behind the machine gun. The driver pulls
out of the hangar and into the field between Red and Blue base, while other Warthogs fan out
to other directions.
Today, the Reds are coordinating a genuine, bona fide assault on Blue Base. They’re on a
mission to do some cool shit, get noticed for doing the cool shit, and then get rewarded for it.
And it shouldn’t be hard, either. With the stalemate having lasted for so long, the Blues likely
won’t be expecting them, and the plan is—
Gunshot. Sergeant Engel hits the floor.
Simmons vaguely wonders who saluted Engel in the field, or if the Blues just got very lucky.
Gunshot. Sergeant Johnson hits the floor.
Okay, super lucky.
There’s half a moment where Simmons sees not only his squad, but the squad over hesitate.
They’re probably supposed to retreat, or relegate command back to Sergeant Grif back in Red
Base, but…
“Charge!” someone yells.
Oh, fuck, Simmons thinks, as the Warthog leaps forward.
“Go for cover!” Simmons yells at his driver. “Get out of the middle of the open field,
dumbfuck!”
“But the Blues are scattering!” the driver yells back.
Gunshot. Driver shrieks and the Warthog skids to a halt. Someone yells, the driver shouts
“Copy that!” and jumps out the driver’s side door.
“Hey!” Simmons yells. “What the fuck?!”
But the guy’s not coming back, apparently, so Simmons leaps off the back and slams his foot
on the pedal and ducks his head down below the dash and really really wishes that Grif were
here because Grif could be blind with no hands and still somehow manage to drive in a
straight line. From what he can see out the passenger window, they—
There’s a crunch as the Warthog’s front bumper flattens itself into a boulder. The lurch sends
Simmons’s shoulderplate straight through the radio.
“Over there!” someone yells, and then bullets start peppering the side of Simmons’s Warthog.
He scrambles out the door and behind the boulder he’d just demolished the car with.
He takes stock of what he’s got--two pistols, a rifle, functioning radio if he needs help
(although he’s somehow uninclined to ask for backup from any of these other Reds), and a
Warthog that probably isn’t totally wrecked. He peers up at the crushed front of the Warthog.
It looks mostly okay—the car isn’t totaled or anything, most of the innards should be
untouched—but fuck if he knows anything about cars.
Well, he’s not exactly one for solo heroics. Sure, he wants to impress on the battlefield for
recognition, but he remembers what happened to Hammer. Going in solo is grounds for
getting killed, and also probably a panic attack if he thinks too hard about it. He’s going to
need a partn—
“Welcome to my hiding rock,” says Caboose.
Simmons nearly jumps out of his skin. “Jesus!” Simmons says. “Wait--what, no, this isn’t
your hiding rock. It’s mine now, Ca--I mean Blue!” For emphasis, Simmons points his gun at
Caboose. “Get out of here!”
“Oh, okay,” says Caboose sadly. “Well, I thought we could share, but…”
Simmons tries really, really hard to not feel like he’s kicking a puppy. Simmons reminds
himself that he has only ever felt two emotions in his entire life, which are ambition and
disgust, and there is no such thing as guilt. “No sharing! You’re a Blue, and you’re on the
other side!”
“Don’t be silly,” Caboose says. “I’m right here. I’m at your side.”
Simmons makes the verbal equivalent of a keyboard smash. “Caboose, I don’t have time for
this,” he says. “Get out and find your own hiding spot!”
“But they’re shooting. Loudly.”
“I don’t care!”
“Yeah, see, that’s what Private Rilinger said to Private Lai,” Caboose says suspiciously. “And
it did not end well when Private Lai left.”
Simmons pauses. Gunfire patters overhead. He pokes his head out. Nobody is looking at
them which he considers as, instead of a negative because now nobody can see his
promotion-worthy actions, a possible positive because now nobody can come kill Caboose.
Shit, he thinks to himself. He didn’t come to this army to make friends, he came here to make
a reputation for himself and build a life career worth being proud of.
But what is he supposed to do--kick Caboose out into open fire and leave him to die? The
answer is, well, yes , because Caboose is a dirty Blue, but--c’mon. Caboose? Not that
Simmons gives a damn but--Simmons suddenly has a vivid image of the look on Church’s
face if...
“Um, uh, um, okay,” Simmons says, and drags his pistol in the dirt between them. “That’s
Blue side, this is Red side. You stay on the Blue side of the hole,” he orders.
“Like a very very very very very tiny Blood Gulch!” Caboose says happily.
“You’re right, this is a terrible idea,” Simmons says.
“No, it’s a very good idea,” says Caboose. “I would not like for you to end up like Private
Rilinger.”
Simmons stops. “What? I thought you said Lai was kicked out into open fire and…”
“No, the hiding rock had a mine and Private Rilinger died. I would not like that to happen to
you, Simon,” says Caboose, quite seriously. “So I will stay here, so there is no mine to blow
you up for being a dick who kicks your friends out into open fire.”
“I don’t think that’s how mines work.”
“Well, I think that’s how people work,” Caboose says.
“Okay, you’ve officially lost track of the thread of conversation,” Simmons sighs.
“No, I—” Caboose pauses and cocks his head like he’s listening. “Sorry, what were we
talking about?”
“Incredible,” says Simmons. “The memory of a goldfish.”
“It’s mean to insult goldfish, Simon.”
Simmons sighs. He pokes his head out again. The Blues shapes seem to be moving
backwards. “Caboose, I think you guys are losing,” he says. “Ohhh, fuck, I should be out
there…”
“Yes, that’s what Principal Miller told me,” Caboose says.
“Who?”
“The voice in my radio who made you insult goldfish.”
Simmons is almost certain that there’s an internal logic to that, but he has no fucking idea
what it is. “Okay, go back. Who is Principal Miller?”
“He wants to put me in detention.”
Simmons decides he doesn’t care who Miller is. “Okay, what did Principal Miller say?”
“That we’re losing,” says Caboose simply.
Simmons sighs. “I can see that,” he says. He pokes his head back out--yep, the Blues are still
losing—
“But I think that the Reds are losing too,” says Caboose. "Probably worse than us. You
should be worried."
“What? No, you’re getting your asses kicked.”
Caboose points at the battlefield. “Principal Miller says he wants us alive so he can kill us
himself, and that goes double for you, Caboose, you teamkilling manchild. But I don’t think
your principals told you that.” He lowers his voice. "Maybe they should have?"
Then Simmons sees what Caboose is seeing, or rather was Caboose doesn’t see: he doesn’t
see any Blue bodies, just a ton of Blues running away from the Reds and giving up Blue
territory willingly and freely. He sees more Red bodies on the ground, some of them moving,
most of them not.
He frowns. Checks his team stats.
He almost drops his gun. Within the first ten minutes, they’ve lost almost half their men.
“Is this what we’re doing?” Simmons mutters. “Shocking the Blues by being so massively
suicidal that they turn tail and run? Getting mowed down, trading men for ground? ”
“I don’t think that’s how trade works,” Caboose says.
“How would you know? You gave us chalk in exchange for bullets!”
“--me? Can you hear me? ” says a voice on Simmons’s radio. “Or am I being a fucking idiot
and talking into my own helmet by myself?”
“We read you,” says a voice.
“Okay, cool,” says the voice. “This is Staff Sergeant Grif, highest ranking remaining
personnel at this base, broadcasting on a team-wide channel. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Off the channel?”
“Not the channel. Why would I put you on the channel if I just want you to get off the
channel? I mean the literal deathtrap you’re in. I’m talking about retreat.”
“But sir —"
“Oh my god! ” Grif says. “Are you for real right now? What more motivation do you need to
retreat other than Blue douchebags firing bullets at your helmets?!”
Simmons flips on his radio. “The Blues are losing,” he interrupts.
“This is true,” Caboose agrees. “We are misplacing a lot of dirt.”
“The Blues are losing ground,” Simmons translates into the radio.
“Yeah, but I really don’t care,” Grif snaps. “All the other COs are dead! I had to come out of
the base, and now I’m getting shot at, dude! If you haven’t noticed, we don’t have a plan!
Let’s get the fuck out!”
“Sir,” says a voice, “if you’d give us orders—”
“I just did! The orders are to retreat!”
“Sir! If you gave us real orders—”
“Yeah, I don’t feel like it,” Grif says.
There’s a silence. Thirty men on one radio channel, and not a single word. Simmons can’t
even hear them breathe.
Simmons looks back at the Warthog. It’d be so easy. They were winning. If he just stepped on
the gas, the Blues would scatter like bowling pins, and…
“If you don’t like it,” Grif says, “feel free to stay behind, without aid or backup or intel or any
or sort of plan, and if you survive long enough to make it back, you can explain to Command
why your ass is getting dishonorably discharged."
More silence.
“Simon?” Caboose asks.
Nobody is going to speak. Nobody is going to acknowledge orders. In the distance, a Blue
soldier pulls out a machine gun.
Simmons ducks his head. Stares at the ground. But he switches on his radio and grits his teeth
and says, into the thick, rebellious silence of thirty Red soldiers: “Copy that. Heading back to
base.”
His voice is thick with anger.
It takes a moment, but one by one, voices click on to the channel and acknowledge orders.
Simmons thinks they might be acknowledging the orders individually, since nobody is really
in their assigned squads anymore; the reel of disappointed, grudging, angry voices goes on
and on and on. They do not sound like a glorious Red army. They sound like a ragtag group
of surly boys.
But they acknowledge.
“I have to go,” Simmons tells Caboose.
Caboose is peering out from behind the rock, watching the Reds turn around and head back
to Base. “Yes, I think your friends are leaving,” he says. He deflates, then perks back up in
less than two seconds. “Oh! We can trade for turret kibble next week, right?”
“Yeah, Caboose, fine,” says Simmons.
“Oh good,” he says. “I hope you’ll bring Grif with two F’s with you. Maybe you can see my
turrets! Man, it must be so nice. I wish Church could be at this Outpost with me. It must be so
nice to be with your best friend all the time.” He waves. “Say hello to Grif with two F’s for
me!”
Simmons sets his jaw.
There’s not enough Reds left to fill the proper assembly hall. They gravitate towards the mess
hall, where people shed their helmets, sits sullenly on the tables, and murmur amongst
themselves. Simmons is just entering from the West door when Grif, the ballsy fatass,
actually dares to show his face through the East door.
He takes one look at them, shrugs, and turns right around to leave. Someone laughs
mockingly.
One private, who apparently can’t read the atmosphere, hops right off his stool, goes right up
to Grif, and salutes. Everyone else stares. “Sir, are you here for the debriefing?” the soldier
asks
Grif groans. “What the fuck do you need a debriefing for?”
“For one, to account for all our fatalities, sir,” says the soldier.
Grif screws up his face. “I don’t feel like debriefing you. I’ll do the fatality count later,” he
says. “If you’ve got an injury, go over to the med wing yourself.”
“Sir, we have to take stock of the outcome of the battle—”
“I’ll do that later.”
“Later?” He hesitates. “Don’t we need to know the outcome of the battle?”
“Uh, isn’t it obvious?” Grif gestures to the mess hall full of dirty, wounded soldiers. “We got
our asses kicked?”
Grif whirls around and makes a break for the only other exit, which happens to be exactly
where Simmons is. “Hey,” Grif says. “You wanna be the ‘later’ that does all my paperwork?”
“No,” says Simmons.
“C’mon, Simmons, I’ll say nice things about you in the report—”
As if you’d actually write the report, is what Simmons is supposed to say. But he doesn’t say
anything. He just stands there, arms crossed, teeth clenched, staring at Grif.
Grif groans, like not only his job but Simmons himself are a fucking imposition. “Come off
it,” Grif says. “Me? Do responsibilities? Actually give orders? You know me. We did our
best, we shot some bullets, it was time to come back.”
“We could have taken Blue Base,” Simmons says.
“So what?” Grif replies. “Are you going to do the paperwork or not?”
Whoever Miller is, he’d been right: Blue Team was losing ground. But so was Caboose: Red
Team had been losing people , and that their commanders hadn’t told them to come back
alive--not until Grif had shown up. They were trading people for a second base in a set of
tunnels that went nowhere. (Having people at Rat’s Nest at all wouldn’t have been worth it.)
Giving up was, in fact, exactly the right call, even the call that Simmons would have made in
another time and place and military ranking. Retreat, regroup, launch a second, better assault
that didn’t go to shit two seconds out the gate, and maybe, if they really want that useless
Blue Base, they can do it without any casualties. No pain, no gain works the other way
around, after all--no gain means that there should be no pain.
But if there’s anything worse than Grif sabotaging his military career, it’s sabotaging his
career because Grif is right. Objectively, plainly, completely right.
Simmons hates that.
For one pure, emptyheaded moment, Simmons hates Grif.
“Do your own damn report, you lazy piece of shit,” he hisses, and stalks off back to the mess
hall.
Temper Mettle
Chapter Summary
Simmons hates Sissy, and boy does it feel good to admit it.
Simmons is so pissed that he seethes through the rest of the day, and then the rest of the next
day, and then the day after that. He’s pissed when Grif writes up the reports and catalogues
the damage and cleans up the bodies. He’s pissed when Window Guy says hello in passing.
He’s pissed and he takes the opportunity to skip every single meal, and he doesn’t even feel
hungry and doesn’t even feel happy about not feeling hungry because he’s so busy being
pissed. He’s so pissed that when it comes time to stand guard with Sissy the next afternoon,
Sissy takes one look at him and starts laughing.
“Reconsidering what I said about Sergeant Grif being a threat?” Sissy asks.
“ Eat shit and die ,” Simmons replies.
Sissy laughs again, as if Simmons was just kidding around and didn’t actually, genuinely
want this man to meet a grisly death by chainsaw. Sissy should have died in the last battle.
There was a fifty-fifty chance he could have, god fucking dammit, what was Sissy’s fucking
problem , being alive to bother Simmons on guard duty? Guard duty isn’t Sissy’s fucking job
, it’s Grif’s job, except that if Grif was here right now Simmons would probably just punch
him off the wall. But noooo, Simmons has to settle for Private fucking Sissy , who appears to
have no problem blindly baiting Simmons when he knows Simmons is pissed as hell, so shit,
who gives a damn, right?
Fuck being polite. Fuck being nice. Fuck trying to not hate his coworkers.
Simmons hates Sissy, and boy does it feel good to admit it.
“But now you see it. Now you admit it. Sergeant Grif is a veritable threat to the Red Army,”
Sissy announces.
“I’m giving you five seconds to stop being a smug douchelord,” Simmons says.
“And we’re completely justified in wanting to find any way to dispatch him and call
Command for a better—”
“Four,” says Simmons, and taps his finger along the side of his gun. “Three.”
“How’d someone so incompetent get promoted anyway?” Sissy wonders.
“You know, I’d actually tell you,” says Simmons, “if I didn’t despise the fact that cosmic
space dust had the misjudgment to one day form the organic matter that is you.”
“So, he swore you to secrecy,” Sissy says.
“ No ,” says Simmons, as clearly as he can, “I just hate you.”
Sissy chuckles again. He still doesn’t get it. He still doesn’t realize that Simmons isn’t
kidding. Maybe Simmons isn’t enunciating his vowels right.
“And I enjoy sabotaging your delusions of grandeur and conspiracy,” Simmons adds, as
clearly as he can.
“Alright, fine,” says Sissy, as if Simmons hadn’t spoken. He looks around, as if checking the
weather and Simmons isn’t even there. “But since you’ve seen reason at last, I want to show
you something.”
Then he walks straight out the guard’s tower and into the no-man’s land. The no-man’s land
between bases is littered with old Warthog parts and the occasional rust-brown of dried
blood. Blue Team’s guards had turned their helmets away when Reds came to collect the
bodies. Sissy is going off to the side, way to the outskirts where they won’t be quite in plain
view, but still a long, dangerous way from Red Base.
“Hey, no offense except, y’know, full offense because you’re being incredibly stupid ,”
Simmons snaps, “but where do you think you’re going?”
Sissy sounds positively gleeful. “I’ve already shown some others, but I want to show you,
too. You deserve to know, considering your relationship to the Sergeant. I’ve found a way to
get rid of Staff Sergeant Grif.”
Simmons chews his lip. He’s trying really hard not to grin, or maybe grimace, but then he
remembers Grif’s shit-eating, careless shrug from yesterday and makes up his mind and
stomps off after Sissy. He’s in a mood. He’s in The mood, actually. He’s in a Really Proper
Mood, and the Mood wants to be reckless, and the Mood doesn’t want to calm down, and the
Mood wants to mess Grif up, because the tubby lazy fatass deserves it. Simmons walks right
into no man’s land without a backwards glance.
Sissy brings him to a corner of one of the long tunnels, still in clear view of both bases.
There’s a pile of broken turrets shoved up against the wall. Simmons and Simmons’s Mood
are uninclined to feel bad for Caboose and his broken turrets. “Okay, what’s this?” he asks,
impatient.
Sissy pulls open one of the turrets, where a full magazine of bullets is still inside. It still has
Shipment to Outpost 28B--Red Base stamped on the side. “See this?” says Sissy. “Don’t you
wonder why we get so many shipments but we always have so little supplies?”
Simmons says nothing. Very slowly, his heart begins to sink. On the other hand, Simmons
isn't sure what else he expected.
“Sergeant Grif was in charge of the armory for a while, wasn’t he?” Sissy says. “Did you see
his behavior at the armory? Suspicious. Very, very suspicious.”
Simmons feels his Mood beginning to fizzle away. He is, about ten minutes after he should
have, beginning to realize that he might have fucked up.
“I,” he starts. “Well. That’s. Um.”
“And he’d have access to the records as well, so he could have forged those easily…”
“Ah, er,” Simmons says.
“So he was in the perfect position to do so,” says Sissy, “and with the way he was behaving?
Barging in, trying to cover up anything he couldn't before he was transferred out?”
“I mean, you don’t know that, that’s all… conjecture…” Simmons says.
He could scream. Here he is, pissed as all hell at Grif, and even now he still can’t bring
himself to throw Grif to the wolves?
Sissy isn’t listening, of course. Sissy is fiddling with the magazine, lost in his own little
world. “The only question is,” Sissy wonders aloud, “since this is rather large operation, you
know… it seems unlikely that this was solo work. He’d have to have a contact on the Blue
side, and possibly a partner on the Red side, too. So who could have helped Grif with the
operation and the forging of…”
Sissy trails away. Then he looks at Simmons.
Simmons thanks God and Jesus for the opaque visor on his helmet, because he is realizing
how close to being caught for embezzlement and treason he is and he is losing his shit .
“Simmons,” says Sissy.
Simmons nearly swallows his tongue. “Er, uh, um...”
“I’m sorry,” says Sissy.
Simmons is going get caught by Private fucking Sissy and get court-martialed and sent to jail
and he’ll rot away in prison and his family will come and laugh at him and oh god his cyborg
limbs need maintenance and who would yell at Grif to stop smoking and he’d never be able
to compete against the prisoners doing hard time and he’ll have to live as some prison bitch
for the rest of his—
“Sergeant Grif has replaced you with a new boyfriend,” Sissy says, with utter seriousness and
gravity.
“What,” says Simmons.
“I’m sorry you had to find out this way but, as you can see through my impeccable logic and
deductive reasoning that took zero leaps or shortcuts, this is the only logical conclusion. After
all, nobody could possibly be so stupid as to be both working an illegal trade with Grif, and
then come with me to investigate that illegal trade, so his partner definitely can’t be you. Face
it, Simmons. Grif’s two-timing you.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Simmons replies. “As if he’d be able to get rid of me. He couldn’t--he
wouldn’t replace me. Would he? I mean, after everything that we’ve gone through,
everything we agreed to...”
Sissy makes a sympathetic noise.
“Wait, no,” Simmons interrupts himself, “this new partner isn’t real! Grif isn’t illegally
selling ammo to the Blues, that’s ridiculous, and if he was, he definitely wouldn’t have
partnered up with anyone but me! How do you even come up with the conclusion that he has
a new partner and that he’s fucking them?! And--and Grif can fuck off right now, anyway, so-so, y’know, I don’t give a shit about what he does anyway!”
“You still have the right to be jealous and heartbroken,” says Sissy.
“WHY would I be JEALOUS of a FICTIONAL MAN that Grif isn’t ACTUALLY
CHEATING on me with. WHY.”
“Because as the nature of cheating goes,” Sissy says, “he’s probably better looking with a
better personality and better career and probably better at giving head to boot.”
“BULLSHIT,” Simmons says. “Grif is--too lazy to cheat. Yeah! And for your information, I
am perfectly fine-looking, my personality is a ray of sunshine, my career is taking off, and...”
Simmons realizes where his sentence is going. Anger boils higher. Why does everything have
to be that homo shit with Sissy?
“...and besides, I hate Grif!” Simmons says. “So I don’t give a shit about what Grif does,
since everything he does is a lazy, incompetent waste of resources anyway!”
Sissy gives Simmons that Look. “You’re just going to let Grif get away with this?” Sissy
says. “I know you’re upset, but don’t be blinded by your passionate, jilted-lover outrage. If
we don’t stop them, Grif is going to drive us all to an early demise, bankrupt the Red Army,
and get away scot-free with his new lover, all because you’re too angry to think straight.”
“I’M NOT ANGRY,” Simmons says, angrily.
“And then the two of them are going to escape this place with all their stolen money,” Sissy
goes on, as if in a trance, “and escape to a distant planet where they plan to sort through their
stolen goods, until they find that their hideaway is a planet ravaged by civil war, where
they’ll realize what it means to work for the great good of a society and become the unlikely
heroes of both sides against a conspiracy led by bloodthirsty mercenaries to artificially tear
the planet apart via war…”
“You delusional, blind, ignorant waste of space,” Simmons sneers.
“...and beautifully grow into better versions of themselves and realize a deep concern for not
only themselves and their well-being but for each other and the other’s well-being, which
they will one day realize is the love they have always denied in words but not in action…”
Simmons starts snickering.
“...and settle down and have space babies on a vaguely socialist moon base retirement
community for veterans,” Sissy finishes.
Now Simmons is laughing. It’s the same ugly, angry, mocking laughter that he used to hear
from his mother. He doesn’t care.
Sissy gives Simmons a sympathetic look. “Like I said. Simmons, you’ve been dumped.”
Anger: boiling. “You need to knock it off with the gay jokes,” Simmons snaps.
“Why? Nobody minds if you’re fucking. Or were , past tense.”
Nobody minds is a lie, first off. But then again, Simmons already knows that Sissy’s a liar.
Second off: “Because I mind that you’re assuming something that’s not even true, you
inconsiderate imbecile. We’re not dating. We’re not anything. We’re not even friends. So for
once in your life , pull your head out of your ass and stop wasting air.”
Sissy raises one eyebrow.
Simmons grits his teeth. “We’ve just got really, really shit luck, so both of us always end up
in the same places at the same times,” Simmons explains through gritted teeth.
Sissy raises the other eyebrow.
“Oh, why am I explaining this to you? I could be talking to a brick wall and it’d understand
better than you. A guy has to cope,” Simmons says, very slowly, as if talking to an
exceptionally stupid amoeba. “Like, we might have… maybe said some things, or behaved
oddly here and there, but if we imply anything, it’s just--we’re just kidding. If we make a few
jokes about some stuff, it’s because we’re having a morbid, black-humor laugh about us
never being able to escape each other, even though logically speaking, we totally, completely
should be able to. See? Everything we do is a joke between two totally, completely straight
dudes.”
“Oh my god,” Sissy mutters.
Simmons sneers. “What am I doing, explaining to you? As if a delusional tin-foil nutcase like
you could understand.”
“It’s okay,” says Sissy, and pats Simmons’s shoulder. Simmons has the sudden impulse to
break his hand. “I know this break-up is hard for you, but maybe you can work it out with
Sergeant Grif and you’ll get back together? If--ugh--if you must . I mean, I suppose getting
promoted and currying favor is all well and good, but since he’s fat and ugly and lazy...”
Simmons’s eyebrows shoot up. “ Excuse you?” says Simmons.
“Why, is that news to you? Have you seen his face? Have you seen anyone with such fuckedup skin grafts? Who botched up that surgery? Couldn’t they bother to at least try to match the
skin to—”
“What the fuck do you know?” Simmons snaps.
“I think we can all agree that Sergeant Grif is an irresponsible and dangerous individual—”
Anger, boiling.
“The hell do you think you are, getting off and saying that?” Simmons asks, as if Simmons
does not regularly insult Grif both behind and to his face. “When you’re an even bigger piece
of shit than Grif could ever be?”
Anger, boiling. Boiling—
Sissy gives him a withering look that Simmons can feel through the visor. “Please, Simmons.
Don’t be so—”
“Shut up,” says Simmons.
“What?” says Sissy.
Whatever Simmons is, Simmons doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t want to hear anything
this irritating, infuriating little man has to say anymore. He doesn’t want to put up with
Sissy’s conspiracy theories and Sissy somehow having stumbled right into Grif and
Simmons’s trading deal with Caboose.
“I said shut up,” says Simmons.
Sissy stiffens. The movement hits Simmons like the scent of blood in the water. “I thought
we were all on the same page that Sergeant Grif has to be remo—”
“Do you hear yourself talk?” Simmons asks. “Do you have ears? Are you capable of actually
listening to yourself, like you force the rest of us to do every time you waste our time by
opening your mouth?”
“Simmons, I don’t know what’s gotten into—”
“What’s gotten into me is I’m fed up with you, and the rest of this fucking base ,” Simmons
snaps. “I’m tired of you and your shitty logic and all your crackpot theories that don’t check
out or make sense or have a single ounce of self-reflection or criticism. And speaking of,
what’s your fucking problem, Sissel ?” Simmons sneers. “Nothing you say makes sense!
Nothing makes sense!”
“I—”
“Do you know , Sissel? Caboose was transferred here because they didn’t have anywhere else
to put him!” Simmons says. “He isn’t a supersoldier, he’s just big and stupid and barely
knows which team he’s on! He joined the army by accident! Grif and I are here because we
happened to be in the same place at the same time! Grif was promoted by chance! Grif was
drafted by chance, and I joined on a whim! There’s no reason whatsoever that we wind up
together, just that we do!”
“I don’t believe that the Red Army—”
“That’s fucking rich , yeah,” Simmons interrupts. He’s aware that he’s shouting now. “You
think there’s a Red Army cause? You think there’s a Blue Army cause? What is it? Can you
tell me? Do you know ?”
“We—” Sissy is backing away. “We have to…”
“I don't care! Nobody cares, Sissy!” Simmons yells. “Even if there was a point to Blues vs
Reds, nobody gives a shit about fairness and justice of winning or losing in real wars, either!
The only thing that matters is the money and fame we earn from putting other people down
and putting other people in the ground! That’s the only reason I joined this fucking army, and
the only reason anyone should join this army!”
“Simmons, wait, stop—”
“No, and also fuck you!” Simmons yells, even though Simmons has no idea if Sissy means
Simmons’s ranting, or Simmons advancing, step by step, backing Sissy up against the wall.
“I’ll stop when we’re dead . And newsflash! In this army, dying probably won't take that
long! Because in this army, there's no need for logic, we don’t need reasons to live or die,
there is no reason why we’re here, and we won’t get any reasons, either!”
Sissy’s back hits a wall. Simmons’s teeth are bared and he shoves his visor right up against
Sissy’s visor.
“There’s no reason why we’re here, you schizophrenic jackoff. Uselessness goes for the
Blues, for the Reds, for Caboose, for Grif, for me, and certainly,” Simmons hisses, “most
certainly for you.”
Simmons is so close he can see the outlines of Sissy’s eyes through the visors. They’re wide.
Staring. Glassy with fear.
Simmons smiles, finally, finally feeling satisfied.
“So shut the fuck up,” he seethes, “keep your head down, stop thinking, stop lying, and give
up.”
Gunshot. Simmons hits the dirt.
Not intentionally. It’s because his leg fucking hurts. His leg possibly hurts for reasons related
to the gunshot. He should yell about the pain, but he’s so surprised that he forgets.
“Hands up, Red!” comes a voice. Aw, fuck, Simmons realizes; Blues who saw the some Reds
sitting like ducks in the middle of the no man’s zone, and also probably heard Simmons
yelling at the top of his—
“You killed him!” Sissy yells. He sounds offended.
Yeah, that’s a good plan: play dead. Simmons lies very still and does his best impression of
being killed. Maybe he can shoot them when they’re not expecting it? But his gun is still in
its holster and the gun he was holding isn’t anywhere near his hands anymore, so—
“I said hands up,” says a second voice. “or—”
Sissy pulls up his gun instead.
The second guy freezes. “Shit, Randall!” says the First.
Sissy hesitates.
Second says, “But what about taking priso—”
Simmons reaches for his gun. Sissy looks at him.
“Just shoot!” cries First.
Gunshots. Sissy’s head jerks back. His entire body jerks back. Visor glass shatters.
The body collapses.
The Kevlar undersuit is leaking red.
Nobody moves.
Simmons lies very still and pretends he wasn’t reaching for his gun after all.
“Jesus,” says Second Blue.
Through the cracked visor, Simmons can see the inside of Sissy’s HUD and the peak of a
human nose. Lights are flashing.
“Why the fuck didn’t you just shoot him?” snaps First.
“Well, why didn’t you?!” Second snaps back.
“I was out of ammo! Why didn’t you?”
“I… I dunno, he wasn’t, like, really aiming or…”
“He was pointing a gun at you!”
“I didn’t think he was really going to shoot!”
“Of course he was!” cries First. “He’s a Red!”
Simmons is holding his breath. Sissy’s HUD begins flashing red. Armor lock compression is
activated to preserve blood in the ruptured organs. Armor lock compression is failing.
Second mumbles something unintelligible.
“What?”
“I said, can we go now?” says Second, in the tone of voice that makes Simmons doubt that
that was what he’d said. “We swept the perimeter. Let’s go report it and let the higher-ups
handle it.”
“Good idea,” says First. “Can you believe that that’s the first time we’ve killed a Red at this
outpost?”
The HUD freezes. Armor lock compression failed.
“On purpose, you mean,” says Second. “Plenty of Reds have died on accident. Unless there’s
a word for the opposite of ‘Caboosed’?”
“Uhhh, Caboosed is like, accidental manslaughter. So maybe... intentional murder...?”
The display goes black. Armor operating systems shutting down.
“That’s not a word, that’s a phrase,” says Second. “And don’t I need intentions for it to be
intentional?”
Simmons lies there a long while, listening to them argue and watching the Kevlar drip. When
he can’t hear them anymore, he twists around, checking his limited range of vision through
the visor to see if they’re really gone--which they are--and pulls himself to a sitting position.
His wounded thigh protests, but from the throbbing ball of pain that feels lodged in his quad,
it’s nowhere near any bones or arteries that he can remember. He’ll probably be okay.
Probably.
He blinks in the dim light. He tries to feel his leg, but most of his leg has gone numb except
for the tennis ball of pain where the bullet is. Maybe he’s going into shock? Is that how shock
works? He doesn’t feel angry. He doesn’t feel scared. He feels...
So shut the fuck up, keep your head down, stop thinking, stop lying, and give up.
(Not that Sissy wasn't Simmons's most despised person the planet but--had that really been
the last thing Simmons had ever said to someone just before they--?)
No. Never mind. He's got to report that they lost another soldier. He gets up and tests out his
wounded leg--"Jesus fuck!" because it really, really does hurt--and checks his holster. He
looks over his shoulder in the direction of Blue Base. Nobody around. Just him and the body.
He's got to report that. Let the higher-ups handle it.
Got to report. Got to report. Don't panic. Got to report. He limps in the direction of Red Base.
Got to report. He is trying to be glad that, at the very least, he is no longer angry.
Leg Sidle
Chapter Summary
"I love badmouthing the dead like the classy gentlemen we are.”
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
In the first hour:
“Leg wounds are kinda like Hollywood’s way of saying ‘you didn’t get shot anywhere
important’” the medic complains. “As if . You could lose your entire leg with a leg wound.”
“ What ,” Simmons says.
“Yeah, seriously. Leg wounds are crazy. There’s a bunch of shit in legs like, you know,
arteries and bones and junk. Did you know your leg has bones?”
Simmons hopes to god that that’s a rhetorical question. The medic looks at him expectantly.
Simmons realizes it wasn’t, in fact, a rhetorical question. “Yyyyyyyyes,” says Simmons.
“Yes, I did.”
“Sometimes the bullet hits an artery and then you bleed out and die,” the medic says. “And if
the bullet hits a bone, then the bone usually shatters and the fragments grind around inside
the muscle that’s trapped inside your skin until it hits an artery and then you bleed out and—”
“Am I dying ,” Simmons interrupts.
“Nah,” says the medic.
“So you hyped me up about dying over my leg wound for nothing.”
“You’re still going to be in an assload of pain, if it helps.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Like, a metric fuckton of pain,” the medic says again. “When the localized anaesthetic wears
off? Damn! Have fun.”
“Are you gonna take the bullet out, at least?” Simmons asks.
“Hell no,” the medic says. “I’m leaving that thing right where it is. Do you want me fucking
around in your muscle, trying to pull that thing out? I could accidentally puncture an artery
and then you bleed out and—”
“Okay, okay,” says Simmons.
“So now you have a metal chunk even in the organic bits of your body,” says the medic.
“Congrats.”
There’s a pause. The medic gives Simmons a considering look. “ How did you say you got
turned into a cyborg again…?”
“I didn’t say,” Simmons replies.
The medic shrugs. “Well, it’s convenient, at least,” says the medic. “Your chest literally opens
right up for organ maintenance. Have you seen this shit? Wild .”
“I do, sometimes, take my shirt off,” Simmons replies flatly. “Sometimes in the vicinity of a
mirror, too.”
“Literally, I could press a button to open you up Y-scar-style. You’re the Easy-Cheese of
heart surgery patients.”
Simmons thinks about that for a moment. “I resent being compared to plastic cheese in an
aerosol bottle, but that’s good to know,” says Simmons. (Which he’s not being sarcastic
about, actually. Who knows what his electrolytes are doing?"
“You still have to do some rehab on your leg, though,” says the medic. “And you’ll probably
have to stay here for a while while the muscle figures out what it’s going to do with your new
chunk of metal. Your body might freak out, but considering the shitload of other metal,” he
gestures to Simmons’s metal arm, “that you’ve got in you, I’m guessing… probably not.”
“So you’re going to do nothing,” says Simmons.
“Yeah,” says the medic.
Simmons sighs. “Of course. What did I expect from a medic? You don’t heal people, you just
help them as they die.”
“Oh, no, I’m not a medic,” says the medic. “I’m just some guy who cleans the medbay until
an actual medic gets shipped in.”
Simmons chokes. The not-medic gives him the biggest, most awful shit-eating grin Simmons,
exception of Grif.
“I’m just going to keep calling you a medic until the actual medic gets here,” Simmons says.
“You do that. We’ve been requesting a medic for almost three years,” the medic replies.
Then Simmons wakes up feeling like he’s dying.
He’s not dying. He was barely sleeping--he’d slipped into a twenty minute nap. But his chest
is tight anyway, and he can’t breathe, and he reminds himself to breathe out so there’s enough
room in his lungs to breathe in, and then he can breathe again, but his chest is still pinching ,
like someone’s opened up his chest and has a clamp around his arteries—
He lays there until he can feel the pain in his leg. He's not dying. He's not dying. He's not.
Then he recites every awful swear he’s ever heard from Church, who is a far more
imaginative swearer than he will ever be, because damn, his leg really does fucking hurt .
He rolls over and clenches his fists and tries not to be here, which is not unlike literally
anything else he’s ever done with his entire life, but now the pain is too loud for him to want
to find some food and throw it back up. He wonders how he’ll be able to throw up with his
leg in this condition. (Not because he wants to throw up now, not in particular; just planning
for the future, because he knows himself. He knows that’s only a matter of time.)
(Simmons stares at the ceiling and tries not to think about that.)
In the second hour:
“Oh, by the way,” says the medic, “when was your last physical? The last thing I have on file
for you is from…” The medic flips through the clipboard. “...from five years ago? Did you
just never have a check-up at your last post?”
“Uhhh,” say Simmons. “Wwwwwhich answer won’t get me in trouble?”
The medic rolls his eyes. “I don’t get paid enough to care. Out of my way, I have a bunch of
medical electronic shit I wanna use.”
Heart failure is not uncommon for people who throw up too often. Bulimics, sure, but also
alcoholics who drink themselves sick on the regular. Especially alcoholics who drink without
food, and then throw up nothing but liquid. Nothing worse for clearing out all the electrolytes
you need to live like throwing up the liquid at the bottom of your stomach.
He’s heard that sometimes you die fast, that way. He’s heard that most of the time, it’s slow
and painful; that you end up trapped in your own malfunctioning body as it struggles towards
life without anything it needs to live.
Bodies, as purely physical entities separate from the people they house, don’t need reasons to
live. It’s nice to be able to pinpoint the physical reasons why they die.
Simmons wonders what the physical reason Sissy died was.
A bullet, obviously , he’s not stupid. A bullet through the head. Through the brain, more
specifically. What malfunctions when a bullet rips through a brain? Through the eye, through
the skull--does the skull fracture, too? Bounce around in the skin, tearing through the brain?
Does the brain need to be arranged a certain way to function? Isn’t it all just grey matter?
What makes the brain work? What makes it stop—
Fuck, fuck, Simmons wants to leave. (He shouldn’t have said that to Sissy. Any of it.) He
needs to get out of here. But he can’t. He’s stuck here with he and himself. He suddenly sees
the appeal that his mother saw in alcohol--portable, concealable, doesn’t require a toilet if
you can hold your liquor. Simmons stares at the ceiling and tries not to think about that,
either.
“Did you know we have a cool glowy thing?” the medic says.
Simmons frowns. Did he mean the cool glowy thing that Doc used? “One of those things that
examines people by reading data their power armor picked up, along with other signals from
heat signature and magnetic pulses…?”
“How would I know,” says the medic. “Ask the medic when he gets here. Anyway, the little
glowy thing spat out a bunch of numbers about what your blood is doing—”
Simmons suddenly feels the strong compulsion to jump out of bed and run, like that one time
that he’d gone to the dentist while ass-deep in a two-year purging streak and sat in the
waiting room convinced he was going to be told that all his teeth were going to rot and fall
out because of all the stomach acid in his mouth; he’s going to be told that his electrolytes are
fucked and he’s about to die and his potassium is nonexistent and probably something about
ketones because he hasn’t eaten in like three days—
“--and everything’s fine.”
“What?” says Simmons.
“Yeah, apparently literally nothing changed from your last check-up. You’re in perfect health.
Nothing’s wrong whatsoever.”
Simmons says nothing.
“Cool, good talk. Oh,” says the medic, as if he just remembered: “But you probably missed
dinner, so here’s something while I get someone to bring food, which you’re definitely going
to need to heal up that leg.”
He hands Simmons a cup of something orange.
It looks like orange juice. Smells like orange juice. Simmons swirls the juice in the cup. It has
the consistency of no-pulp orange juice, too.
“What is this?” Simmons asks.
“Uhhh, orange juice?” the medic replies.
“There’s only orange juice in this?”
The medic gives him an odd look. “...Yeah?”
“Okay,” says Simmons.
The medic leaves. Simmons looks at the orange juice.
He should probably drink this. Literally no nutritional value, of course, considering that
orange juice is just pureed sugar in water which, speaking of blood sugar levels, would just
fuck that up and probably make him jittery. Why does he need it if he’s just going to sit in
bed all day?
But why doesn’t he need it? It’s like, six ounces. What damage could it do? Some?
Negligible? Significant, but workable? Drink the fucking thing, Simmons. Not all food
people give you is poison. He’s not going to die. He just got through worrying about his
health check-up, he’s not particularly trying to follow any food rules or record what he eats,
so why not?
But why not not ? It’ll just—
Oh, never mind. Simmons knows this game. He doesn’t want to play. The guy said perfect
health , okay, he’s fine, nothing’s wrong with him, he has medical records to prove how
nothing wrong he is! No consequences! No problems! Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing!
Flush it all away, all gone, start again tomorrow and promise not to purge, repeat yesterday
and purge, flush it all away, all gone, start again tomorrow, he’s going to be healthy, he’s
going to be okay, he’s going to be nothing wro—
He doesn't want to play this game, either. He dumps the juice in a potted plant and leaves it
alone. Then he stares at the ceiling and tries not to think at all.
In the third hour:
Grif slams open the door and Simmons nearly jumps out of his skin.
“I’ve been messaging you for forever !” Grif nearly yells. “How come I didn’t hear that
you’re in the medbay ?!”
“Why, something important happen?” Simmons replies.
“Uhh,” says Grif, in that way that he does when he doesn’t really have anything important
but he wanted something else entirely--presumably to see Simmons in the medbay, or
something gay like that--so they have to side-step the real issue for the prerequisite twenty
minutes before they can get to what’s actually happening.
Therefore, Grif goes on to detail to Simmons that he, apparently, used his helmetcam to
message Simmons a smiley face he’d drawn with ketchup on--on a--Simmons squints at the
photo and then feels himself physically recoil. “Grif, I swear to god, if you drew that
ketchup-face on a pancake …”
“Putting syrup on pancakes is so mainstream. I developed a taste for ketchup after I started
putting ketchup in my oatmeal.”
“Get out out of this medbay,” says Simmons.
“C’mon, Simmons, you’re hurting the smiley-face’s feeli—”
“Who’s yelling?” the medic yells from the office.
“Me,” says Grif.
“Who’s ‘me’?”
“This heathen ,” Simmons says, “who puts ketchup on his fucking pancakes—”
“Never mind, doesn’t matter,” says the medic.
“Aren’t you going to tell me to leave?” Grif asks. “Y’know, ‘it’s not visiting hours,’ and ‘the
patient has to rest,’ and ‘you’re disturbing the healing process’--all that good shit?”
“Why would I?” asks the medic. “I don’t care. I’m not liable for jack shit. Go on, fuck him
up.” And the medic slams the office door closed.
Grif and Simmons look at each other.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” says Simmons, “but I think I like Doc’s personality better.”
“Does Doc have a personality to like?” Grif wonders.
“Christ, Grif, and you accuse me of hurting a ketchup-smiley-face’s feelings.”
“You ignored him when I sent his photo to you!”
“I wasn’t really keen to sit in bed in full power armor with a helmet on,” Simmons replies.
Grif’s eyes go, almost involuntarily, to Simmons’s leg. “So, uh,” he begins. “Are you,
like…?”
“I’m dying,” says Simmons flatly.
Grif freezes.
“Every single one of my arteries were hit,” says Simmons, “and also all my bones, and my
leg is a fractured mess that will never recover, and all my arteries are bleeding out and dying!
In fact, I’m on the brink of death as we speak.”
Grif clears his throat. Gives Simmons an unappreciative look. “Okay, fine. Whatever. Cool.”
Simmons scowls. Honestly--what did Grif want him to do? If it’s not allowed for Grif to
openly care that Simmons landed himself in medical, then how is it allowed for Simmons to
openly acknowledge that Grif came to see him and how he was doing? “It was one bullet. It’s
fine. Go ask the medic,” says Simmons shortly, and sidesteps right into: “We lost another guy
today. We’re down to forty-four.”
“--Oh,” says Grif, and frowns and scratches his head. He looks back at Simmons’s leg again
before tearing his eyes away. “Right. And you’re telling me because I’m the only Sergeant
left at this base.”
“Yeah. God forbid, but it’s up to you to find Private Sissel’s file and mark it with KIA. Don’t
get lost in the archives.”
“Wait,” says Grif. “ Sissy died?”
“Yeah,” says Simmons.
“What happened?” Grif asks, and then before Simmons can respond, Grif apparently realizes
that Sissy is an appropriately neutral person that Grif can ask after without looking like a
loser: “Were you attacked? Who was there? Was it just you two? How many other guys?
How come I didn’t hear about it until just now? What was the damage?”
Simmons sighs. “Sissy, the fucking idiot, thought he could uncover some conspiracy about
Caboose. So he went off the regular patrol route. Then a pair of Blues saw us doing nothing
in the middle of the battlefield and--apparently these Blues, unlike those Blood Gulch goons,
can actually hit their targets.”
“And that’s how…”
“They thought I’d died,” Simmons says. “They must’ve been far off when they hit me, so
they just came, shot Sissy, and left.”
“You were lucky,” says Grif.
“I could have gotten luckier and gotten shot in the metal leg,” Simmons complains. “As it
was, I couldn’t drag his body back so we could bury him.”
Grif says nothing for a moment. His face is screwed up, like he’s trying to figure out his
chances and hedge his bets. Then he says, “He got shot and killed... in front of you.”
Simmons would actually rather they go back to talking about his leg.
“Well, thank goodness, honestly. He was an asshole,” says Simmons. “I probably wouldn’t
have brought back his body even with good legs.”
Grif is looking at him side-eyed. “Yeah? Isn’t he the guy who cornered me in the mess hall?”
Simmons snorts. “Yeah, that guy. He’s also the guy who--what’d you call him? Prissy Sissy?”
“Yeah, that guy you were complaining about in the first couple weeks here.”
“What a fucking toolbag,” Simmons complains.
“Pff, yeah,” says Grif, “what a toolbag. I love badmouthing the dead like the classy
gentlemen we are.”
“We already badmouthed him when he was alive, anyway,” Simmons says.
“Gossiping behind people’s backs is the best, obviously.”
“Not just behind his back,” says Simmons. “To his face.”
“Damn, really? When was that?”
“Two seconds before he died,” says Simmons.
There’s a silence.
Simmons is suddenly very interested in the bedsheets. When he looks up, he catches Grif
looking at his leg again.
“What’d you say to him?” asks Grif.
Simmons swallows. “Really nasty shit,” he admits, more quietly than he should have.
Silence.
“Yikes,” says Grif, tentatively.
“Yeah,” says Simmons.
More silence.
“But he was a piece of trash, anyway,” says Simmons, which isn’t a lie.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true.”
"Can you believe,” Simmons says, “he took one look at Caboose and decided he was a tank
on two legs.”
“To be fair, Caboose kind of is a tank on two legs.”
“Yeah, but he thought he was a tactical mastermind or something,” says Simmons, more
irritably now. “Do you know how annoying it is to listen to him jumping at some dumbass
conspiracy theory? Do you know--fuck, did I tell you about this? He was an absolute
douchebag like, all the time, but this one thing he did was the absolute worst .”
“Oh, boy,” says Grif. “This one sounds like a good one.”
“He was convinced ,” Simmons says, “that we were sleeping together. He took one look at us
and he was like yep, those two, gay as hell—”
Grif looks appropriately amused by this.
“--but then he had the fucking nerve to be like, oooh, Simmons, you don’t have to whore
yourself out, I’ll help you out so you don’t have to pity-fuck Grif, like you’re some awful
catch or—” Simmons realizes his sentence is going straight into Forbidden Zone and does a
U-turn: “—like I was some ugly mutt he was trying to adopt! Or--I don’t know, some
exceedingly stupid and ugly thing--”
“At least ugly mutts are cute.”
“Yeah!” Simmons says angrily. “Like I was a--an ugly mutt turd, or something!”
“A flea?”
“Bacteria!”
“Uglier,” says Grif. “A sea cucumber. Those are like, living turds.”
“Sea cucumber turd,” Simmons seethes. “ Fuck that guy!”
Simmons crosses his arms, winces when it jostles his leg, and fumes. Grif looks away from
the leg again.
“Let’s give him a shit burial,” says Simmons. “You gotta send someone to get his body. Then
we’ll put ‘professional turdbucket’ on his grave.”
Grif groans. “I gotta send a report, gotta square away the pension… All this paperwork.
Geez. Ugh, fuck, I won’t bother with Command. I’ll just rewire the pension to his family and
send a note.”
“They’ve probably got a boilerplate letter for notifying family of deaths.”
“Fuck it, too lazy to find it,” says Grif. “I’ll write my own.”
“Tell them he was a turdbucket.”
“Fuck yeah.
Simmons blows out a breath. Nothing like working yourself up into a proper irritation, like
he can breathe the poison out of his body with a good rant.
Grif’s helmet dings. Grif kicks it under the bed.
“Let me guess,” Simmons says. “Someone’s messaging you to tell you to do a responsibility
you’re avoiding.”
“You know it,” says Grif.
“You should probably do it.”
“Impossible. I’m emotionally compromised right now. I have to weep at the bedside of my
gay lover as he angsts over the death of his beloved partner, and tell him how much I love
him and cherish him and want his space babies.”
Simmons reaches over and does his best attempt to shove Grif without upsetting his leg,
which Grif dodges easily. “Grif! Go do your work for once!”
“C’mon, babe—”
“Don’t call me babe.”
“--you’re breaking my heart,” Grif complains.
“Good!”
“Emotional turmoil , Simmons!”
“For fuck’s sake!”
Grif kicks his feet up, grinning, and doesn’t leave.
Simmons kind of doesn't mind.
Chapter End Notes
oh my god remember when my chapters were short
Waiting Games
Waiting is difficult. Waiting for one's own leg to heal is difficult, and Simmons is only done
with the first four days of his mandatory seven days of bed rest. Waiting for the clock to hit
one in the morning so Grif could sneak off to trade ammo with Caboose is difficult.
None of these things are as difficult as waiting in Blood Gulch. By this point, Simmons
thinks they should considered actual professionals at waiting. The Big Leagues. Training
every day. Shooting for the Olympics, maybe.
Case in point: As of right now, Grif is crawling out from under Simmons's bed, both of them
staring at the door as if expecting Window Guy to come bursting back in, shouting that he'd
known Sergeant Grif was hiding here the whole time. "I just don't get why they keep coming
to here to find me," Grif says. "Nobody sees me come in. They just come here because you're
here and they assume I'll be here too. Do they think we're attached at the hip? That we just
talk to each other all day long?"
"We've been doing nothing but playing cards and talking for the last nine hours," Simmons
says. "It is entirely, completely true that if Window Guy finds me, he'll find you."
"Eh," says Grif. He passes a full food tray of the mess hall's dinner to Simmons, which
Simmons puts on the bed and does not touch.
“If you actually talked to Window Guy, you’d have something to do, and you’d be less
bored,” Simmons says.
“Eh,” says Grif, and opens a new snack bag of those little corn-chip bugles.
"You know that Window Guy runs the armory," Simmons reminds Grif.
"Eh," says Grif. Grif glances at Simmons's food tray again. Grif has been waiting for
Simmons to eat that dinner for the last hour. Simmons feels a flash of anger that he swallows
down, hard.
"The armory, Grif?" Simmons says.
Grif has been waiting for Simmons to eat something for the last four days, the fucking
helicopter.
"The armory we've been stealing from," says Simmons, voice tight.
Grif blinks like he's just lost his train of thought. "Oh, shit, d'you think it's about that? I
thought he was just upset because I haven't reported the last skirmish to Command."
Simmons feels his eyes narrow, and Grif immediately shoves more bugles in his mouth and
gathers up their deck of cards. Did Grif think that he could just ignore the battle in which
they lost half their force? The shifts were longer, the workforce spread thinner, the patrols
tired and overworked, everyone wondering when Command will send replacements--and
Grif's just going to ignore it? Running away from his own failure as a Sergeant, now?
But Simmons is trying not to be mad about Grif giving the order to retreat, anymore. Let it
go, namaste, kumbayah, wear his yoga leggings and maroon tank top and do some of those
stupid breathing exercises his high school counselor wanted him to do, back when the
counselor used to say that Simmons should watch your temper, it might lead you to actions
you'll regret .
So instead, they talk about vehicle maintenance and speculate what the requirements of being
a medic would be. They play a shitload of card games. They gripe about being bored as hell,
because they are, although Simmons gets to gripe a little extra because Grif completely does
not understand what it's like to be as busy of a body as Simmons and then get assigned to
sitting around doing nothing. Being useless is stressful fucking business, but less so when
Simmons is semi-drugged and woozy from lack of food.
Simmons grits his teeth and tries to ignore that Grif still refuses to file the proper reports in
the aftermath of Red Army losing half its men at Rat's Nest and spends more time loitering in
the medbay than he does out of it. Simmons knows that Grif is only here because he doesn't
want to do any work, and Simmons, honestly, could fucking strangle him for it. And in the
event that Grif escapes Simmons's reach, Simmons has got some lungs now, he's got some
ab-work done with all the puking he's gone through, he could shout Grif out of this medbay if
he really wanted to and it'd probably feel great, too.
But the worst--or maybe the best--is always, always when Grif brings two plates of foot from
the mess hall: three times a day, three plates of food gone to waste. Simmons doesn't even
feel a little bit bad about throwing the food away, because not being able to eat is a problem
that dead-eyed boney girls have, and Simmons is not a skeletor-girl and therefore that is not a
problem that Simmons has. And because Simmons literally, physically cannot get up to throw
up his food, he doesn’t eat the food, and therefore he spends each one of his meals not staring
at the inside of a toilet bowl.
QED: Simmons is angry, starving, stressed as hell, bored out of his mind, and unironically,
unsarcastically, genuinely having the time of his life not throwing up, at all, for the first entire
week in months .
"We're not playing Go Fish if you're going to count the cards again," says Grif. He's done
shuffling the cards.
Simmons glares. "It's a legitimate strategy."
"Those are the justifications of a cheater, Simmons."
"Well, it's not like we can play Old Maid with only two people, idiot."
"Speed?"
"You can't ask to play Speed and then say you're too lazy to move fast enough to win."
"I've got it," says Grif, and puts the cards down and holds his hands up.
" We're not playing patty-cake, Grif ."
"It's called Numbers," says Grif, "and it's a completely different thing. C'mon, Simmons, I'm
bored, you're bored, let's go. I bet we can get up to at least four hundred."
Simmons groans at the top of his lungs. "Griiiiif..."
"No, I'm not going to go out and trash the motor pool just so you have data to reorganize,"
Grif says.
"Grif," Simmons says, despairingly.
"You fucking workaholic."
" Griiiiiiiiif ."
"And also fuck you for making me be the responsible one."
"How am I supposed to survive without constant validation and reassurance of my existence
through overachievement," Simmons complains.
"Jesus fucking Christ. Have you tried relaxing, Simmons? For once in your entire, whiteknuckled life?"
Simmons is sitting up straighter now. "Wait.."
"No, that right there is the opposite of relaxed. Back slouched, leaning down, chilling out--"
"Seriously, listen! If Window Guy was here to see you about the armory..." Simmons chews
his own lip. "You know that Sissy had proof that someone was smuggling ammo to the Blues,
right?"
"Yeah, heard some guys talking about it at breakfast," says Grif. "They sounded upset that the
Blues conveniently killed him right after he started spreading the gospel truth about my lying,
thieving ass, blah blah, everyone hates me.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“But then I was like, those guys are idiots, obviously, if they think there’s some sort of
pseudo-conspiracy about why Sissy died, because it sounded a lot like they thought it wasn’t
the Blues who did it, but one of our guys, and specifically the guy who was with Sissy at the
time, which was you—”
Simmons nearly chokes.
“--but obviously that couldn’t be right because you got shot, too. You already have an alibi.”
"They think I did it?" Simmons yelps. “You didn’t think this was important to mention?!”
"Uh, well, no, because you got shot, so--"
"The only place a human is incapable of shooting him or herself is in the back," Simmons
says. "Self-injury to provide a plausible cover is easy to do and common."
"I'm... both impressed and terrified that you know that information off the top of your head,"
Grif says. "But also entirely unsurprised, you huge fucking nerd. Which shitty sci-fi novel did
you get that from?"
Simmons would rather die than admit he learned it from a fanfic and then later fact-checked
it, so instead he informs Grif: "Congrats, we're super, super fucked. Everyone hates you and
now me because I associate with you. Window Guy was probably here to tell both of us
exactly how incredibly fucked we are."
Grif frowns. "Well, I mean... how bad could it be if we get caught, anyway?"
"They're going to court-martial us and send us to jail," Simmons snaps, "or save themselves
the effort and just kill us by firing squad."
"PFFFFFFFF," says Grif. "Death by firing squad? What is this, the 1900's? As if that could
ever happen." He kicks his dirty feet up onto Simmons’s white bedsheets. "And besides, I
already gave it my best shot. Get it? Shot? Like a firing squ--"
"Yes, Grif, I get it, and also it's entirely unfunny. There was no actual joke involved."
"All puns are funny by default," Grif says.
"That's the worst lie you've ever said. Actually, that's the worst statement you've ever said or
ever will say, full stop."
Grif waves a hand. "I'm a hundred percent sure I could top it—”
"Focus. We can't just abandon the armory issue," Simmons says. "Someone's going to pick up
the clues. Probably the fucking prosecutor."
Grif is putting bugles on his fingers, but none of them are staying. The only one who'd had
fingers small enough to wear bugle hats was Donut and Sarge's pinkies when Sarge thought
nobody was looking. "Well, okay, sure. But what're we supposed to do? Just stop the trade?
Or pin it on someone else? Leave Caboose out to dry?"
Simmons thinks about that.
"Yes," he says, with conviction.
"What?" Grif says. "Oh, c'mon, Simmons, it's Caboose, don't be heartless--"
"No, I mean--we'll stop, and pin it on someone else. If we stop now, then a whole bunch of
people will have just died in the last battle, right?" Simmons says. "Meaning that if the
shipments stop now, then it could have been any one of them. Right?"
"Shit," says Grif. "That's--yes. Yeah. Holy fuck, yeah--"
"--but there is the issue with Caboose," Simmons interrupts.
"We'll tell him tonight that we're stopping the trade," Grif says. "He'll be fine, he's a big kid,
we’ll tell him to write his sad turret feelings to Church."
"What do you mean, 'we'?" Simmons says.
Simmons knows he's totally asked for the response he's going to get right before Grif's starts
grinning that shit-eating ‘ let’s go to the Vegas quadrant ’ smirk on his face. "C'mon,
Simmons, I thought you wanted something to do? What else are you gonna do with your
night if not further incriminate yourself in the eyes of the law?"
"Heal," says Simmons promptly. "Be a good patient. Follow orders. Sleep, maybe. Do what
I'm told. Be here when the not-medic comes to check on me and my recovery."
"That's the saddest, squarest thing I've ever heard from you," says Grif. "Which is really
saying something."
"Yeah, tell me about it. Let’s steal some crutches," Simmons says.
Simmons's dinner is left uneaten on the bed. Grif finds him a pair of crutches and says
nothing.
Night Lights
Chapter Summary
Don’t ask don’t ask don’t ask don’t ask--
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Not eating is always and forever the worst idea that Simmons has ever had, currently has, or
ever will have, of all time.
And so is eating.
So if both eating and not eating are bad ideas, it’s a bit of a bind, obviously.
See, Simmons wishes he could explain the “not eating” bad decision--something about how
he “feels better when he doesn’t eat” or some ana-butterfly self-delusion like that, because
the truth is that nobody feels better when they don’t eat. Or maybe he could say that he’s had
a stressful, life-changing experience of watching an arrogant dickbag in Red get shot by
chatty assholes in Blue--but that, too, is mostly par for the course. He wants to say that he
hasn’t eaten in a week because he’s reached the point of exhaustion, that every thought of
food and eating and the consequent throwing back up the food and eating and the five million
ways he can and will fuck up has pushed him to the last resort: “you can’t fuck up if you
don’t eat.” (That one might be true.)
But Simmons has the feeling that as nice, neat, and comforting all these stories are, the truth
is the same as it’s always been: Old habits.
Alone at home for a weekend and Mom told him to order takeout because the fridge is
empty? An opportunity to not eat. Nothing to do over spring break in the college dorm?
Opportunity. Sick in bed and can’t move? That’s an opportunity. Shot in the leg and literally
can’t get up to eat? That’s an opportunity!
No options are good options .
And not eating is a good opportunity to be too tired to heal your leg wound, too tired to walk
to the other side of base, too tired to keep pace with Grif, too tired to keep pace with Grif
who’s slowing down, too tired to listen to Grif.
Who is talking.
Right now.
To Simmons.
Which Simmons should probably respond to.
“Wait, what?” Simmons says.
“It’s just truthful,” says Grif. “The phrase ‘earth to insert name’ should be replaced with
‘space to insert name,’ because we’re all in space.”
“No, we’re at Rat’s Nest, not in space.”
“But Rat’s Nest is on a planet, which is in space.”
“That’s a lie by misleading.”
“Or is it just so true,” Grif says, “that it looks misleading?”
“No,” says Simmons, too grumpy to shoot back something intelligent.
“Maybe you just can’t handle the truth,” says Grif, as if that joke isn’t older and deader than
he is.
"I'm leaving," says Simmons.
"No, c'mon, we're waiting for Caboose."
Simmons, frankly, just doesn’t want to play. He doesn’t want to anything, except sit by
himself and be unpleasant and mean and ugly and hangry all by his lonesome, where he can’t
fuck up with other people. He hates being hangry. He’s already an unpleasant enough person
as he is.
They’re sitting at the far back of the base, a little further off from the armory and the single
stalled bathroom. It’s one in the morning. A lone halogen light is flickering on this side of the
base. The night is cool, the air is dark, the tunnels are picking up just the hint of a breeze.
Simmons thinks it should be pleasant, but he mostly hasn’t eaten enough to have any internal
body heat, and that pisses him off a little, too.
But now Simmons is trying to think back to what he remembers from high school and
college--he thinks being hangry is a thing, but what does he know? Did he take notes? Did he
record data on the field? Introspection is a lie and a con, especially on the Eating Thing. He
likes to think that after all these years, the passage of time might have made him more
objective on the Eating Thing. But mostly he feels confused by himself--did he really refuse
to eat broccoli at the dining hall but had no problem with six shots of vodka? Or the time he
binged on four bagels so fast that it came back up in whole chunks?
He feels like he’s trying to reverse-engineer an answer to a stranger’s dilemma, that the
person scheduling in purging hours in between class and study sessions was someone else
entirely. And that, of course, means two things: 1) overthinking things has only ever given
him a fear of food and psychologists who might diagnose him, and 2) now he knows that any
answer he can reverse-engineer will be wrong, or at least could never compare to the
experience.
Here’s the one thing he can expect, based on what he remembers: when he starts eating again,
it’s going to be purge hell for weeks, and then he’ll get exhausted and stop eating, and then
more purge hell, and then exhaustion and no eating, and then more purge hell, and then and
then and then. He didn’t think about this when he started throwing up again. God fucking
dammit, he should have stopped himself. At the time, he couldn’t even remember why he’d
ever wanted to quit. And now he doesn’t even know where to begin with stopping—
Simmons groans into his hands.
“Tell me about it,” says Grif, apparently picking up some conversational thread. “ Really
weird for Caboose.”
Simmons has no idea what this conversation is about. “Caboose is always weird,” he flubs.
“And yet he was always on time.”
Simmons looks at the time at the corner of his vision. Caboose is now an hour late. The
tunnels are dark and entirely empty, except for them.
“Well, it’s not like anything bad happens if he doesn’t come,” says Simmons. “He just
doesn’t get the message, and we wait until next week to tell him that we’re not doing the
trade anymore.”
Grif gives him a look. “You said that thirty minutes ago.”
“Oh,” says Simmons. He’d… forgotten. He vaguely remembers it, it’d just… slipped his
mind. Thinking about too many other things. Feeling like his brain is swimming through
clear white sludge. "Well, we can still leave."
Grif throws a rock into the dark tunnels, where it skitters across the metal and dirt. “Let’s
give him a little more time. He’s totally coming, he’s probably just held up by some higherup.”
Simmons feels himself grow grumpier and hangrier and uglier on the spot.
“A little more time than an hour?” Simmons asks, grumpily and hangrily and ugly-ly. “How
much more time does he need?”
Grif shrugs. “I dunno, but I don’t have anywhere to be in the morning, and neither do you.
Who needs to sleep, anyway?”
“ I do,” snaps Simmons. “Scratch that-- you do. You’re the one napping all the time.”
“Sleeping is a hobby,” says Grif. “Not to be confused with a necessity.”
“Sleep is a necessity.”
“Yeah? Try hitting the fifty-hour mark of being awake. You’ll feel like you can smell colors
and fight God.”
“As if you’ve ever been awake that long,” Simmons retorts.
“You got me there,” Grif concedes in the easy tone of voice that always makes Simmons
suspicious.
“I’m leaving,” says Simmons.
Simmons puts his hand on the ground to push himself up and immediately feels his head
become five times lighter and weirdly off-balance. He sits back down. He could probably
walk back to the room on his own, but the alternative is to sit here and fume at himself and
his inability to eat something without having a fucking federal meltdown, which is obviously
the far superior option.
Fuck it. Fuck this. Tomorrow, he’s going to eat breakfast. No, wait, he hates eating in the
morning. He’ll eat lunch. Ugh, but, it’ll sit in his stomach all day and he still won’t be able to
get up and walk around, so, uh, maybe just a snack? A snack at the time at which he’s
supposed to eat lunch but it’s not really lunch? Where would he even get a snack? Should he
just accept the tray that Grif brings him from the mess hall? But then he might inhale it, and
he doesn’t want to die from eating a solid meal after his digestive system has undoubtedly
closed up shop and stopped moving; he has to ease back into it, or, or something responsible
like that--but for fuck’s sake, then he’ll just go right back into getting jittery about having
eaten and then he’ll have to throw up on a bad leg, and—
He blinks. “What?” he says.
Grif is staring at him. The instant their eyes meet, Grif looks off into the dark.
“Nothing,” says Grif.
Hold the fucking phone.
Simmons feels his heart sink.
He is suddenly acutely aware that Grif has been sitting in a medbay with him for four days,
during which time Simmons ate absolutely nothing, and Grif is wondering. He has to be
wondering. He has to be thinking what the fuck is wrong with this guy, what’s going on, what
a try-hard, what a chickenshit, what a coward, how fucked up , a confused man with a stupid
girl’s disease-“Seriously, what?” Simmons asks. His voice is sharp. Grif’s eyes tighten. “Is there something
on my face? There better not be something on my face.”
Please, please don’t ask why Simmons hasn’t eaten.
“Christ,” says Grif. “Could you be any more insecure?”
Simmons is going to shatter into a million pieces if Grif asks and he doesn’t even know why.
He just knows that these are the sorts of things that should hide in closets, in the dark, in the
dead of night, where other people cannot see your shames; they should never have seen the
light of day.
“Me? Insecure? Ridiculous,” says Simmons. “I can’t be insecure. My ego is massive.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Grif mutters.
Don’t ask don’t ask don’t ask don’t ask-(If Grif asks, they can get it over with—)
“Then what?” Simmons demands.
“Just, like, I dunno,” Grif says, leaning back. “You seem kinda... spacey today.”
“We can’t change the phrase ‘earth to insert name’ to ‘space’ just because I’m spacey today,”
Simmons says, by which he means SERIOUSLY, GRIF, DON’T ASK-Grif snorts. “No, I just--seriously. Are you, like… okay?”
Simmons watches Grif go through the Five Stages of Grief nigh-instantaneously:
1) Denial : Did I just admit to giving a damn about if he is or isn’t okay? Did I bring upon
myself a conversation that I’m not emotionally equipped to handle? Me ? Do that ? With my
mouth? No. Impossible. You have the wrong man, officer, I’d never confront emotions that I
could otherwise avoid. And then 2) Anger : what the FUCK was I thinking? What the FUCK
was I doing? How could I— 3) Bargaining : maybe I can play it off as a joke? Maybe it
won’t be that bad? Maybe Simmons was too stupid to realize what I said? 4) Depression: I’m
going to die. I, even semi-casually, asked Simmons if he was okay, which is more than
acceptably douchebag joking territory, and I’m never going to live it down. Welcome to hell
on earth, population Grif. And then 5) Acceptance : I said that. I really fucking said that, and
everything is awful.
Simmons sits there and feels nothing. Whatever it is that he expected Grif to ask after
watching Simmons eat nothing for a week, it was somehow not “are you okay.”
“Of course I’m okay,” he says.
He looks at Grif. Grif sneaks half a glance at Simmons. Simmons can’t decide if he wants
Grif to drop the subject and shut the fuck up, or maybe grab Grif by the collar and make him
say all that hurtful shit if only because Simmons had been ready to be hurt, or maybe kiss
him, but not that last one because that would be gay and weird, and also not the second one
because Simmons has lost his temper once in the last week and that didn't end well at all.
Grif looks down at his hands. He nods. Then he nods again, a little less “whatever” and more
resolute. “Uh. Alright,” he says, and doesn’t push it.
There’s a silence.
Simmons realizes again: he’s not pushing it, and apparently, he’s not going to push it.
Simmons looks at him. Grif looks back and shrugs, a little too casually, as if to say: what can
you do, man?
There’s no way that Grif is that stupid, Simmons thinks, wildly. Grif was there, Grif knows
he’s not eating. He can’t have missed that. He’s the one who kept bringing food, who never
mentioned anything when Simmons threw it away, he’s the one who asked Simmons to go to
dinner before the skirmish and stared when Simmons ate, there’s no way that Grif doesn’t
think something’s… wrong with him. He has to see it--maybe not all of the ways that
Simmons is disgusting, but enough that Simmons sometimes wishes Grif would get deployed
to a planet on the other side of the universe.
Doesn’t... Grif think he’s weird ? And wrong? And gross?
There’s silence.
There’s more silence.
“Why do you ask,” Simmons says, which seems like a neutral compromise between the urge
to run and the urge to shake the answers out of Grif.
Grif honestly looks fucking terrified that Simmons is not only not dropping the subject but is
actively inquiring, but all he does is shrug again.
“Dunno. You, um, said something kind of odd the other day, is all.”
“Kind of odd,” Simmons repeats.
“Yeah. I was just wondering.”
“Wondering about what,” Simmons says, voice sharp.
“Nothing about you,” says Grif. “This isn’t like, the Spanish Inquisition or anything. I don’t
really… just. Uh. Fuck. Y’know, like... “
Grif hunkers down and makes himself small. Simmons watches him, waiting for the hit.
“Whatever it is, it’s, y’know, whatever. Like, it doesn’t matter to me what it is, right?” Grif
mumbles. “I was just, um, wondering if I should be worrying. Since we’re like, y’know, stuck
together with this whole illegal trade thing, and...”
Simmons thinks about that.
“Nope,” says Simmons.
Grif nods again. “Alright.”
“Nothing to worry about here.”
“Like I said, you don’t have to prove it or anything,” says Grif, which is a wild fucking
concept that Simmons doesn’t even know how to respond to.
“Now I'm leaving,” says Simmons, and makes to stand up. "For real, this time."
“But what if Caboose comes as soon as we go?”
“Caboose has had almost an hour and a half to get here. Move your ass and help me up.”
“But…”
Simmons scowls. “Do you wanna sit here with me in the dark now that we’ve almost had an
emotion?”
Grif moves his ass.
Thirteen years after this began: Simmons is beginning to think that maybe, possibly,
potentially , he’s wound up with an Old Habit that’s a little more than a habit. Something that
he doesn’t know how to end. Something that might not have an end.
Thirteen years after this began, Simmons thinks about this from someone else’s perspective,
and decides that worrying should be done about something that is within that person’s power
to change.
So he thinks Grif shouldn’t worry about things that will only upset him and make Simmons
feel like a skinned fish, for both of their sakes. He doesn’t know how else to say thanks. His
vocabulary in kindness is limited. Not talking is the only way either of them know how to be
a friend.
Simmons is so, so glad when Grif dumps him back in the medbay bed and Simmons falls
right the fuck to sleep and doesn’t have to think about any of this anymore.
Chapter End Notes
*ignoring 30k words of plotline discussing simmons's failing mental health* DID YOU
SEE THAT. SIMMONS HAD A GAY THOUGHT ABOUT GRIF. LOOK RIGHT
THERE IT HAPPENED AFTER 30K WORDS OF THIS SHIT WE'RE FINALLY
GETTING TO THE SLOW BURN L O O K A T I T
Rat's Head
Chapter Summary
There's dirt in the gears.
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Simmons is released from the medbay and, to nobody's surprise, immediately begins to purge
again. It was a good run, seven whole days of peace, but we all knew it wouldn't last.
Starvation always ends, one way or another.
Grif avoids him like the plague which, Simmons assumes, is as much of a relief for Grif as it
is for Simmons. They’ve had enough emotions for the next… forever, honestly. It’s time to
retire. Hang up his spurs and his neurotransmitters, take out his amygdala and replace it with
a jellybean--it’s been a good run but honestly, fuck that noise.
That, actually, could be the end of our story. That’s how a lot of stories end: two people, too
awkward to confront the tawdry illicit, sordid affairs of last night--he means emotions, of
course--henceforth avoid each other for just a while, just until it’s not awkward, then a while
longer, because the avoidance itself is awkward, and then longer still because the expiration
date on amicable silence has way the hell passed, and now there’s nothing left to do but
pretend they never knew each other.
Logically, Simmons reminds himself that this is a goddamn opportunity to be rid of Grif that
he should have taken when they first got to this damn base. Five--no, six years ago, he’d be
jumping to shove Grif under a bus. This is a gift. A way to break the curse, almost--how did
he describe it to Sissy? A sadistic design of duality? Some cosmic joke? Unfortunate showrunning? Space fate?
When he returns to the single-stalled bathroom at the back of the armory (which he knew
he’d return to, let’s be real), he takes off his helmet and his gloves, as he always does. He
leans up against the wall. He really, really doesn’t not want to be here. He wishes with most
of his shitty metal blood-pumper to be anywhere but here, except for that small piece of him
that doesn’t think he’d survive if he had to give up eating trash and then getting rid of it.
And his throat jams thinking of--of fucking Grif, of course this asshole that space fate
chained him too--being fucking worried over him, as if he cares, as if Simmons and his
health is something worth worrying over, as if maybe Grif is worrying about him right now
because lunch just ended and Simmons booked it as soon as he finished eating and Grif was
there and Grif must have seen…
This is the time that he’d throw all his worries and overthinking into the toilet bowl. But now
his brain won’t shut off, like a switch that won’t flip. There’s dirt in the gears. He keeps
thinking about what Grif said the night before. Are you like… okay? I was just, um,
wondering if I should be worried…
So shut the fuck up, keep your head down, stop thinking, stop lying…
Here he is, standing in a single stalled bathroom, getting ready to coax his stomach muscles
into working in the opposite direction that they should. The bathroom doesn’t look so
different from the one he’d used in college. He doesn’t look so different, somehow, as if all
these bathroom mirrors show the same pimply, ugly preteen he’d been when he was thirteen.
All these bathrooms have the same feeling of permanence, as if this, right here, is his real life,
and everything outside (from Blood Gulch to his college classes to his family) is a feverish
escapism from reality, which is firmly locked up in the tiny college bathroom in the
basement, next to the washing machines, or the high school bathroom between the squash
courts and the water fountains, or the junior high bathroom, third floor West building facing
the computer lab, all the way to here, the Rat’s Nest bathroom, hidden on the far side of the
armory. His whole life feels like it’s been reduced to single stalled bathrooms, as if he, as a
person, could be reduced to this one shame.
Nothing’s changed. Nothing is changing. For this reason, he knows that he has no business
thinking anything could change.
The little feeling in his gut telling him, for the first time in years, that he might be able to
make things change, that he might even want to, just goes to show how illogical he’s become
since joining this fucking army.
He still throws up, though.
On the fourth day of avoiding Grif, Simmons thinks that the space fate that conspires to keep
Grif and Simmons together could probably hurry the fuck up, or else Simmons will have to
do something himself, and honestly, having free will is the worst kind of news for repression
and other types of mental avoidance gymnastics. Instead he decides that he’ll just go about
his day as usual: he’ll do his morning patrol shift, stare at the Blues by himself (because they
don’t have enough people to replace Sissy at his post), stew in overthinking for five hours,
work himself up into a proper stress, consider doing something to de-stress that isn’t eating
food and then throwing it back up, then eat food and throw it back up. He thinks he should
earn brownie points for considering a healthier coping mechanism.
It’s on this internal mental note that he misses Window Guy nearly have a heart attack when
he sees Simmons comes by to pick up a pistol. “Oh, Christ,” says Window Guy, and looks
around frantically for the coworkers he was supposed to have.
“Morning,” Simmons says.
Window Guy stares at him, like he’s expecting Simmons to shoot him, or maybe demand he
put his hands in the air and give him all his money.
Simmons frowns. “I’m on the morning shift? Just like yesterday? And the day before that? I
need something to stand guard with? I’m just here to get my designated weapon?”
“Right,” Window Guy mutters to himself. “Not my problem. I don’t get paid to make
decisions.”
“Uhh,” says Simmons.
“How can I help you?” says Window Guy, in his awful, uncanny-valley customer service
voice.
“I’m on the morning shift,” Simmons repeats. “I need something to stand guard with.”
“Just a moment,” says the uncanny-valley voice.
Simmons frowns harder. “For what? Nothing about the weapons assignments was changed in
the last day. Just give me the same thing you gave me yesterday.”
“It’s protocol,” says Window Guy. “It’s easy to fall back on in times of turmoil.”
“What turmoil?”
“UHHH, NOTHING. So how are you today,” says Window Guy, sounding supremely
uninterested and unhappy in having to ask how Simmons is today.
“Fine,” says Simmons, cautiously.
“How are you, uh, enjoying the new base.”
“I don’t think it qualifies as a new base if I’ve been here for over a year,” says Simmons.
“And it sucks, thanks for asking.”
“Sorry to hear,” says Window Guy.
“Bet you are,” says Simmons, who is still incapable of making any friends or playing nice
with others.
There’s a pause.
“It’s not a bad base,” says Window Guy.
“Probably not,” says Simmons.
“But it still sucks?”
If Simmons were a man prone to long bouts of truthful introspection, Simmons would
mean to say is: at Blood Gulch, I didn’t have to confront the fact that moving up in the career
ladder requires making genuine friends, which I can’t do, because I’m shit at it, because of
who I am as a person. At Rat's Nest, even now, this entire year has been spent fucking up my
only relationship with a human being (who is unfortunately Dexter fucking Grif), watching
half my team die in battle, watching someone I knew get shots full of holes in slow motion
before my eyes, and destroying my health. Rat’s Nest is a disgusting, claustrophobic cesspool
of bad thoughts, and no matter what the place is like physically--although the fact that Rat’s
Nest has literally nothing to do but stew in your own thoughts certainly contributes--this
outpost will always be marred by my seething mass of shitty, shitty headspace. Much, in fact,
like a nest of dirty, ugly rats.
And, be if physically or mentally, I want out of this shithole. I want something better, because
I think I might want to actually get better.
But Simmons, who devotes most of his self reflection to doing every mental backbend to
avoid self reflection, instead simply settles for: “Yes. It still sucks.”
“Sorry to hear.”
“My weapon, please?” Simmons says impatiently.
Window Guy looks around again, then sighs. “Okay, sure. Protocol says to give you a
weapon today, regardless of current events. Here you go.”
Simmons’s eyes are narrowed to slits. But he takes the pistol and leaves.
“Oh, and Simmons?” says Window Guy.
Simmons turns around, even more wary than before. He wants to get the hell out of here.
Window Guy waffles for a moment, then sighs. “Never mind. It’s been a long day.”
“It’s only six in the morning.”
“I know,” Window Guy groans.
Simmons walks to his post, wondering what the fuck that was all about, up until the point he
actually gets up on his post and looks over at Blue Base
Caboose had, unknown to Grif and Simmons, been first detained in the brig by his own CO,
departed on a secret mission with a secret agent to do secret things, like find Church and his
secrets. Caboose, however, is a considerate friend. He tells people goodbye when he leaves
and goodbye when they leave and is always happy to see someone come back. This is why
Caboose, for lack of radio channel with the Reds or any forewarning from the Secret
Washing Tub, had to improvise his goodbye.
On this shitty morning that Window Guy apparently hates so much, a large banner is strewn
up like a party decoration across Blue Base for all of Red Base to see. It reads: THANK YOU
FOR ALL THE TURRET BULLETS, GRIFF AND SIMON! ♥
Simmons looks over at the post one guard tower over. Both Reds there are staring right the
fuck at him.
A voice blares over the PA system: “Would Sergeant Grif and Private Simmons please report
to Building A?”
Simmons turns around and bolts in the direction of Grif’s room, wounded leg and all.
(What did he say? It’s fucking space fate. And about time, too.)
Chapter End Notes
caboose is trying his best, okay.
Jailbreak Promposal
Chapter Summary
"Maybe we're kidnapping each other."
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Here's how reacting to the effective final nail in the coffin of their ill-advised ammosmuggling scene is supposed to go:
Simmons opens Grif's door and says, very calmly, "Grif, we've been compromised and we
have to escape the premises as soon as possible or we're going to get shot and killed by our
own men."
"I agree with your sound judgment," says Grif. "I will move in an orderly fashion at a brisk
pace that is neither too slow to get us caught nor too fast to alert panic, taking only essentials
en route to the nearest available exit."
Here's how it actually goes:
Simmons bursts through Grif's door and yells, "Grif, we're FUCKING DEAD and we have to
get the FUCK out of here RIGHT NOW or we're going to get shot and killed by our own
men."
Grif is asleep in nothing but a pair of boxers and is snoring loudly.
Simmons shoves Grif's entire body off the bed, which makes Grif yell, which makes
Simmons yell, then they yell at each other about why the fuck did you do that and why the
fuck weren't you up and oh god everything hurts and I don't care you were supposed to be
awake and oh I'm dying Simmons leave me here you've killed me let Sarge know he finally
got his wish and then there's a lot of exaggerated groaning from Simmons as Grif, still halfasleep, bemoans his own impending death via the treacherous fall from his mattress to the
floor and Simmons wonders why nothing in his life can be easy, or at the very least orderly,
for just once.
"Grif, shut it. I am five hundred percent serious right now," Simmons says. "You need to
move your ass right now, because the literal entirety of Red Base is pissed at us and coming
to find us as we speak--"
"You can't have five hundred percent anything," Grif mumbles. "That's not how math
works..."
"I know that's not how math works!" Simmons cries. "I'm breaking the rules of math because
that's how distressed I am! Are you happy?!"
Grif squints blearily and crinkles his nose and scratches his dick and honestly looks too
asleep to be having any functioning thought or feeling, with the sole exception of
instinctively being a huge pain in Simmons's ass. "What'd you say about the literal entirety of
Red Base?"
"Get up," Simmons says. "Get up, put your armor on, we're going."
"What?"
"I'll explain later, just go!"
Later is when Grif has put on all his armor and Simmons has shoved a box of granola bars
(what a waste of calories) and three canteens of water into a bag and they're both doing the
lowest-budget reenactment of every shitty sci-fi spy film that Simmons once unironically
loved--peering around corners, whispering over a private channel, tiptoeing in their six
hundred pounds of electronic armor, shushing Grif every two seconds, dragging Grif in the
right direction--which all would be fucking cool in the geekiest, uncoolest possible way if
Simmons wasn't two inches from meltdown. Then Simmons gets them out of the building
Grif's quarters were in into the yard, and there's Caboose's banner, clear and bright like
fireworks over the wall. So Simmons fills Grif in as fast as he can with all the almost-nothing
he knows, and is also slightly relieved that at least now they're on the same damn page so
Grif can finally stop digging his heels into the metaphorical dirt.
Which is when Grif digs his heels into the unmetaphorical dirt.
"Are you for real?" he says. "That's all what you're worried about?"
"'That's all'?" Simmons repeats incredulously. "They've got our names hanging from Blue
Base--"
"No, they don't," says Grif. "Look, it says right there: 'Griff and Simon.' You're Simmons .
And I'm Grif with one F."
"Do you really think anyone is going to give even the tiniest shit about that," Simmons says.
"Do you really."
"I think they should . I mean, honestly, who doesn't know how to spell the name Grif? Or the
name Simmons? Besides Caboose, of course, because he's just Caboose, but for the rest of
these guys? C'mon. They couldn't possibly pin anything on us they can't prove just over a
banner that doesn't even get our names right."
"It doesn't matter what should or shouldn't happen," says Simmons, who rapidly approaching
pissed off but refusing to let his temper get the best of him now. "They're going to put two
and two together even if nothing was there. They were already suspecting you because they
wanted a reason to, and Sissy's been spreading rumors about us smuggling the ammo and
then there was the rumor that I killed him for spreading that rumor--Grif, c'mon, don't you
see? It doesn't even have to be true that we were selling ammo to Caboose and then killed
Sissy to cover it up. The Reds will believe it because it's what they want to believe. And I'm
telling you now, Grif, if you don't want to get our asses kicked, our best option is to--"
He stops.
"Is to what?" Grif asks.
Simmons fidgets.
"What, are you suggesting we just... we just book it? Get out of here? Go AWOL?"
Simmons is beginning to realize he's verbally trapped himself into a corner. Again.
"Really, Private Kiss-ass?" Grif asks, sounding delighted. "You're suggesting we just up and
walk out of the army over a fictitious problem that's not even going to happen?"
"Don't be ridiculous!" Simmons says, as if that was not high-key the entire idea.
"Well, uh, from what you're saying, and the fact that you came bursting into my room and
then packed all my shit and then tried to smuggle me out of the base, uhhhhhhhhh..."
"We couldn't," Simmons says, with wavering conviction.
"Where would we even go? How long could we even get away with it? Would it go down as
a lower-ranking officer kidnapping their commanding officer? Or the other way around?
Wait, are you kidnapping me?"
"Grif--"
"Maybe we're kidnapping each other," Grif muses.
"--if you could take this seriously for--"
"Aha!" says Grif, and snaps his fingers. "We're running away together. Into the sunset."
"No, that we are not--"
"We're eloping."
Simmons dumps the bag on the dirt. "You can run away by your sad and lonely self."
"So we are running away," says Grif quickly.
"From the people who want to kill us, yes!"
"Together. Into the sunset."
"Out of necessity."
"How romantic," says Grif.
He's doing it to get a rise out of you, Simmons reminds himself. He's only doing it because
he knows it bothers you.
"Oh, darn, I forgot the wedding ring," Simmons says flatly. "If I promise to pick one up later,
will you please move your fat ass towards the motor pool for our daring escape so we're not
killed by our own men?"
"You're hooking a lot of your proposal on this fictitious scenario in which Red Team is
coming to kill us for selling ammo to Blue Team."
"Because they are. I am telling you, right now, with the iron absolute certainty of plot
foreshadowing, that our men are coming to kill us."
"I dunno..." says Grif doubtfully. "Does the ammo thing really matter that much?"
"To them? Yes!" snaps Simmons. "They actually give a genuine, bona fide shit about how
this war works out! This war is why they're here, Grif! Which is why we need to be not here,
and instead be literally anywhere else, together!"
Grif says nothing. Then:
"Okay, fine," says Grif, "I'll come, if only because I'd never turn down an opportunity to get
the hell out of this army. But," he says, holding up a hand, "I want a nice wedding ring."
Simmons groans. "I'm trying to help you."
"Take it over leave it, Simmons."
There's half a second where Simmons very seriously wonders if he could, in fact, just fucking
leave him.
"I'll pick up a Ring-pop for you," says Simmons.
"I want the blue flavor."
"You Blue Team traitor," Simmons hisses.
"Not my fault that blue raspberry tastes bette--"
"Sergeant Grif!" a voice calls. Private Window Guy is fronting a small group of men up the
main road. One is holding a bad arm, two are favoring their weight to one side. "Sergeant
Grif, sir, may we have a word?"
Simmons feels his heart sink. Of course--of all the stupid, inane ways they could get caught,
it's because they took too long debating Grif's fictional wedding ring. It's not too late,
Simmons thinks wildly; they just have to make a break for it-"Yeah, what?" says Grif. "Can't you tell you're interrupting something?"
"Grif," Simmons warns.
"Yes, sir. But we still thought it was fairly important to bring to your attention, so..."
"Okay, fine, whatever," Grif says, ignoring when Simmons smacks him in the side, trying to
get his attention. "What now?"
"Well, sir," says Private Window Guy, "we were discussing the ammo thing among us, and
the last battle, and the general command structure of us taking orders from you, and, y'know,
a lot of us thought that was. Uh. Well, most of it was awful, sir."
Oh Christ, Simmons thinks. We're about to be killed by our own men.
"So what?" says Grif. "You got a complaint? Take it up with Command. Unless you're
kicking your commanding officer out of the base or what?"
"Nothing personal," says Window Guy, "but we took a vote and we thought we'd stick with
tradition, sir, and kill you by firing squad."
A group of men behind him pull out their rifles.
"Sorry, sir," says Window Guy. "I voted to give you guys to the Blues. I also voted to not be
the one to come and get rid of you but all my friends decided that that I was the man for the
job, by which I mean they did the Nose Goes protocol, even though they all weren't wearing
helmets and I was so I couldn't reach my nose, so..."
Window Guy sighs irritably. Simmons gets the feeling that this man was just voted Most
Expendable out of his group of friends.
"Wait, wait," Simmons interrupts, "we don't have to be so hasty about--"
"Oh, and I'm supposed to get rid of you too, Private Simmons," says Window Guy. "Since we
figured you're, like, definitely working with him, considering the banner."
Simmons thinks this over. "Uhh, well, okay, I guess that makes sense--"
"And because I don't think anyone here really likes you," says Window Guy.
Simmons wishes Window Guy had just shot them and been done with it.
"Any last words?" Window Guy asks.
"Yeah," says Grif, sounding supremely inconvenienced by the predictable and justly-deserved
consequences of their actions. "You guys suck."
Window Guy shrugs. "Ready!" he says. "Aim!"
Simmons glares at Grif with every ounce of irritation he can muster. "Killed by our own
men," says Simmons through gritted teeth. "Couldn't see this coming."
Grif sighs.
One minute and forty-one seconds later, Sarge drives a Warthog between them and a dozen
bullets. Neither of them die and neither of them elope, and Simmons is saved having to pick
up a blue wedding ring for Grif's traitorous, skeptical ass.
He is very glad to leave Rat's Nest behind, and he's very certain that nothing that has
happened here will ever come back to bite him.
//end part 1: RED VS BASE
//next up, part two: TRASHY SLUTTY ROMANCE FICTION
Chapter End Notes
cool, that's a wrap. whew! im taking a break next tuesday as i plot out my trash and sluts
and romance fictions, where shit gets slightly less un-real and i probably tear down my
"canon compliant" ao3 tag and slam dunk that shit in the trash. i'll see yall on 08/29/17,
or at hylian-reptile on tumblr, or lmk what u think in the comments ofc. see ya later o/
EDIT: if youre binge-reading all the chapters all at once, i IMPLORE you to take a
break here!! give ur brain and eyes a rest!! this is a good stopping point meant to be a
complete arc by itself. go take a nap lol
PART 2: TRASHY SLUTTY ROMANCE FICTION
Chapter Summary
"Boners are an art."
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
When Dex was fourteen, the United Kingdom of Hawaii dissolved under American rule for
the last time. He was no longer sure who the major players of the movement were, nor how
long they’d been planning the siege in the 'Iolani palace, nor what happened to them
afterwards. But he remembered it because those protesters seemed uniquely interested in not
just emancipating the Kingdom of Hawaii from America’s original invasion of native land,
but (he imagined, without any evidence at all) what that emancipation meant.
He’d seen them protest before, but this time, he was old enough to realize that there was no
Kingdom of Hawaii to save. The protest was for the principle of the thing, changing the laws
of justice itself, as if by correcting this one original sin--the theft of benevolent land, of the
only gift from life and God the Polynesians had dared to accept--then perhaps not just this
mythical Kingdom of Hawaii, but the land itself and Kai, Dex, Mom, and everyone else who
lived on that land--no, that the laws of fairness, happiness, and reality might, one day, turn
out okay.
The protesters were pulled out via SWAT team, as they always were. Dex figured they’d be
back again in another four years, as they always were. Mom would be confused when he told
her, Kai would chatter eagerly about what little Hawaiian history she knew, and they’d go to
Walmart’s electronic section and catch KHON’s broadcast of protesters flying the State flag
upside down, chanting in Hawaiian, barricading the 'Iolani palace’s wrought-iron gates shut,
brown faces that looked like Kai’s and Dex’s peering through Queen Liliokulani’s bedroom
windows.
But he never saw them again.
By the time he was drafted, he figured there’d never been any Kingdom of Hawaii to save
since 1893, January 17th, anyway.
Nowadays, Minor Junior Private Negative First Class Dexter Grif, male, thirty-three, of the
Red Army, is breaking in the new Red base at Valhalla, with the dubious help of Private
Richard “Dick” Simmons, male, twenty-nine, also of the Red Army. “Breaking in” the new
base, in Grif’s case, requires squirreling as much food into every drawer as he can, scattering
shitty toiletries into vaguely inaccessible bookshelves, and throwing civilian clothes over
every possible floorspace. Simmons, who is supposed to be helping, is instead sitting in the
corner, head in his hands, wheezing in what looks like physical pain.
“You sadistic bastard,” he moans. “The base was clean . The base was dusty and unused and
empty but it was clean , and you come in here and ruined it...”
“And now it feels like home,” says Grif.
“No, it feels like it’s going to start reeking like a college dorm in less than two days, and I
won’t stand for it,” Simmons says. He reaches across the doorway for a shirt—
“Hey!” Grif says. “Take your shoes off when you come in!”
“Take off my shoes ? How?! I’m wearing full body armor! I’m not wearing shoes!”
“Do what you did at Blood Gulch,” Grif says, and waves a hand. “Or Rat’s Nest.”
“I never took my shoes off at Blood Gulch. Or Rat’s Nest.”
Grif frowns. “I definitely would have kicked you out if you came into my side of the dorm
with shoes on.”
“And I definitely would have remembered if you tried something like that,” Simmons replies.
They pause to think.
“Did you,” Grif says, “ never go to my side of the dorm at Blood Gulch?”
Simmons crosses his arms. Defensively, Grif suspects. “Well, uh, why would I want to go
into that pigsty anyway?”
Admittedly, during the five years at Blood Gulch, Grif had perfected the art of anti-Simmons
deterrent. Anti… all-of-his-teammates deterrent. But now they’re here, and they’re crossing a
bridge they didn’t realize was even a bridge, so better now than before either of them can
psych themselves out. “Okay, well, look at what I did--you take off the bottom bits of your
boots, and just leave the undersuit on--no, more than that, all that stuff above the ankles, too.
That’s how it works here, I don’t make the rules.”
“If you don’t make the rules, who does?”
“Common sense?” Grif says. “C’mon, Simmons, who wears shoes indoors?”
“ Everyone ?”
“Gross,” Grif says.
Simmons stares at Grif in disbelief. “You have clothes that haven’t been washed in ten years,
opened food wrappers, and a mattress with stains on it already , and wearing shoes indoors is
too gross for you.”
“If you wear shoes indoors, how are you going to sit on the floor?”
“I won’t,” says Simmons. “I’m going to sit on a chair. Like a normal human being.”
Simmons doesn’t know the joy of rolling oneself into a blanket burrito on the floor. Grif
gives him a pitying look.
“Don’t give me that look,” says Simmons, like Grif knew he would, which is why Grif had
given him that look in the first place. “The floor is dirty, chairs are better for your--spine, I
think?--you can injure your glutes sitting on hard floors for too long—”
“Are you really telling me I’m going to break my ass ?” Grif says. “From prolonged blunt
force applied from the floor ?”
“It’s a real thing!” says Simmons. “I read it in a science… thing!”
“Will you sign my doctor’s note when I tell Sarge I can’t do anything because my ass is
broken?” says Grif, and pulls out a bag of Cheetos.
“Stop talking about breaking your ass, please, I don’t miss Donut’s innuendos that much.”
Simmons stares at the Cheetos for a moment too long, until he looks away, faintly irritated.
“I’m going to unpack the living room,” he says, and moves to leave.
“Wait,” says Grif, before he can think to stop himself or really second-guess whether or not
actively attempting to keep Simmons around is a good idea, but Simmons waits, so he’s gotta
roll with it. “Okay, don’t tell Sarge, but I pulled some magazines off those guys who
confiscated our stuff and gave us our base.”
Grif reaches under his bed and pulls out a stack of magazines and shoves the Cheetos out of
sight while he’s at it, because that might be the considerate thing to do? Maybe? Probably?
Simmons narrows his eyes. “Grif, if those magazines are what I think they are...”
Grif waggles his eyebrows.
“For god’s sake!” Simmons hisses, glancing over his shoulder as if Sarge could appear any
moment. “You can’t just steal some random pilot’s porn !”
“I mean, who’s going to stop me, really…”
Simmons snatches one of the magazines. “Wh--this isn’t porn.” He grabs another magazine,
absent-mindedly sitting down on the floor next to Grif (with his shoes off, thankfully).
“Ooh, careful,” says Grif, “you’ll break your ass if you sit down too hard.”
“You stole Nat Geo magazines?” Simmons asks in disbelief.
“Are you sure you can’t get your rocks off to beautiful, high-definition, color-coded
sandstone layers corresponding with various time periods? The lines are so neat, Simmons.
One could say… pornographically neat.”
“Please never speak to me about porn ever again.”
“This is why I don’t know what you’re into, Simmons. Bad communication.”
“I don’t want you to know what I’m into!”
So he’s into something , Grif thinks, and files it away for no real reason at all, promise, just
interesting factoids between good ole teammates, ‘cause that weird stuff you pick up about
other people when you’re stuck in a base with them for years, ha ha, amirite? Now change the
subject so he doesn’t notice Grif thinking about stuff he’s definitely not thinking about
anyway. “Hey, do you think Nat Geo can certify that I can break my ass from sitting on the
floor?”
Simmons isn’t listening. “I’ll give you this,” he says. “There is something satisfying about a
high-res picture that’s so detailed you can see the pores on an animal.”
“Told you,” says Grif triumphantly. “Like, it’s not porn, but it’s not the worst thing I could
swiped from—”
Simmons flips the magazine around to show Grif a two-page spread, larger-than-life, sodetailed-he-can-see-the-pores picture of the hairiest, biggest motherfucking bat Grif’s never
seen, and it’s three inches away from Grif’s face. Grif screams.
Simmons snickers for five minutes straight at his own shitty prank and refuses to let Grif tear
out the pages. Grif scours every single magazine they have for a picture of a snake to return
the favor and not one of the magazines have anything , not even a lizard. Grif’s heart is
racing long after Simmons has put the animal photos away and has begun summarizing
aloud an article about a self-reprogramming excavation bot who stakes out animals via active
camouflage, which is boring as fuck but it still somehow seems like Grif’s out of breath, that
this moment where Simmons is sitting on Grif’s floor, reading science articles in Grif’s room,
legs crossed and almost close enough to touch, is the craziest stunt Grif has ever pulled off.
Grif doesn’t get time. So he’s thirty-three years old, huh? Two whole years since Rat’s Nest;
seven whole years since he was deployed to Blood Gulch; ten whole years since he was
deployed to that shitty space colony; twelve whole years since he was drafted. A solid third
of his life spent in an army and career he didn’t sign up for.
The army’s been crazy, lately. Mostly Blue Team drama, which is nothing new, except for the
part where Grif and Simmons almost got killed by firing squad, which was probably entirely
their own fault--maybe. Sarge came and dragged them off to kill the Blues, so all three of
them might be AWOL, now, but Grif thinks Simmons is probably in denial about that.
Washington was a guy who came around and said some mean stuff about them being useless
simtroopers that everyone immediately, unanimously, silently, and simultaneously agreed to
put a lid on and ignore until they couldn’t anymore, except for Grif, who spends
uncomfortably long hours in the middle of the night staring at the ceiling and thinking about
the futility of life and all that edgelord shit. The Warthog got totaled by some guy in white
armor. Simmons deleted the Blues. Church died, again, and everyone gave too many fucks
about it, again.
But if all this stuff is happening, if all these years are passing, how come he feels the same as
when he left Oahu? How come he’s just the same schmuck he was when he was fifteen and
living in his car, just fatter and wrinklier and uglier and beginning to bald?
He’s been scammed, probably--nothing new there. See, it seems to Grif that people write
their stories and poems and essays and big long philosophical treatises on how to live lives,
pages and pages of advice, and apparently it all goes to naught because there’s not enough
days in a life to read it all, and even if you read it when you’re young you’re too young to
really match up the advice with the experience you’ve lived yourself because you haven’t
lived enough, and by the time you’ve read it all and are at a proper age to understand it
you’re already just as old as those wrinkly-ass douchebags who wrote the damn advice in the
first place, and you could have just learned it yourself in the meantime anyway, and then by
the time you’ve figured something out from all that understanding and living you did, it’s
time to die.
Fuckin’ useless. Waste of time and energy. Learning is such a scam. Growing older is such a
scam. Living is such a scam. Grif hates meaningless work. Better to quit before you waste
your breath, as he always says.
“Have you ever seen those photos of nature photographers creeping around, trying to
approach an animal?” Simmons asks.
“I thought all the photographers were replaced by bots.”
“Not all of them,” he says. “A lot of animals are smart about machines, and it’s not like we
can spare a dumb AI for every robot that wants to take a picture. Maybe we should take a leaf
out of their book, next time we attack the Blues. Do a sneak attack.”
“Against Caboose?” Grif asks.
Simmons pauses. “I mean. Theoretically. If there were more Blues.”
“Yeah, see, the difference between sneaking up on an animal and taking sneaking up on the
Blues is that the Blues attack you back.”
“It’s supposed to be a toss-up between fight or flight for photographers and animals,” says
Simmons. “I read somewhere that once you’re up close to the animal, every single second
itself spent that close to a wild animal is doing an impossible feat. Supposed to be an
adrenaline rush.”
“Maybe we should take photos of the Blues,” says Grif.
“A whole photoshoot, just for Caboose,” says Simmons.
“Maybe that’ll cheer him up.”
“Maybe he’ll stop skulking around Blue Base and avoiding us.”
“Maybe he’ll actually share all the rations he gets in the supply drops meant for four people,”
Grif says.
“Maybe he’d appreciate these Nat Geo magazines more than us.”
“Hey, I stole them, I wanna keep them.”
“You don’t even want them,” says Simmons.
“He can have the one with the bat in it. You can have the ones with the color-coded sandstone
gradient photos.”
“So I can jack off to them , is that it? Is that it, Grif?” Simmons says, irritably.
Grif snorts. "'S why I got 'em, isn't it?"
“Because of you and your obsession with my hypothetical obsession with color-coordination
and neatly partitioned organization systems, is that it?”
Grif starts sniggering.
“Oh, yes, my name is Dick Simmons,” Simmons mocks in a nasal falsetto, “and I love boxes
and datasheets and clipboards and checklists, because Grif is too dumb to come up with
literally any other personality traits! And I also love boxes and datasheets with my dick ,
because Grif has no imagination so he thinks everyone loves boners just as much as he does!”
“I don’t love boners,” says Grif. “Boners are an art . I live and breathe boners, Simmons. I’m
a boner connoisseur. I won’t be mixed with the boner-loving plebs. And you, Simmons, you
boner pleb, definitely don’t appreciate boners as much as I do.”
“Bullshit,” says Simmons, who apparently can never walk his pasty, muscle-less ass away
from a challenge. “You said it yourself. I’m a rules-loving, glue-sniffing teacher’s pet who
can never resist a good organization system. You could never defeat this monster you’ve
created, Grif. Thanks to you, my dick is always hard for—”
Sarge is standing frozen in the doorway. Neither Grif nor Simmons asks how much Sarge just
heard, because it appears, to no one’s surprise, that it was exactly all the wrong parts.
“Oh fuck wait,” Simmons says, “it’s not what it sounds like--"
Sarge spins right around and leaves.
“SAAAAAAAAAAARGE,” Simmons wails.
Grif tunes him out almost instantaneously. See, Grif has bigger fish to fry, now. Grif is
always on the lookout for new ways serve himself. New entertainment, new moneylaundering, new hobbies, new napping spots. And that, right there? Grif is almost certain he
saw Sarge look uncomfortable .
The scent of exploitable weakness.
“Ohhhh, no,” Simmons moans.
Oh, yes, Grif thinks.
Chapter End Notes
me, wearing a ripped nightgown, mascara smudged and pearls clutched, crying:
please…… i have a wife and kids…… have mercy i beg of y
this story: A D D G R I F ' S P O V
Rubber Seduction
Chapter Summary
“I’m not flirting to get our way with our radio."
Chapter Notes
yall getting this chapter MEGA early because i gotta be up in two hours to go to work
and i am NOT gonna remember to post this shit during my morning routine. enjoy
“Sarge! Good to see you, sir!” Simmons chirps, as soon as he musters up the courage to walk
into the kitchen and show his face to Sarge. “How are you, sir? I was, just asking for, you
know, no reason whatsoever, but if there was a reason it’d be that I thought that maybe ssomething from earlier could do with, some, maybe, some team discussion--some
clarification, just so we're all a hundred percent clear that earlier conversations were not
misunderstood or taken out of context to the detriment of anyone's reputati--”
Sarge throws three sets of cooked MRE bags down on the kitchen table. The bags are labelled
“spaghetti and meat sauce.” Grif grabs the salt, and also the stick of butter, because he’s
figured out ages ago how to make MREs palatable, and gets to work transferring rubber
noodles from their bag to a plastic plate. (Can’t go wrong with salt, sugar, and fat, and
preferably all three at the same time.)
“Correct, Private!” Sarge declares. “This is a high-alert situation, and communication is key
to successful teamwork!”
If there's any time to talk to Sarge about something important, it's after 5PM, when he's
already gotten most of his anti-Blue fervor out of his system at some point during the day.
"After hours," during dinner period, when Sarge has already traded in his shotgun for a cup of
black coffee (what an old man) and put his glasses on for his farsightedness (seriously, what
an old man), is by far the least fanatical that Sarge can be, and the closest to a normal
conversation that anyone will be able to hold with him.
And here they are, with Sarge vaguely tired from being up at 4AM sharp and in his glasses
and microwaving MREs and the best chance they could have at a human interaction with
him, and Grif will bet you anything that Sarge is going to tell them that he's still somehow
convinced he has to call in an air strike on Caboose's ass right this moment, because Sarge is
literally incapable of shutting the fuck up and letting them all have anything resembling "after
work hours."
“High alert!” says Grif, with as much mock surprise as he can muster. “Is someone dying?
Oh, is the dead person Donut agai—”
“Even more dire,” Sarge interrupts.
“What’s more dire than Donut dying again?” Grif asks.
Sarge begins ticking off fingers: “Stubbing my toe, Donut running out of moisturizer, running
out of strawberry yoohoos, no mantle for me to mount my Chekov’s gun, temperatures above
eighty degrees except when the weatherman colors the numbers red, jaywalking—”
“--incorrect assumptions about certain people’s sexualities—” Simmons interrupts.
“Sorry, wrong question,” says Grif. “What’s less dire than Donut dying?”
“Church dying,” Simmons says promptly.
There’s a round of muttered agreements. Grif, after liberally salting and buttering his
spaghetti, passes the salt. Simmons takes it. Grif passes the butter. Simmons looks at it like
Grif’s passed him a live rat. Grif, rather than let the butter sit on the table where Sarge might
pick it up and make his food palatable, opts to actually stand up and put the stick away just to
spite Sarge, and Sarge doesn’t even seem to notice, the old bastard. Sarge could be eating
wood chips and sriracha and he probably wouldn’t notice. Simmons is pushing the rubber
spaghetti around the plastic plate.
“But Donut dying has to be at least mildly dire, because if Donut is dead,” Grif says, “then
we’ll have to give a eulogy, and then we’ll have to talk about feelings .”
The temperature of the room drops a fraction.
“Out loud,” Grif says. “With our mouths.”
Simmons visibly shudders.
“And words ,” Grif adds.
With valiant effort, Sarge says, at length: “I maintain that our current situation is even more
dire .”
“Now I know you’re bullshitting me,” says Grif.
“I have reports, with my own two eyes,” says Sarge, “that there’s live Blue activity in the
immediate vicinity.”
Yep, there it is. Simmons stops playing with his food and bites on his lip hard, like he’s trying
not to laugh.
“Just over there, at the base clearly marked ‘Blue Base’!” Sarge says, scandalized.
Oh, great, now Sarge is going senile, too.
“Sir, would this Blue activity happen to be, uh...” Simmons glances at Grif. “...the Blue we
helped move into that Base just last week? Y’know… Caboose ?”
“Which one is that?” Sarge asks.
“Uh, well, there was only three Blues in Blood Gulch—”
“Plus Tex,” adds Grif.
“And Sister,” says Simmons.
“And Lopez’s body,” says Grif.
“And Andy the bomb,” says Simmons.
“And Tucker’s kid,” says Grif.
“And that Flowers guy,” says Simmons.
“And sometimes Simmons,” says Grif.
“For like, one hour, Grif!”
“And Sheila,” Grif says.
“Speaking of Sheila,” says Simmons, “Caboose is the one who—”
“ALL THESE BLUES WITH THEIR DARN NAMES TO REMEMBER,” Sarge interrupts.
“ALL THESE NAMES. IT’S LIKE THERE’S A NAME FOR EVERY BLUE.”
“Yes, sir,” says Simmons, “that’s generally how names work—”
“THE BLUE IN VALHALLA IS A LIVING BLUE AND THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS,”
Sarge declares.
“Sarge, you’re the one who paired up with Caboose when we went through the portal to—”
“Oh, him ?” Sarge says. “Jesús? Michael Jesús?”
“Who’s Michael Jesús ?” Grif asks in disbelief.
“The one who hates taxes and babies,” says Sarge. “Very odd boy, but can’t say I blame him!
Downright lethals, some of those--all those teeth and eyes and tentacles...”
“Er,” says Grif, “neither taxes nor babies have—”
“Those darn babies and taxes,” says Simmons, the fucking kiss-ass.
“Simmons knows! But a living Blue is still a Blue who’s up to no good!” Sarge interrupts.
“So long as he continues to persist with his color-coded ways, he remains a threat to us, to
our team, to our base, to the Red cause, to all that we hold dear and red! Like apple pie, and
most of our laundry, and blood!”
Grif squints. “Apple pie isn’t—”
“Sarge, can you please separate your reds from our light-colored laundry,” Simmons says.
“I could, Private Simmons,” says Sarge.
Simmons waits. Sarge takes a bite of his rubber spaghetti.
“So are you, uh,” Simmons asks, “ going to…?”
Sarge takes another bite of spaghetti.
“Christ,” says Grif, and stands up and takes his plate with him to the couch to fiddle with the
radio. (And Simmons wonders why Grif never does his damn laundry.) Sitting at a dining
table in a formal setting always gives him hives, anyway; the best place to eat dinner is in a
living room in front of a TV, in his opinion, so nobody has to look at or talk to each other.
What? The American nuclear family is bullshit, anyway.
“We’re reintroducing morning patrols at six-hundred hours starting tomorrow!” Sarge
announces. “I need as much intelligence on the situation over there as we can get! Tomorrow,
men, we’re going to war! No information gone undocumented, all knowledge is power, you
know!”
“Are there any particular forms we should fill out when we’ve come back from patrol, sir?”
Simmons asks.
Grif groans as loudly and as exaggeratedly as possible.
“Minimum twenty pages,” Sarge says. “Submit it to Lopez. He needs new material to wipe
up oil spills with.”
Simmons sighs. The radio crackles.
“I need to know names, faces, dates of birth, I want to know their weapons and the layout of
their base—”
“Sarge, we were in that base seven days ago,” says Simmons. “We know that base down to
where Caboose’s coffee maker is.”
“A diabolical plot,” Sarge cries. “Everyone knows that boy doesn’t drink coffee!”
“I’m sure he’s convincing the coffee maker to turn into a Red-killing Decepticon as we
speak,” says Grif.
“Precisely! Excellent thinking, Private, er…” Sarge’s face screws up in bewilderment.
“...Grif…?”
Everyone experiences the simultaneous feeling of the earth tilting into directions unknown
and ill-advised from the sheer weight of Sarge having said something positive about Private
Dexter Grif.
“Hey, Simmons, come turn our radio into an Autobot,” says Grif, to off-set the vertigo and
restore balance to the universe.
“I don’t think that’s how radios work,” Simmons says.
“Not with that attitude.”
“You couldn’t even wait until tomorrow to corrupt my only workable soldier, could you,
Grif?” Sarge snaps.
Grif gives Sarge his loveliest smile. Sarge pulls his shotgun out of nowhere and puts it on the
table space now vacated by Simmons, like the fucking authoritarian toolbag that he is.
Simmons brings over his plate too and sits on the couch. Grif glances back at Sarge, who’s
still sitting resolutely at the kitchen table alone, where he meticulously spears each forkful of
spaghetti and chews it like he’s not even paying attention to the flavor. Christ, he even eats
like an old man. Grif wonders how long it’ll take for Sarge to reach “toast and tea” syndrome.
Simmons lowers his voice and whispers, “Do you think we can get Lopez to turn our radio
into an transformer like Caboose’s coffee machine?”
“Probably. Lopez is already half Transformer already.”
Simmons scowls. “Lopez is too mean to be an Autobot. He’d convert our radio into a
Decepticon.”
Grif polishes off the last of his rubber spaghetti. Simmons has barely touched his. Grif, for no
reason at all, begins to tap his fork against his plate, which earns an irritated glare from
Simmons, so Grif turns to bouncing his leg, but then he stops that too because that’s a
nervous Simmons thing to do and there’s only enough room for one of those around here.
He’d offer to finish the plate for Simmons, but he’d really rather Simmons eat the thing
himself, and it’s a lot easier to ask to finish someone’s plate than it is to ask them to finish
their own plate-“You two better be working on intercepting Blue transmissions over there,” Sarge warns.
Simmons nearly drops the plate. “Oh! Uh, yes, sir. That’s entirely what we were doing. Very
seriously. With science. And computers. And computer science.”
“Who knows what Blue Command’s got up their sleeve now,” says Sarge. “We’ve got new
bases, new terrain, possibly new mission objectives altogether! Do they even still have a
flag? What’s up with that waterfall? And those anti-grav flinger-majingers? We need
answers, men, or our very lives will be in peril tomorrow on the battlefield—"
Grif groans. Sarge never shuts up .
“Yeah, we were just gonna sweet talk the radio a little bit,” says Grif. “Always works for
Caboose, right? The radio might give us the Blue frequency if we ask nicely.”
“That’s not how machines work,” Simmons says.
“Sure they do,” says Grif. “Watch. Simmons,” says Grif, very seriously.
“What?”
Grif looks Simmons in the eye. “I’m going to ask you to do something, and you have to do it
while working yourself up into a huge irritated snit over it.”
“And why would I do that? Wh--what do you mean, huge irritated snit ? I don’t work myself
into a snit . Certainly not a huge, irritated snit. I don’t--I don’t. Do I? What are you trying to
say, Grif? Why should I do anything for you if you think I’m just going to work myself up
into a snit over--”
“See?” says Grif, and puts his arm back down across the back of the couch. “Simmons is
one-eighth robot, and all I had to do was ask nicely, and now he’s in a huge irritated snit.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” says Simmons, and goes back to fiddling with the radio, which Grif
doesn’t even bother responding to, because:
Oh, fuck yes , he just pulled off the “reach over and put arm around date while pretending
you’re stretching” maneuver. He is the Fucking King of shitty high school rom-coms, except
that they’re not, like, on a date, because no date will ever or could ever have Sarge right
fucking there.
Except that Sarge is eighty percent the best part of this moment, because Sarge is staring at
Grif’s arm stretched across the back of the couch, almost touching Simmons’s shoulders, like
Grif’s put a live snake in the living room.
Grif looks back at Sarge. He’s probably going to die at any moment, he thinks. Simmons is
going to turn around and it’s going to get awkward real fast and then they’ll have to do the
song and dance to make it not awkward, and it’ll be a ton of work and vaguely tedious unless
they can manage to entertain themselves, which they always, somehow, do. But oh my god ,
is it worth it to see Sarge’s face right now.
“What were you saying about the flag, Sarge?” Simmons asks.
“Er,” says Sarge.
“Yeah, Sarge, what were you saying?” asks Grif, bright and chipper and earnest.
Sarge shoves the last of his spaghetti into his mouth and books it to the sink to wash off his
plate. “Just--leave the radio to Lopez,” he mutters.
Grif scoots one inch closer to Simmons on the couch, just into the Uncomfortably Close
Personal Space. Simmons doesn’t notice. Grif is keenly aware of his own mortality and the
impending death of his entire relationship with Simmons.
Sarge says, “Harrghgmgnghgjrrhhghgffffffffffffff,” which Grif thinks was supposed to be one
of his patented Sarge Harrumphs, but it sounds more like he’s swallowed a fishbone and
would rather die than let Grif give him first aid.
“C’mon, we see Caboose sweet-talk machines all the time,” says Grif. “Simmons’s just got to
add some pizzazz to it, and the radio will totally spit out some valuable intel. Add some
emotion, you know? Bat his eyelashes, maybe? It’s called seduction , Simmons.”
“Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrhhhhhhhrhrhff,” says Sarge.
“I’m not flirting to get our way with our radio,” Simmons says.
“You’d flirt with other things to get your way?” Grif asks, before he can stop himself.
“MORNINGPATROLATOHSIXHUNDREDGOODNIGHT,” Sarge says loudly and hoofs it
to the door.
Simmons cries, “Wait, Sarge, what about morning training or room inspection or—?!” but
Sarge is gone , just like that, absconded the fuck out of there with speeds that impresses even
Grif, coward and retreatist extraordinaire. Speaking of, Grif shoots right up from the couch to
wash his plate and get the hell out of Simmons’s personal space. Simmons notices nothing.
Everything is a resounding success.
“What was all that?” Simmons asks, sounding genuinely clueless. “He was going on about
the Blue threat, and then it was like he just completely lost his train of thought…?”
“Beats me!” says Grif cheerfully, spraying water across his plate.
“I didn’t even get to tell him that I don’t love boners,” says Simmons sadly.
“A real shame,” says Grif.
Simmons squints suspiciously at him.
“Whatever it is you think I did, you can’t prove anything,” says Grif.
Simmons only squints harder.
Grif shoves his plate and utensils into the drying rack, flops back down on the couch with a
pack of saltine crackers, and tries his best not to look like a smug fat cat. “Well, now we don’t
have to listen to him give shitty vague orders about ‘try harder to win the war’ and junk like
that.”
“I still don’t know what you did,” says Simmons, “but I can definitely prove it, and I’m going
to.”
“Oh boy, do I get a twenty page report too?”
“Nice try. You were demoted ages ago,” Simmons scoffs. He dumps most of his uneaten
spaghetti in the trash, shoves his dishes in the sink, and leaves for the single-stalled bathroom
down the hall.
Grif blinks.
He looks around at the empty living space. Looks at Simmons’s unwashed dishes in the sink.
Looks at the closed bathroom door. He has the sudden feeling that he’s, somehow, fallen for
an illusion, hook line and sinker, and he still doesn’t know how.
Bedroom Talks
Chapter Summary
Here's what Grif knows.
Chapter Notes
warning for bad head times, specifically references towards possible suicide
“Well, I’m tired,” says Grif. “Night.”
Simmons is sitting on the common room couch, tapping his finger, obviously bored and
wanting to do something but also shit out of anything to entertain himself. “Yeah, okay,” he
says. His voice is clipped. More antsy than Grif had guessed, or maybe just more antsy now
that Grif hadn’t offered to be the entertainment.
Grif pretends he doesn’t see. Grif pretends he has no idea that Simmons's knuckles are
bleeding and that he can smell something funny from the single-stalled bathroom. Instead,
Grif retreats to his room. Shuts his bedroom door. Dumps armor on the floor. Strips out of his
suit. Hits the lights. Crawls into bed. Pulls the blankets up to his chin. Looks up at the ceiling.
He does not close his eyes.
He waits.
Whatever it is, it’s, y’know, whatever. Like, it doesn’t matter to me what it is, right?
I was just, um, wondering if I should be worrying.
State-mandated Health Ed classes take place at the end of the day on Wednesdays during
sophomore year of high school, during which time Dex is regularly skipping all classes after
eleven in the morning to deliver pizzas for Domino’s, and the school counselor who’d said
that getting a high school diploma was “integral to his future opportunities” could suck it
because future opportunities mean jack shit when you’ve barely got maybe a quarter of a
current opportunity. Ninety-nine percent of what he knows about the physical human body
comes from WikiHow. He, somehow, missed the memo that he should have WikiHow’d the
human head , as if the brain were an organ that could develop a dysfunction like a kidney or a
liver; as if the place where a person’s self lived could corrode and corrupt like bad lines of
code.
Here’s what Grif knows:
Kai comes home one night with half a box of chicken katsu and spam musubis that she’d
made for the potluck and slammed the screen door behind her, because that shit was broke as
hell anyway. “Taylor didn’t eat any of of my food,” she complains. “I think she’s on a diet or
something. Like she isn’t already a skinny bitch?”
“More leftovers for us,” Dex says. He wasn’t really listening.
“Koji thinks she’s becoming anorexic,” Kai complains. “Like those super old commercials
where the ugly girl looks in the mirror and sees a fat person.”
“Wow. Awful,” Dex says. Still not listening.
“More like it’s fuckin’ annoying !” Kai says loudly, and huffs off to the shower.
Here’s what Grif knows:
Kai grins, her lips shiny with vomit and the air rank with the smell of vodka and sour orange
juice. “Kalena says that--that if you throw it up, you’ll feel better. Because of endorphins?”
she said. “Yo, uh, Dex, what’s--what’s an endorphin?”
She bursts into happy giggles. Flecks of bile hit his cheek. Dex turns away.
Here’s what Grif knows:
“I had to do, like, a school project about binge eating and food addiction?” Kai said. She’s
still texting on her phone, tongue poking out of one side of her mouth in concentration. “And
I’m like, uh, yeah, we’re all addicted to food, have you heard that I eat like three times a day,
sometimes more, that I need food to live or I go through withdrawal, which is called
starvation , EL-EM-AY-OH. Have you ever heard of something so fucking stupid as being
addicted to food ?”
“Please tell me you didn’t write ‘have you ever heard of something so fucking stupid’ on a
piece of paper and turn that in,” Dex said.
“Nah, that due date was like, three weeks ago.” She looked up from her phone. “But that’s a
great idea!”
Dex is flipping through Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , skimming paragraphs
about some haole chick getting caught puking in the bathroom. It’s not relevant to the other
two-hundred and fifty pages of some Native-American kid attending the Seattle version of
Punahou. It’s never mentioned again. The counselor says the book was supposed to be
relatable to “indigenous peoples.” He loses his copy and forgets to write his assigned essay.
Simmons is opening the door from the single-stalled bathroom around the back of the Rat’s
Nest armory. Grif is surprised, but not worried. There are no worrying reasons that Grif
knows about that would make a man throw up before noon that don’t involve alcohol, and he
knows that’s not Simmons’s poison. He thinks he’ll give Simmons a hard time about
whatever it is later. There’s no reason not to, after all.
Kai is laughing, bright like the sun across the ocean. “Me, go to rehab !” she shrieked, and
slaps her knee at the funniest joke she’s ever heard. Kai’s homeroom teacher appears to
immediately regret opening her mouth. “Shit, bitch, vodka’s a fuckload cheaper than therapy
and food, okay?” She taps her head, giggling. “I stay akamai, Ms Watanabe, like you said I
do--”
Simmons is curling his lip and wrinkling his nose and probably thinking about how to get
away with murder because Private Prissy “Douchefuck” Sissy doesn’t have the human
decency to look contrite when his CO is kicking his ass. “Private Simmons and I are just
eating lunch,” Sissy says through gritted teeth, to which Grif retorts without thinking at all:
“Yeah, Private Simmons looks real hungry,” and then Grif freezes and Simmons freezes and
Simmons wilts, and Grif knows it’s because Grif knows something he’s not supposed to and
he can’t unknow it, whatever it is, even if the only thing he knows is that some great
unnameable something has gone wrong enough that Simmons thinks he , as a person , has
gone wrong. Grif doesn’t know how to disprove him. He doesn’t even know what he’s
disproving. The only person on Red Team equipped to formulate a cohesive argument with
sourced evidence and proofs is, actually, Simmons.
Dex is opening the cupboards of his mother’s apartment and the bag slips and scatters rice
across the wood. Mom left it open again, the fucking ditz; there’s ants crawling through the
shoyu stains leaking from the cracked bottle and into the rice bag. He shuts the cupboard.
Goes back to his and Kai’s bedroom and buries his head under his pillow. Nothing to be done
about that.
Ms Watanabe lifts her glasses from her face and rubs at her eyes. “These issues do, ah, tend
to run in families, Dexter. Some people say it’s more likely to be passed down through
fathers, but the reality is that mothers are equally likely to—”
Simmons is standing in the wreckage of a bathroom mirror. Grif is trying not to stare, but
there’s a fuckload of glass and a bit of blood and Grif knows that somebody’s got to clean it
up, and he really doesn’t want it to be him, Grif only got up to piss in the middle of the night
and he really doesn’t deserve to get involved in this kind of drama and Simmons takes a step
towards him and Grif just turns around and runs out of the bathroom back to his room
because only fucking lunatics go around punching bathroom mirrors in the middle of the
night and Grif does not intend to be caught in an enclosed space with someone with such a
little grasp on his temper that he’d lash out with his fists like a two-year-old child. Grif locks
the door behind him and swears up and down that Simmons is--Simmons is--it’s a bad idea,
okay-- Simmons is a bad, bad idea, full stop, and Grif just needs to do his time and maybe try
to get dishonorably discharged and go the fuck home--he really just wants to go home, and
promises himself that that’s all he’ll ever want from this fucking military.
“Am I?” Washington says, voice as balanced and even as a knife. “Think about it. Name one
thing that ever happened to you that wasn’t directly preceded by Command calling you, or
sending someone to your base.” Nobody moves. Washington tilts his head. “ One thing.”
“These are not answers I have, Dexter,” says Ms Watanabe. “I don’t know how much of a
person is predetermined by genetics or social-economic status. I can’t answer these questions
for you. And I don’t think anyone can.”
Grif ticks off his fingers: “The Flowers guy died from aspirin, the Church guy died from
Caboose, the Tex chick died from—” and Simmons interrupts with, “ We killed a man in
Basic within two hours of meeting each other.” Grif snorts: “Yeah, whatever,” Grif says, but
he still makes a sign of the cross for Hammer, even though he hasn’t been to church in five
million years, because the least he can do is respect the little old Korean ladies from the
Christian-Baptist church across Makiki District Park. Grif doesn’t know jack shit, but he
knows that Mrs Ok-yeong Yi deserves to have her prayers heard.
“ One thing,” Washington says. Nothing to be done about that.
“At least I know my taste in people is shitty!” Kai retorts. “Unlike you !” Dex says, “My taste
in people isn’t shitty .” Kai bursts out laughing.
Dex’s mother tells him two pieces of advice, neither of which she’ll ever follow: 1) Never
turn your back on the ocean, and 2) never rescue a drowning person. Well, what am I
supposed to do if I see someone drowning in the ocean? Dex demands. I can’t look away, I
can’t help them--am I supposed to just watch them drown? She frowns plaintively, like a child
wearing bright red lipstick and six-inch heels. How am I supposed to know ? she complains.
It’s only what my father told me, Dextie. She hesitates. Well, I think he… And Dex perks up
and asks, What? But then she thinks, then shakes her head: Ai-ya, can’t remember. Must
not’ve been important!
Simmons salutes. “Of course, sir, I’ll get on it right away, sir!” he chirps. “Every detail, every
thing is of utmost importa—”
(Grif suspects that when he has--well, that’s not a certainty anymore, he supposes, not with
the way his life is going. If he has kids, he’d only be able to pass on the second rule: Never
rescue a drowning person. No point in learning to never turn your back on the ocean if he
never makes it back to O’ahu, is there? Nothing to be done about that.)
Nothing to be done about—
(Are you sure?)
Grif is sure. (Grif isn’t sure.) Nothing to be done about anything. Nothing to be changed. No
way, no how. No can, no can.
Simmons is staring at the Cheetos in Grif’s room, and Grif just got Simmons through the door
and he’ll be fucking damned if a pack of Cheetos is going to scare him off but what the hell is
this? Why does Simmons look at every plate like it’ll bite, enter every kitchen like he’s ready
to fight, leave like an animal ready to chew a leg off to squirm out of a beartrap if only he can
get to the bathroo-That doesn’t make sense. Simmons wouldn’t do... that. He never said he does... that . (Grif
doesn’t know what he knows. Big surprise.) Simmons said: I threw up on purpose. It’s just a
thing that happens sometimes . That doesn’t mean anything. The single halogen light, in the
dark of the empty Rat’s Nest tunnels, two of them waiting for Caboose, Simmons said: Of
course I’m okay .
(It doesn’t have to make sense. I was just, um, wondering if I should be worrying. )
(Something also tells Grif that this--whatever this is-- Simmons in particular needs to start
making sense--by force if need be--or--or…)
(It doesn’t have to make sense. Whatever it is, it’s, y’know, whatever. Like, it doesn’t matter to
me what it is, right? )
( I was just, um, wondering if you needed… if I could… if you’d let me… if there’s anything I
could do, if there was— )
Nothing to be done. And nothing makes sense. Grif knows that.
It does—
It doesn’t—
( It matters— )
(What if they have to make it make sense? And then what if they have to do something, Or
Else? What if it matters? And at the end of all this, there’s still nothing to be done ?)
Does it matter?
Does it really?
( Waste of time and energy. Learning is such a scam. Growing older is such a scam. Living is
such a scam. Grif hates meaningless work. Better to quit before you waste your-- )
What’s the point? What does it matter? Can you say why? Is there a reason you’re alive? Is
there a reason Simmons is alive? Why are we here? Is there a reason you give a damn? Is
there a point to that, either? What does he matter? What does it matter what he does with his
food? What does it matter where you are today? Where you are tomorrow? A year, in ten
years, in fifty? Could you say why you’re there instead of here? Does it matter? Does it
matter, being here? Is there a point to you being here? Is this another scam? Another lie? Do
you have answers? Are there answers? If you have them, where did you go? Why aren’t you
here? Why am I here? Why am I here with Simmons? Why Sarge? Why Caboose? Why not
Church? Why not Kai? Do any of them matter? Does it really matter if Grif hasn’t heard from
Kai in years? What’s a few feelings? What’s a few humans? What are all humans? Why are
we, the royal we, here? What’s Grif to the entirety of the human race? What’re we to the
entirety of the universe? Why now? Why them? Why us? Why here? Why are we here? Why
are we here? Why are we here? Why are we here? Why are we—
( Living is such a scam. Grif hates meaningless work. Better to quit, quit, q-- )
Simmons cracks open the door.
“Psst!” he hisses. “Wake up!”
Grif groans, because oh, fuck Grif. He rolls over. The bedside clock says five-thirty-one. He
closes his eyes for the first time that night. His eyes feel dry and papery.
“‘m awake,” he mumbles.
“You don’t sound awake.”
Grif scrubs at his face with a hand. “‘M, mmfg, more ‘f a night owl...”
Simmons rolls his eyes. “Owls are completely nocturnal and never even shut their eyes at
night, let alone sleep,” he says, turns on the overhead light, and shuts the door.
Grif moans and buries his face into the pillow to hide from the bright light. Even now,
exhausted and feeling like he’s been run over by a truck, he doesn’t feel sleepy. He doesn’t
feel like he slept at all. He probably didn’t. Yeah, definitely fuck him.
“Like I don’t know what a fuckin’ owl is,” Grif tells his pillow grumpily, and peels the
blankets off to get on with his life and patrol for some goddamn Blues.
Uncooperative Underachievers
Chapter Summary
“Simmons is in mortal danger!”
Chapter Notes
if it's not clear, as of season 7 ep 2, simmons basically becomes a surly teenager because
of sarge's decisions, which is the event that i'm referencing. it's probably the only canon
moment im keeping from season 7 lmao
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Grif wakes up expecting hell on earth and instead finds Simmons’s peaceful, sleeping face an
arm’s length to Grif’s right. Holy shit. Grif is dreaming.
“Uh, no, please come back,” says Caboose’s voice. “Sleeping is for nighttime, and also on
mattresses.”
--this is not usually how the dream goes.
“And also you’re supposed to sleep alone, not together,” Caboose adds.
“Jesus,” Simmons says, sounding scandalized. “Could you word that just a little differently?”
“It’s in the rules,” says Caboose reproachfully.
“We’re changing the rules,” says Simmons, glaring at Caboose.
Caboose puts his hands on his hips and Grif can feel him glaring right back through the visor.
“Well, you can’t, because Church made them and they’re better than Tucker’s rules and I’m
not allowed to make rules,” he said. “And also the shouty Red pirate captain is looking for
you so you can look for me, so he gave me orders which he’s not allowed to do because I am
Blue and he is Red except he can tell me what to do just this once because I think he becomes
more shouty when he’s lonely so please go back before he becomes sad that his team is
gone.”
Simmons makes the verbal equivalent of an eyeroll.
“Oh, fffffffucking—okay, fine,” Grif says, “we live to serve Sarge’s delicate feelings and all
that shit…”
“Simon?” Caboose prompts.
And Simmons opens one eye, sticks his pasty, sunburnt haole nose in the air, and says, “Sarge
can suck it.”
This is really not how the dream goes but, like--Grif's not complaining?
Grif drags himself over to Red Base expecting yet more hell on earth. Here's what happened:
When Grif had woken up that morning, Sarge and Simmons were planning an assault on
Caboose’s base. Except that then Grif realized that hey, wow, “fighting” just Caboose would
be way better than fighting literally any real enemy, and they’d really hit the jackpot with
Valhalla, so he could drag his groggy, exhausted, sleep-deprived ass to somewhere quiet and
nappable with assurance that he could safely slack off for the foreseeable future.
And then Simmons gets upset because he wanted to, y'know, actually do something
worthwhile with his life, and now they can't even fight the Blues in their shitty fake war
because Grif's convinced Sarge to hold off on the attack until they can get Command to reenter the Blues into their database, and now:
Now Grif wakes up in the middle of the afternoon to go coddle Sarge’s whims while
Simmons mutters about goddamn Sarge and Sarge's shitty leadership skills and Sarge's
inability to launch a proper grumble grumble mumble mumble, and Simmons rolls over and
takes the shady spot that Grif had been occupying, the shade-hogging bastard, because
someone's been hit hard with the demoralization blues while Grif goes off to babysit both
Sarge's and Simmons's big and bruised Man Feelings. Right now his Priority One is to get
back to sleep, and the Obstacle One standing in between him and that is Sarge, so off he goes
with Caboose to get Sarge off his ass.
(Obstacle Two between Grif and his napping tree is what the fuck is Simmons doing, just
deciding to take a nap next to him like they’re an old married couple. Is Simmons trying to
kill him. Is this some kind of joke. Fucking Private Leonard “Main Character” Church
himself said no sleeping together. No crossing lines. No ambiguous comments about
changing rul—)
“Private Grif!” Sarge hollers the instant Grif comes into sight. “Why were you napping?!”
Because Grif stayed awake all night fixating on dumb shit. “Because of who I am as a
rebellious, uncooperative underachiever, Sarge,” says Grif.
“A suspiciously correct answer, Grif,” Sarge says. “And why is Simmons napping?”
Because Simmons has abruptly decided to become a rebellious, uncooperative underachiever.
Also because serving under Sarge is a morale-sucking karmic punishment. “He probably
stayed awake all night fixating on dumb shit, sir,” says Grif.
“Needs some shut-eye, does he? TOO BAD," Sarge says. "We can’t launch an attack against
the Blue forces with only two men! Caboose, you didn’t hear all that vital information about
the state of our army.”
“Wow! How did you know?” Caboose asks.
“Now someone get Simmons!” Sarge barks.
Sarge looks at Caboose. Caboose shakes his head and says, “No, thank you. I’m Blue.”
“Private Grif!” says Sarge.
“No, thank you,” says Grif. “I’m orange.”
Sarge cocks his shotgun.
Grif stomps up to Simmons, expecting hell and a fight, and says: “Sarge wants to know if you
want to lay siege to Caboose’s base by sitting in the hot sun for eighteen hours straight.”
“But I can’t,” says Simmons, whose attempts to remain completely calm and unperturbed are
foiled by the irritated scowl on his face. “I’m sleeping.”
Grif is trying really hard not to snort. Okay, hang on a second--he might really be okay with
grumpy, cranky, demoralized, pissbaby Simmons.
“You’re talking to me, Simmons," he says. "You’re awake.”
“Zzzzzzz," says Simmons.
“That's just you saying a ‘Z’ noise like a fucking bumblebee.”
“I have a sleeping condition. I’m very sensitive about it,” says Simmons.
Grif thinks about this. “This is plausible and I completely believe you and your bald-faced
lies,” says Grif.
There's a pause. They look at each other. Grif feels like he's going to bust a lung from the
effort of not laughing.
Simmons starts giggling.
“You broke Simmons, Sarge,” Grif reports, and is very glad that his helmet is hiding his
huge, unrepentant shit-eating grin. “He doesn’t want to work, and it sounds like it's aaaaaaaall
your fault!”
“Me? Break Simmons? Nonsense! Everyone knows I can do no wrong in Simmons’s eyes;
that’s the whole point of him!” Sarge says. “If anything, Simmons was fine up until you said
that whole thing about us deleting the Blues and not getting any credit for eliminating their
forces in Valhalla and dragging out this fight for the interminable future!”
“So it’s my fault?” Grif says in disbelief, and holds up his hands. “You guys were the ones
who deleted the Blues! I’m just saying the truth!” He holds up his hands as if this nonsense
about not defeating the Blues until they’ve been re-entered into the system is not the best lie
Grif has ever told. It is, in fact, the best lie Grif has ever told, but it’s not only a lie, it’s also
completely true from Sarge’s point of view.
(And besides, Simmons didn’t get all moody until Sarge started being a megalomaniacal
asshole. It is Sarge's fault.)
Sarge is doing his old man squint from behind his helmet. “Just you claiming to tell the truth
makes me suspicious,” Sarge says.
“I lied and everything I’ve ever said is only a con to serve myself and my hedonistic whims,”
Grif recites.
“Better,” says Sarge. “Now that that’s established, your point about needing to accumulate
more Blues to annihilate is excellent and truthful!”
“Good to hear,” says Grif. “Well, since that's a wrap, I’m going off to help Caboose set up his
base in preparation for the new incoming Blues—”
“No you’re not,” says Caboose.
Dammit, that was prime napping space. “Okay, I’m not,” says Grif. “Then, uh, I’m off to help
Lopez with—”
“No you’re not,” says Sarge. “We’re still a man down! If we're accumulating more Blues, we
need to accumulate more Reds! You’re getting Simmons out of this moody funk and back on
his feet!”
“I already did that!”
“Do it again! And don’t suck at it this time!” says Sarge. “By god, saying all these neutral to
vaguely positive things to you is giving me a hernia! You get Simmons back here and in asskissing shape on the double so I can abuse my authority without my intestines falling out!”
Grif flops back on the grass and groans. Simmons is shredding grass and dumping it on a
tiny mountain of grass shreds.
"Enjoying your new, demotivationalized, purposeless, inconsequential life?" Grif asks.
"It's not new," says Simmons, "but it is a party." And he dumps the shredded grass on Grif's
head. Grif shrieks.
"Just go get him yourself," Grif tells Sarge, now feeling smug as fuck because holy shit
Simmons is not giving up. Oh, this is rich. "Maybe explain yourself and your leadership
decisions to do absolutely nothing with his military career to him. Be honest with each other.
Have a bonding moment.
"Eeueugghggheghghgghghghghfhfffhhgh," says Sarge.
Yeah, okay, in Sarge's defense: same.
"Honesty sounds like a great idea," says Caboose.
"Go back to your base, Blue, before we catch your ability to have openly emotional
conversations," Grif says.
Sarge harrumphs. "Simmons will come around. He's disappointed that we can't kill Caboose
yet, but we have to keep the end goal in mind! We can't just go around killing Blues willynilly if we won't get credit on the records for it! If he just cooperated, we could get Command
to add the Blues back in to the database in no time!"
"A stupendous plan, sir," says Grif. They're going to be here doing nothing for years.
"You keep working on Simmons, Grif," Sarge orders. "It might take a long time... it might
take weeks or months, but--"
“Sure,” says Grif.
“Dammit, Grif, I know it's a hard sell, but don’t make me—” Sarge stops. “What? Really?”
“Yeah, sure,” says Grif. “I love spending quality alone time with Simmons.”
Sarge says nothing. Grif wishes his helmet was off so Sarge could see his lecherous eyebrowwaggle.
"What'd you say--'keep working on Simmons'? Definitely can do, sir. Greatly enjoy working
on Simmons, sir. Don’t wait up, sir,” says Grif. “Just letting you know, it might take a
long while. Lots of stuff we’ve been meaning to try--"
"ABORT MISSION," Sarge interrupts.
"--if you catch my drift..." Grif goes on.
“I said abort! Caboose, for the love of god,” Sarge begins, “please go get Simmons before
Grif—”
“I said I’m Blue,” Caboose interrupts. "And I have important things to do! By myself!
Without you!"
“Simmons is in mortal danger!” Sarge hisses, as if Grif isn’t right there listening to him.
"Prolonged exposure to Grif has made him not right in the head, and now Grif is only going
to make it worse with his hedonistic wiles!"
“Simon is not in danger,” Caboose says. “He is just sleeping. And now Grif is going to go
back to the tree, and then they will sleep together.”
Dead silence.
“That’s how I found them in the first place,” Caboose continues.
Even the birds have gone quiet.
“Simon was very sweaty and embarrassed,” Caboose goes on.
“Anything else you need me to do, Sarge?” Grif asks brightly.
"The good news is that Sarge is literally never going to bother us ever again," Grif
announces.
Simmons isn’t sleeping when Grif goes back to the tree, but he’s still hogging the shade.
"What's the bad news?"
"No bad news," Grif lies. Well--it's not like Grif undermining Simmons's reputation as a
heterosexual man is bad news. Right? Right? That'd be, like, homophobic, maybe? Who
fucking knows. Grif nudges Simmons with his foot. "Move over, I'm beat and I want the
shade."
“I’m gonna burn in the sun,” Simmons complains.
“Too bad. You’re not even sleeping, you’re covered in full-body armor, and I was a slacker
before it was cool.”
Simmons scoots over, but not enough. “I’m keeping my face in the shade, at least,” Simmons
says.
“Ugh--okay, yeah, whatever,” Grif says.
Until he lies down and finds out that in this position, Simmons’s face is like, six inches away
from Grif's face, and then it’s—uh, no, it’s fine, Grif swears, it’s all chill with him!
Everything is fine, Grif’s fine, we’re all alright! Just two dudes taking a nap, side by side, not
touching because they’re not, like, uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. And because Grif is so,
so fine and alright, Grif spends about four solid minutes lying there in the soft grass, in the
pleasantly cool shade, listening to Simmons’s breathing, being super fine and weirdly hyperalert for a dude who didn’t sleep at all the night before.
“Uh, Simmons, you’re missing out on prime ass-kissing over there,” Grif says at last. “Sarge
is gonna resort to eating pints of ice cream to get over the break-up.”
“Fuck it,” Simmons mutters. “What do I care. Not like we’re doing anything worthwhile
anymore, anyway.”
Grif snorts. “Yeah, that’s the Red Team spirit.”
“Is Sarge coming to yell at me?”
“Nah,” says Grif. “Caboose told him…”
He stops.
“Grif?”
“I forget,” says Grif.
“Uh-huh.”
“No, really, I did.”
“Uh-huh.”
"Probably wasn't important," says Grif. "It's okay now."
And Grif thinks: actually, it feels like things are pretty okay. Like, highly okay. Simmons is
being friendly--Grif can barely wrap his head around that. Grif has to put up with a Sergeant
Shouty McGeezer, but he’s figuring out (after seven years) how to keep Sarge minding his
own business. Lopez doesn’t even speak English and Donut is supposedly skulking around
here somewhere. They’ve got a nice base all to themselves and a big-ass backyard with a
fucking waterfall. It could be worse. It could be better. It's okay.
(Isn't it? Shouldn't it be okay?)
Grif listens to Simmons take a deep breath. (Wonders when was the last time Simmons threw
up was.) Grif is keenly aware of the inches between their heads, how their shoulders almost
brush, how if Grif moved his arm out to the left just a little it’d bump into Simmons’s.
Some days, he thinks, things feel pretty okay. Feels weird. Feels suspicious. Still feels okay.
Eventually, he falls asleep. Later, so does Simmons.
Chapter End Notes
anthony padilla voice from vine: two broooos, chillin in the hot tuuuub, five feet apart
cuz they’re Not Gay
Fruity Rumpus
Chapter Summary
“I’m not having an emotions threeway with you and Lopez."
Chapter Notes
if anyone's wondering, grif's talking about what happened in chapter 13, when simmons
tried to explain to grif why he'd been throwing up in a bathroom.
Sarge does not, in fact, bother them.
Sarge doesn’t bother them for six days .
It would, actually, be somewhat unnerving--like, come on, all he did was tame shit like put
his arm around Simmons, wiggle his eyebrows, imply that he and Simmons were fucking on
the grass like weed-smoking hippies. Tame shit. Sarge is a wussie, and also probably vanilla
as hell, which kind of wasn’t anything that Grif, who is also a mega-vanilla dude, actually
wanted to know about his commanding officer. Oh, god, abort thought, abort thought-anyway, thankfully, Grif is spared from being ungrateful for his six days of peace from
Sarge’s unnerving silence by, instead, having no peace whatsoever because:
“Well, I wouldn’t be annoying if you’d fess up what you’ve done,” Simmons snaps. (Touched
a nerve with the word “annoying”, did he?) “You can’t expect me to watch our CO just
vanish!”
“You’re the one who was being a rebellious snotbottle,” Grif complains. “ You wanted him
gone!”
Simmons crosses his arms. “Yeah, but, but--if I’m being rebellious and lazy, and you’re being
rebellious and lazy, then who’s flying the plane?”
“Never fear!” a voice cries. Grif nearly jumps out of his skin and stares up at the roof of Blue
Base. A lone figure is silhouetted in shining, resplendent glory from the rising sun. “ I will fly
the plane, with a firm hand upon all buttons, knobs, and joysticks!”
“Please get down from the railings, Lieutenant Crepes,” says Caboose.
“Oh,” sighs Simmons.
Oh, thinks Grif: this motherfucker.
“Please do not lose your teammates,” says Caboose.
Simmons is eyeballing Caboose and his base devoid of literally all the other teammates
Caboose has lost, so Grif elbows him to nonverbally tell him to shut the fuck up. “I didn’t get
lost!” says Donut. “I just got transferred, and then almost killed, and then came back and
almost died of dehydration, and then wound up in Caboose’s base as Caboose tried to restore
me to health with a diet of Poptarts and coffee and almost died again!”
“So that’s why you needed the Decepticon coffee-maker,” Grif says.
“And I’m right as midwestern rain, now!” Donut chirps.
“Of course,” says Grif. “This makes complete and total sense.”
Simmons throw up his hands and doesn’t even try. Lazy bastard. Grif is so proud.
“And you came back… why ?” Grif asks.
“Oh, well,” says Donut. “That’s a long story. Ages to tell! We really should go somewhere
more comfortable! Have some tea, pull out some stroopwafels…”
“Yeah, I think I’m good over here,” says Simmons.
“But it’ll be fun! We can catch up and—”
“No, thanks,” says Simmons, “this single position in which I hold my elbow at a ninetydegree angle to hold my gun at the ready for literally no reason is really doing it for me.”
“Nothing’s stopping you from holding your elbow at a ninety-degree position while
munching on stroopwafels,” says Donut.
“There is more stopping me from eating a stroop-waffle than you will ever know,” Simmons
says coolly, “up to and including the fact that it’s called a stroop-waffle .”
Donut thinks about this.
“What,” says Simmons.
“Nothing,” says Donut.
“No, really,” says Simmons, “what’s that face for?”
“Nothing!” says Donut again.
“ Donut —”
“I’m just saying,” says Donut. “It sounds a little, y’know... racist.”
Then Simmons refuses to be around someone who will make him eat Norwegian cookies and
sulks off to annoy Caboose, which is not the normal order of annoyer-and-annoyee that Grif
would have expected but apparently the Red Army is now so fucking useless that even
Caboose has better things to do than talk to them. This, henceforth, leaves Grif alone with
Donut.
“But since we’re here and got the whole room to ourselves,” Donut says, “well--give it to me,
Grif!”
“No,” says Grif.
“I mean the deets , gutterbrain!” Donut exclaims. “I mean the 411, the sitch, the upd8! What’s
been happening since we last saw each other? Talk honestly with me!”
“Even more no,” says Grif.
The coffee machine spits out the last dregs of coffee. Donuts pours cups for the two of them.
“Cream or sugar?”
“I don’t drink coffee,” Grif says.
“Hm, yeah, wasn’t that a song from High School Musical... ?”
Grif really wishes that Simmons was back here so they could roll their eyes together. “The
better question is, where were you ?” Grif says. “Sarge probably thinks you’re dying, which-which I guess you are, or something--or that Caboose is disembowling you and baking you
into meat pies. Fill us in, Donut.”
“I prefer being filled than filling,” says Donut, and begins pouring sugar into his coffee.
“Filling in .”
“Yeah, that!” says Donut cheerfully. “Speaking of, ever since I got transferred, I realized that
getting bossed around isn’t in my wheelhouse! It’s such a passive role, you know? Like
damn, some guys have such a heavy hand, when really I think leading someone proper
requires a gentler but still firm touch! Like, I could be the brainless jokes-machine lackey, but
frankly, I think I’d be better utilized as emotional leadership?! And I’m handsome enough to
be mascot, too, if Lopez doesn’t want to--not that I don’t think that he’s a great mascot, but I
think most mascots usually have eyes...”
Donut is still pouring sugar. Grif is waiting for the coffee to congeal. In the distance,
Simmons shrieks and Caboose yells something about a wrench.
“...but then I’m not sure what else Lopez would do, because he can’t be emotional support if
none of us can understand him--except for me! So I guess we can tag-team it? Make every
therapy session a threeway with—”
“I’m not having an emotions threeway with you and Lopez,” Grif says.
“B—”
“No, stop, I’m stopping you right there ,” says Grif. He’d forgotten how much Donut would
talk if you’d let him. How much it felt like communicating with a martian from another
planet.
“In a threeway, there’s more holes to go around!” Donut exclaims, and caps the sugar bag.
“Too much sugar, you think?”
“Lopez doesn’t have …”
“Robots can have emotional voids that need to be filled too, Grif!” Donut cries.
Simmons chokes from the doorway.
Grif stabs a finger at him. "Whatever it is you're thinking is going on," Grif says, "it's not
that."
“Uhhh, yeah. Never mind,” Simmons says, and walks back out.
“I’m telling you,” says Caboose’s voice. “Gruf is always saying the ‘get the fuck away from
me’ from February but in Red Team words, and now the pirate captain is scared.”
“What?” Grif asks. Is everyone in Blue Base a Martian from another planet?
Wait, that was a stupid question. But he didn't think it'd be contagious.
“Anyway, I’ve still got stuff to do here at Blue Base,” says Donut. “Which is why! I asked! In
the first place! Let me know what’s up with the Red Team! So I can catch with you all!
Without leaving my other friends out to dry like a cheap condom!”
“ What stuff are you doing at Blue Base?”
“Blue Team stuff!” says Donut.
“Blue Team stuff what ?”
“I can’t tell you! It’s very secret.”
Grif crosses his arms. “Oh, really. Secret.”
“Yeah!”
“Well,” says Grif, “we’ve got Red Team secret stuff, too.”
This is where Simmons rolls his eyes and what no that’s ridiculous and then thinks about it
for two seconds too long and then panics because how come he hasn’t heard anything about
Red Team secrets? Sarge isn’t keeping secrets, right? Not from Simmons, because he’d never
do that to Simmons, right??? Right????? And then boom, they’re off and running: instant
chaos and entertainment. OR, alternatively, this is where Sarge nods knowingly and says ah
yes THOSE secrets, the ones about my secret laser deathray to drill through the entire
fucking Earth to liberate the Earth’s molten core , the ultimate Red ally, or something like
that--boom, off and running, instant chaos and entertainment. Grif hasn’t changed his
operations in years.
Donut, the motherfucker, says instead: “Pssh, that’s bullshit!”
“No, for real,” says Grif. “Secrets everywhere.”
“Please,” says Donut. “You can’t fool me.”
Grif frowns. “Drowning in secrets. It’s a nest of lies. Practically one of Lopez’s shitty
telenovelas. Except I am Madam Carmensita, and Lopez is Señor Diego.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“Nope!” says Grif. “And guess what? Sarge has a tragic secret backstory that’s going to come
back and bite us all in the ass, so get your ass ready.”
“My ass is never anything less than ready! But not for that , because Sarge definitely doesn’t
have a secret backstory.”
“He was an ODST,” Grif lies. Super lying. Making this shit up as he goes. “Awful, terrible
accidents that he saw. He saw people burn up in the atmosphere as they came down. Crisped
like bacon. Skin peeled off with the Kevlar when they tried to strip the armor.”
“Dooooooon’t beliiiiiiieve youuuuuuu,” Donut sings.
“I’m cheating on Lopez,” says Grif. “And then eloping with Simmons.”
“That’s not a secret, Grif, we all knew that.”
“Also, Simmons is dying,” says Grif.
“Really!” says Donut, sounding unimpressed with Simmons’s mortality. “Okay, hotshot-why is Simmons dying?”
(Grif doesn’t know why Simmons is dying. He doesn’t even know how long that--that sort of
thing--takes to kill--)
“It... all started when we were in Rat’s Nest,” Grif begins, slowly.
“Ooh,” says Donut. “Go on!”
“There was this asshole,” says Grif. “Named, uh, Private Sissy.”
“Wow, that’s an unfortunate name,” says Private Franklin Delano Fucking Donut.
“It was… something to do with the base, I think,” says Grif. “Some sort of… change in
Simmons set in… or maybe just something I’d never noticed before...”
“Mmmhm,” says Donut.
Grif’s eyes narrow, piecing the story together. “I noticed, one day, that something was odd
with Simmons… and I didn’t think anything of it, y’know, because who’s complaining when
someone becomes less stressed and less crabby, right? But…”
Donut is quiet.
“...one day,” says Grif, “I found him sick out by one of the outer bathrooms. Didn’t know
why, but…”
Grif puts his head in his hands. Donut’s breath catches.
“...I figured it out,” says Grif, quietly. Brokenly.
Donut reaches out for Grif’s shoulder. “...Grif…”
“HE’S PREGNANT , DONUT!” Grif wails straight into Donut’s hearing aid. “PREGNANT
WITH ANOTHER MAN’S CHILD!”
Donut takes his hearing aid out and throws it at Grif. “I see how it is!” Donut yells. “You
con! You douchesniffing snake! Playing with my gossip-loving heart like this!”
“Wait, no, Donut, come back, he’s--he’s dying because not only is he pregnant with Sissy’s
child and throwing up with morning sickness, he’s also drinking like a lush because of
Sissy’s bad influence, and also Rat’s Nest had the worst case of hay fever—!”
“CABOOSE!” Donut hollers down the hall. “GET SIMMONS! WE’RE KICKING THEM
BOTH OUT!”
Homos Only
Chapter Summary
"This is a high-level slacking jutsu."
Red and Blue Team reach a comfortable stalemate.
Donut doesn’t come back from whatever Blue Team nonsense he’s doing. Caboose carries on
with his Blue Team nonsense. Sarge does not command Red Team, who now has four
members (five if they include Donut), to wipe out the only remaining Blue, because he can’t
without shooting himself in the foot. He does not order Simmons to do anything, in part
because Simmons wouldn’t do anything anyway. He does not order Grif to do anything. He
gives plenty of orders to Lopez, who does a whole bunch of stuff to keep Red Base actually
up and running, but none of the things that Sarge had asked.
One day, Grif walks into the common room and see Simmons flipping, boredly, through an
ePub file on the couch. He’s got his contacts out and his glasses on and his hair slightly damp
from a shower that probably wasn’t so much a shower as it was a cover for the sound of
retching. He’s drinking water through a straw like it’s his job. His leg is bouncing, like it does
when he’s getting antsy--probably because nobody’s done anything in weeks, and Simmons
thrives on staying in motion. (Maybe he needs to go for a run? Get a hobby? Personal
project?)
Simmons looks up and says, “Donut sent us a crate of diet soda, if you want it. Who knows
how long it’s been in Blue Base, but he says that neither he nor Caboose are going to drink it
because it’s bad for the complexion, so he thought we, being the ‘nasty frat boys’ that we are,
might appreciate it…” He gestures to a fruit-basket arrangement on the floor, except all the
fruit are soda bottles, and all the soda bottles are organized by color.
Grif watches Simmons taking off his glasses and cleaning them on his shirt with hazy but
inevitable focus, and thinks, All we need is a dog and a nice backyard, and we’re deep in
white-picket-fence territory .
Grif, suddenly, really wants a dog. Maybe that can be Simmons’s new hobby. Simmons has
never had a pet, he’d said once. Simmons seems like a cat person. Grif wonders if they’ll still
be trucking around together by the time Simmons finds out if he’s a dog person or a cat
person. Grif kind of wants to still be there. It’s not curiosity, exactly--Grif hasn’t been curious
about anything Simmons has done in years. He just wants to… be there . To just see it. He’s
hoping that Simmons might smile.
Yeah, that’d be--that’d be real, real nice. It’s not the Makiki apartment with two small kids
and a chill girlfriend he’d thought he could scrape but, y’know, sometimes “nice” is a dog
and/or cat, a military base, an old man and his robot, a pair of stupid-ass gay neighbors, and
Simmons’s tetchy frowns and doofus smiles.
Then Grif scowls at himself and collapses on the couch next to Simmons and puts his feet up
on the soda-basket, because Christ, Grif is so old, and now Grif’s talking like an old man,
too.
“Are you gonna put the soda away?” Simmons asks, in a voice that highly implies that he
wants Grif to put the soda away.
“Yes, dear,” Grif says, in a voice that highly implies that he’s just going to wait until
Simmons gets so tired of the soda being in the middle of the common room that he’ll put it
away himself.
“You’re just going to wait until I get so tired of the soda being in the middle of the common
room that I put it away myself, aren’t you,” Simmons says.
“Who, me?” Grif asks. “Be lazy? Try to get away with doing the least amount of work
possible? Try to wriggle my way out of consequences by avoiding conversation topics? Me
?”
“You could try not being fucking proud of it,” Simmons says.
“I’m not proud of who I am, Simmons. I’ve only accepted that I cannot be anyone else.”
Simmons snorts. “Which self-help book did you get that from?”
“Fortune cookie,” Grif says, because he’s learned that nobody in this damn base will take him
seriously if he admits to having come up with that himself. (And if they take him seriously,
then he’s only shown a soft underbelly, and--well.) “Speaking of, Simmons, you should
probably know--you’re great at slacking off and all, and I really appreciate the effort, but you
should know--I’ve got years more of experience at this than you, buddy. Don’t get cocky.
You’re speaking to a professional, here.”
Grif does the thing with the two fingers pointing first at Grif’s eyes, then at Simmons.
“ Excuse you,” Simmons says. “You say that like slacking off is hard .”
“Oh, the naivety,” Grif says, shaking his head. “You’re a sweet summer child, right now,
waddling in the shallow end of the pool.”
Grif leans against the armrest on the opposite end of the couch from Simmons, which should,
theoretically, put the length of the entire couch between them, except the entire couch is
really fucking tiny. Grif swings his legs up onto the couch and onto Simmons’s lap.
“Get your!--fucking!!--nasty shoes off my tablet!”
“This is a high-level slacking jutsu,” Grif says, pressing his feet down firmly on Simmons’s
thighs so Simmons can’t escape or push his legs off. “In this technique, not only am I
slacking off and pissing off other people by slacking off, but I’m both broadcasting it and
actively pissing you off because I’m interfering with your productive reading.”
Simmons twists and puts his giraffe legs on the couch too, so his size twelve feet are sitting
right on Grif’s lap. Or rather, because Simmons has legs for miles and the length of the couch
is just barely too short to accommodate Simmons’s giant legs, Grif gets fucking crushed by
legs.
And, like--look, honestly, if Grif is going to die by being crushed by Simmons’s lovely legs,
Grif’s not complaining.
“High-level slacking technique, is it, Grif?” Simmons asks. “Is it really?”
“You wanna know an even higher-level slacking technique, Simmons?” Grif asks.
Simmons, who thinks he’s won with his giant smug legs, says, “What?”
“If you’re preventing me from getting up off this couch with your legs,” Grif says, “then I
can’t put away the soda basket.”
Simmons leans back. Groans for half a minute straight.
Then he throws his tablet down and stands up. “Fine! Fine! I’ll do it myself!”
“Thank you, dear!” Grif calls.
Simmons lifts the basket with his metal arm and flips the bird with the other and marches out
of the room.
Grif leans his head back on the couch and vaguely wishes he had a cigarette. He closes his
eyes. Carefully, he breathes until the stupid sappy smile no longer threatens his face. He
wonders what it's be like to have Simmons’s nice long legs wrapped around his wai—
Grif decides he’ll go for the cigarette.
The e-cig, though, or Simmons will throw a fit when he comes back.
He’s scrounging around for the e-cig in the pockets of various sweatpants he’s got squirreled
under the common room table when he notices Sarge, peering through the door like he’s
checking the room for threats. Grif eyes him. “Looking for something?” he calls.
Sarge harrumphs.
“Looking for something, sir ?” Grif sighs, because apparently they can’t get past this fucking
miltiary charade.
“Yes, in fact,” Sarge declares. “I’m looking, in fact, for you, Private Grif!”
“Wow,” says Grif. “Congrats. You did it. You found me. What now?”
Sarge points a finger at Grif’s nose. “I’ve got some. Things. I’d like to say,” says Sarge
irritably. “To you.”
“Fascinating,” says Grif.
Sarge stares at Grif with distrust and uncertainty which, honestly, Grif is a hundred percent
down for as a new change of pace. Beats being yelled at.
“Are you gonna get to it?” Grif asks.
“I think you’re tryn’a bamboozle me,” Sarge says.
Grif waits.
“Tryn’a pull the wool over my eyes.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Grif says.
“It’s about Simmons! And you! And—” Sarge leans forward, eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe
you two are really doin’ the hanky-panky.”
Grif’s eyebrows shoot up, which is exactly the wrong thing that he shouldn’t have done.
Sarge’s grizzled lips quirk into an unamused grin.
“Yep--yeah, I think I’ve got you figured out, Private Grif. I thought it was odd, you changing
your tune on a dime! I think you’re just pretendin’.”
“First of all, nobody calls it the hanky-panky,” Grif says. “Second of all, why the hell would I
pretend about that?”
Sarge’s eyes are slits. “Because you’re getting back at me,” he says.
Ooh, Grif thinks. Got it in one.
“Don’t be so self-absorbed,” Grif says instead.
“No, you can’t fool me,” Sarge says, jabbing a single finger at Grif’s nose. “You’re putting
that poor, confused boy in the middle of our feud, like a chesspiece! He just wants to be a
good soldier, Grif, you sadistic bastard! He doesn’t deserve this!”
“Lots of people don’t deserve lots of things,” says Grif. “For example, does Caboose deserve
to get eradicated just for being a Blue?”
“Yes!”
“Noooooo,” says Grif, as if explaining morality to a small child. “Okay, then--do you deserve
to walk into the break room and find that someone’s taken the last of the coffee and refused
to refill the pot?”
Sarge says, “Hhhrmgmghmmmmmm.”
Grif holds up his hands. “Bad shit happens to everyone! Deserving isn’t even on the table.”
Sarge rubs a hand across his whiskers. “So,” he says slowly, “you’re admitting that you are
pretending to be friends-with-benefitting Simmons as a chesspiece to get out of work?”
Oh, shit.
“Not necessarily,” says Grif quickly. Sarge’s eyes flash. Shit, too quickly. Oh, shit. Wait, no,
don’t panic. Nothing unsalvageable yet. “It’s the... rhetoric, the intellectual debate of the
idea...”
“You’re digging yourself a verbal hole, Private,” Sarge says gleefully.
“I’m not—”
“You’re confirming my suspicions every time you open your lying mouth, and do you know
why?!" Sarge cries. "Your guilty expression gives it all away!”
Shit, shit, shit, shit—
“You are lying!” Sarge cries triumphantly. “You’re using my only weakness, a gentlemanly
compulsion to give couples their privacy, to get out of any sort of labor in a way that’s
unprecedently diabolical! You’ve reached new lows, Grif--have you no shame ? Have you
no--”
“What’d Grif do this time?” Simmons asks.
Sarge spins around and grins, maniacally, at Simmons, who's continuing his recent bad habit
of walking into rooms at the exactly wrong moment. Grif is almost frozen where he sits in the
middle of the couch, watching his perfect, wonderful plan to get out of doing work forever
fall apart before his eyes. “Private Simmons! Just on time!” Sarge says. “Private Grif, why
don’t you tell Simmons what you’ve done?”
Simmons gives Grif an expectant look. Grif’s mind reels for an explanation. Grif opens his
mouth—he stammers—
“I already know he broke the fridge light,” Simmons says, walking, without any realization
that Grif's plan is combusting, towards the couch.
“Uh,” says Grif.
“And that he left the toothpaste uncapped, again.”
“Nope!” Sarge says gleefully. “Not those, although those too are heinous and disgusting! You
see, Simmons, Grif has been lying!”
Simmons looks very unimpressed. “Lying?” he says, and sits back on the couch. “About
what?”
Grif looks at Simmons and feels his soul ascend out of his body, because Simmons has,
apparently, chosen to sit about one-point-two inches away from Grif, with their thighs
fucking touching--he repeats, fucking!! touching!!--and Simmons’s arm thrown across the
back of the couch as if around Grif’s shoulders. For all intents and purposes, Simmons looks
like he’s comfortably seated on the couch next to his significant other, and Sarge has come to
visit them in their space, where they were having a gay old time before Sarge interrupted
them, and Simmons fully intends to resume their conversation as soon as Sarge will leave
them alone. It’s--fucking masterful, honestly, the levels of social blocking Simmons has
somehow, magically, employed to cue Sarge into the strong signal of "I'm not interested, and
you can go, now." The mastery of the move leaves Grif almost speechless.
“Uh, dude,” Grif hears himself ask. “What slacking technique is this?”
Simmons looks at him with an expression like closed shutters. “Nothing?"
“Oh,” says Grif, as if Simmons putting his arm around Grif and sitting half in Grif's lap is,
like, something super normal that they do every day? “That’s, um… good?”
“Yep,” says Simmons. "What's this about lying?"
Nobody moves. Nobody speaks.
"Hm," says Simmons. "Well--I guess it'll come up. Anything else you needed from us,
Sarge?”
Simmons’s arm does not move.
“No,” says Sarge, with a straight face, sturdy conviction, and even tone at a decibel about
three octaves too high.
“Good to hear, sir,” says Simmons, and still his arm does not move.
Sarge looks across the common room with a look of “you may have won this time dirty
Blue/nefarious enemy/Meta/Grif/washing machine, but I’ll get you next time!” Outwardly,
Grif smirks, the picture of being a smug fuck who’s not only getting some, but using his
getting some to make his superior officer too uncomfortable to give him any orders for fear
of walking in on something he’ll regret--so not only a smug fuck, but the smuggest fucker.
Inside, Grif is freaking the fuck out.
Heat Stroke
Chapter Summary
Ugh, fuck--let’s stop talking about Sarge, Grif doesn’t want to associate any of this with
Sarge.
Chapter Notes
warning for........ shitty spanish.......??? it went thru google translate like three times to
make sure it was ULTRA shitty
In the space of two minutes, Grif goes from enjoying a nice vacay to feeling like he’s in a
fucking warzone.
Grif wakes up in the morning and there’s Simmons, nodding at him and not eating breakfast
and with his hair a little uncombed because Simmons at some point made the jump from
being neurotic about his appearance to not really caring if Grif sees him in less than stellar
condition and then Simmons gives him a humorless, early-morning hint of smile and Grif
nearly shoves his plate in the toaster instead of his actual fucking toast. And then Grif goes
outside after breakfast and there’s Simmons, waiting at the door for Grif to come by and
shoot the breeze with him, looking impatient and bored in the hot morning sun but just a little
clearer-eyed when Grif shows up and fuck . Fuck, fuck, fuck .
Grif suddenly has the overwhelming conviction that everything is unfair and Grif is being a
idiot again.
In the interest of Grif being honest with himself: Simmons is ninety-nine percent incapable of
entertaining himself, unless Simmons has managed to pirate another book or TV show. And
the thing is, Grif would have nothing to do either if he wasn’t enabling his teammates to run
around in stupid fucking circles. It’s a symbiotic relationship. It’s boredom. It’s shitty brojousting. It’s the worst coincidence of all time. It’s—
Whatever. Let’s go check out of that waterfall.
So they go and check out that waterfall, because it is, actually, an outrageously hot day, even
for Grif, who wears layers in summer and regularly switches the base thermostat from sixtyeight degrees to seventy-five when nobody’s looking, which always pisses off Simmons
despite the fact that Simmons also always runs cold and complains about fucking being cold?
But now that it’s hot, Simmons is complaining about the heat, the lack of breeze, the sun,
how Simmons is running low on sunscreen for his lily-white ass, as if that’s the most
important thing they need in a hundred degree weather--how come this dude never stops
complaining?
There’s fucking Simmons taking off his helmet because it’s too hot, wiping sweat off his face
with the back of his glove, fucking Simmons standing in the cool water, fucking Simmons
taking his gloves off and pouring water over the back of his neck so his hair stands in handtousled spikes when he rubs his hair and face dry, fucking Simmons shaking his hands dry and
shoving his long fingers back into his gloves as water droplets trail down the cut of his jaw,
the hollows of his neck-“Are you alright?” Simmons asks.
“Hhhhfhhyhhffhfyyyeah,” says Grif. “Yeah? Yeah, of course?”
Simmons frowns. His eyelashes are wet and dark. There’s water scattered across his freckles.
Which Grif isn’t noticing or looking at or thinking about at all.
“Very. Alright,” says Grif. “Yes?”
“You’re not getting heat stroke, are you?” Simmons asks.
Simmons takes a step closer. Grif has the strong desire to see how close Simmons will come
and the simultaneous desire to run away screaming. Unfortunately, the simultaneous sudden
and strong desire flooded his entire functioning system and Grif ended up standing there
doing nothing at all at Simmons comes close enough that Grif can see the old shaving scar
from that one time in their second year at Blood Gulch, the faintest raise of white skin, along
the cheek still made of flesh, the kind of scar so strong but so feather-thin that you can’t help
but want to trace it, down and along the slight hollow below his cheekbones and through the
acne scars to the side of his chin just below the corner of his mouth—
“YES IM DYING OF HEAT STROKE OKAY GOODBYE,” Grif says, and runs .
GRIF’S FINE IT’S FINE EVERYTHING’S FINE.
Grif takes refuge with--of all people-- Lopez .
Where else is he supposed to go? Donut’s off shacking up with Caboose. Sarge thinks Grif’s
come down with a bad case of Gay Cooties. Who else is Grif gonna hang with? The Epsilon
unit?
“I’ve got sun stroke,” Grif tells Lopez.
“Su armadura tiene enfriamiento interno del sistema (Your armor has an internal system
cooling) ,” says Lopez.
“I’m taking a break for my health and happiness,” Grif says.
“Eres Grif. ¿Qué salud? (You’re Grif. What health?) ” says Lopez.
“Don’t mind me,” says Grif.
“En realidad--eres Grif . ¿Que felicidad? (Actually--you’re Grif. What happiness?) ,” says
Lopez.
“Cool,” says Grif, and kicks up his heels.
“Y, por supuesto, su armadura está medio roto porque no lo cuidas. Te tratas como una
cochinilla ambulante (And of course your armor cooling is half broken because you don’t
take care of it. You treat yourself like a walking pigsty) ,” says Lopez.
“Good night,” Grif says, and closes his eyes.
“Nunca te trataremos mejor que a ti mismo (We will never treat you better than you treat
yourself) ,” Lopez says. “Eres un idiota (You fucking idiot) .”
Grif sees, for the first time, what Sarge sees.
Grif--well, Grif doesn’t want to think about this too much, you know? It kills him on the
inside from the start to admit that Sarge actually sees anything of value. And while Grif
doesn’t trust Sarge’s judgment on even something as simple as whether or not he’ll need an
umbrella, Grif assumes ...
Ugh, fuck--let’s stop talking about Sarge, Grif doesn’t want to associate any of this with
Sarge.
Let’s talk about Jackson and Parker.
Private Jackson and Private Parker were dispatched to some soul-crushing, ass-freezing,
entirely purposeless outpost on a colony in buttfuck nowhere, where they joined the ranks of
Privates Wesleyan, Spike, Grif, Finnegan, Jay, and Pringles. (Pringles wasn’t his real name.
Something to do about him wanting some friends of his to get him some pringles one time,
and then he went to jail? It was very unclear.)
Jackson and Parker, perhaps, didn’t have the greatest introduction. Nobody was happy about
new transfers--because honestly, what the fuck did they need them for? Who gives a shit?
Everyone else already knows each other, and it wasn’t a great dynamic, but it was a
sustainable dynamic. Did they really need more people fucking up the balance they had? So
most of the time, Jackson and Parker hung out with just each other.
Left alone, in the middle of nowhere, at a base without any real purpose--well, who’s really
keeping score on what you do to get through the week? Everyone knows everyone else’s
weird shit, anyway. Finnegan collected funny-shaped rocks, Jay had a knack for helmetcam
candids, Spike’s the one asshole with That One Fetish, and sometimes Parker and Jackson
fucked.
Because they weren’t even friends. Those two got to fuck because they were…
acquaintances.
Yes, for real. Yes, really . Grif is actually very, very certain that they were acquaintances. Not
friends with benefits. Not boyfriends. Not some sort of illicit prison-wife thing. No contract
or monogamy or any arrangement set in stone. They were acquaintances who’d found a way
to pass the time with someone they vaguely knew. Like playing cards, or watching a movie
together. Good, clean, friendly sex.
Which isn’t uncommon. None of them were really surprised, except Grif, who’d only been
recently drafted. It’s a thing that happens, Finnegan said. Does it bother you?
Jackson and Parker didn’t hang out more than anyone else did, or more than they did with
anyone else. They didn’t get touchy-feely. They didn’t sit too close on couches or hold hands
or think about what it’d be like to have an apartment and a dog together. They didn’t jokingly
propose to each other or hang out under trees together or hang out in each other’s rooms
while looking at Nat Geo magazines or jack off while thinking of the other in the middle of
the night. They didn’t do any of that.
That’s the way it’s supposed to go. That's what Grif was told was the "right way" to do it: the
way that didn't rock any boats, didn't break any hearts, didn't threaten anyone's manly selfrespect.
Not , of course, that this information about the social courtesies of banging your male friends
is relevant at all to the situation! Nope! This is just a strange and out of place aside that has
no bearing whatsoever on Simmons being so much of a fucking idiot that he doesn’t know
what signals he is or isn’t giving off. Not that Grif has any incentive whatsoever to read into
anything that Simmons does, because he doesn’t , he doesn’t think about this or Simmons at
all, ever, of all time.
Grif is stating this now, for the record, that he is flirting entirely heterosexually with
Simmons, and only because it’s such a great Sarge-deterrent.
But if this information were relevant to the situation…
And if Grif were to see, for example, two other people that weren’t himself and Simmons
going through the motions that Grif and Simmons were doing…
If Grif were to know that those two other people were, in fact, probably way more than
acquaintances, and had a shitload more history than just two transfers who’d met each other
last week...
If Grif were wondering if they bit off more than they should… If they’re getting into
something that goes into territory than none of them have a roadmap for…
Grif might be worried for them.
Nervous enough to leave the room if he saw the beginnings of awkward PDA between them.
Concerned enough to grill one of them to check the facts.
Uneasy enough to give those two their space for entire weeks.
Well! Good thing that neither Grif nor Simmons are doing anything weird at all! Therefore,
none of this is relevant information, and Grif will roll over and go back to sleep and do a
whole lot of nothing and stop thinking about it, and he'll wake up in the morning and
Simmons will get his act together and Grif will cary on avoiding all of the consequences for
his actions entirely.
What a great plan!
Bad Ideas
Chapter Summary
"Don't damage your courtesy neurons while bashing your forehead into any mirrors."
Chapter Notes
thank u aryashi for beta and also being the cooliest dooliest!!!!!!!
“At least I know my taste in people is shitty!” Kai retorts. “Unlike you !”
Dex says, “My taste in people isn’t shitty.”
Kai bursts out laughing.
Simmons is standing in the wreckage of a bathroom mirror. Grif is trying not to stare, but
there’s a fuckload of glass and a bit of blood and Grif knows that somebody’s got to clean it
up, and he really doesn’t want it to be him, Grif only got up to piss in the middle of the night
and he really doesn’t deserve to get involved in this kind of drama and Simmons takes a step
towards him and Grif just turns around and runs out of the bathroom back to his room
because only fucking lunatics go around punching bathroom mirrors in the middle of the
night and Grif does not intend to be caught in an enclosed space with someone with such a
little grasp on his temper that he’d lash out with his fists like a two-year-old child. Grif locks
the door behind him and swears up and down that Simmons is--Simmons is--it’s a bad idea,
okay--Simmons is a bad, bad idea, full stop, and Grif just needs to do his time and maybe try
to get dishonorably discharged and go the fuck home--he really just wants to go home, and
promises himself that that’s all he’ll ever want from this fucking military.
Which means that Grif does not get to go home.
Grif does not keep his promise and he does want more from this fucking military.
Grif does not stay away from the bad idea.
Grif pulls his covers up to his chin and lies in bed with his eyes wide open, listening to the
hallway echo: crack goes the glass, skitter across the floor, swearing, shuffling, the sound of
desperation. Now it's just fucking awkward, y'know? Whatwith Simmons knowing that Grif's
awake, and Grif knowing that Simmons is getting fucked with a mirror, and it's not like
there's really anyone else in this base except for the crackpot sergeant, right? Just two
schmucks who blew up a colleague in Basic together and then somehow, improbably, met up
again in Nowhere Canyon, like some kind of shitty space fate.
And, like--okay, Grif didn't think Simmons was like, a creepy guy or anything, y'know? ("My
taste in people isn't shitty --") A huge weenie, obviously, but Grif is the last person to blame
someone for having a strong sense of self-preservation. And he seemed to--what's the word-he seemed to have a sense of humor? So, like, how wrong can you go with a guy with a sense
of humor? But...
Aw, fuck it. Whatever.
Grif grabs the First Aid Kit and a ziploc of bandaids and creeps back down the hall. There's
the sounds of scratching and scraping, the sound of glass on concrete base floor. Bad ideas all
around tonight, huh?
Grif knocks on the bathroom door. Not that the door is closed or anything, Grif just doesn't
wanna stick his head in without announcing himself.
The scraping noise stops.
"Uh, so, I dunno what's going on," Grif says into the door, "and I really, super don't wanna
know, but, uh, I thought you might need some, like..."
Grif puts the First Aid Kit and the ziploc of bandaids on the ground and kicks them through
the doorway, like he's someone surrendering their gun in an action movie.
There's a silence.
"Fuck off," Simmons mutters from around the corner.
He sounds pissed.
"Yeah, alright, jackass," says Grif. "Don't damage your courtesy neurons while bashing your
forehead into any mirrors."
Grif turns away, when--"Wait! I didn't mean for you to fuck off!" Simmons says. "I--uhh."
Simmons doesn't sound any less pissed. Actually, he sounds more pissed.
Grif peeks around the corner.
Simmons has got one finger curled around the handle of the first aid kit and another finger on
the latch. He looks as pissed as he sounds, because his fingers are shaking and he very visibly
cannot get the kit open. His hands are full of blood.
"What the fuck!" Grif cries. "Are you--jesus!"
Simmons flushes a deep red, and not in an attractive way--like in a splotchy, Uncle Vernon
kinda way, honestly. "Fuck it," he snaps. "Okay, thanks, or something, but I--y'know what?
Just go away!"
Aw, now he's self-conscious. "You're bleeding all over the floor!" Grif protests.
"Yeah, I can see that! Now go away!"
"Dude, no, this is gross as hell--like, I'm no stickler for hygiene or anything, but blood? In the
communal bathroom? Christ!" Grif says. He pulls open the First Aid Kit. Simmons shrinks
away, looking embarrassed, but doesn't stop him. "What the fuck did you do, have a boxing
match with the mirror?"
"I slipped," Simmons mumbles, now obviously nervous.
"On what?"
"On," says Simmons, his voice pitching up three volume notches and an octave, "the water
you keep leaving on the bathroom floor! You, who is no 'stickler for hygiene', clearly!"
"It's fucking tile, it dries off--"
"Have you never heard of athlete's foot?!" Simmons hisses. “Mold?!”
"Use shower slippers! For fuck's sake! How is some water on the tile an excuse for shoving
both hands in a mirror?!"
"The blood on my hands is from trying to clean up the glass on the floor because I don't leave
my mess in the bathroom for everyone to suffer from like some people!"
"Don't insult me when I'm saving your ass!" Grif rips open a bandaid and holds it out.
Simmons is now moving away.
"You big fucking baby," Grif says. "Give me your goddamn hand."
"I--I--" Simmons stammers. "No! We have to clean the wound--"
"Oh, shit," Grif whispers, because he totally forgot about all the glass that’s probably in
Simmons’s hand, whoopsie-daisies. "Okay, fine, let's do that. Sink's right here." Grif stands
and reaches for the sink.
"Fuck off," Simmons says.
Grif raises his eyebrows.
"For real this time," Simmons says. Angrily, now. Eyes narrow and beady and mean.
Grif snorts. He'd fucking laugh, actually, if he wasn't so disgusted. This piece of shit, goodytwo-shoes, brown-nosing son of a bitch, ready to snitch and tattle-tale and throw anyone he
can under the bus, and here Grif is, doing him a fucking favor at two-god-damn-thirty-AM,
and he's going to be small and spiteful. Okay--yeah, okay. Grif can tell when he's not wanted.
Grif can tell when it's no great loss to not be wanted.
"Have it your way," Grif says. "Stay here with your band-aids you can't put on, and the glass
you can't clean up, and the water you can't soak up, and blood all over your hands and all
over your face, too."
Simmons jumps and touches a hand to his face.
"Because apparently you decided to stick your face in the mirror, too--"
Grif freezes. Simmons freezes.
As plain as day, Grif realizes: the wound on Simmons's mid-twenties-year-old face is a zit.
A pimple.
A giant, pustule-filled pizza-face acne wart that is bleeding because it got popped.
Grif puts it together midsentence:
"--because you were holding your face two inches from the mirror because you had to look
that close to the mirror because you were popping a zit," Grif says aloud before he can think.
Simmons shoots to his feet. "WHAT? UHHHH, NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT, MY SKIN IS
GREAT AND COMPLETELY CLEAR AND I'VE NEVER HAD A SINGLE PIMPLE IN
MY WHOLE LIFE--"
"Holy shit you were popping a zit!" Grif cries. "Oh, this is fucking golden--I thought you
were like, I dunno, having an emo Batman moment where you brood into the mirror and have
a self-hate session like a cave-dwelling dungeons-and-dragons-playing nerdlord--"
"I--what--no, that's, uh, I would never do either one of those things but definitely not the first
one because I never have pimples--"
"You'd really rather me believe you were brooding into a mirror and then broke it like a twoyear-old child with anger management issues than you having a teeny-tiny zit," Grif says.
Simmons hesitates.
"Simmons. C'mon."
Simmons pulls himself to his full height. Extends one long, bloody finger at Grif's nose. "I do
not have zits," he declares.
Simmons has effectively just declared to Grif that he's had a whole lifetime of zits and would
rather be known as a cave-dwelling nerdlord than let anyone know one Real Shameful Thing
about himself. Grif covers his hand over his shit-eating grin.
"And if anyone asks," Simmons continues, even more irritably and snootily, "you will take
what you saw here to the grave."
Grif crosses his arms. "Says fucking who?"
Simmons hesitates. "My breakfast rations for the next two weeks says so."
Grif is unamused. Grif is earning a reputation for being easily bribed with food because Grif
happens to like food; the truth is, Grif is only easily bribed with opportunity, which food may
occasionally serve in lieu of. But Grif is only a fucking idiot ninety-nine percent of the time,
and he knows when being underestimated serves him better than being overestimated (which
is almost always), so this reputation serves him just fine.
"Oh, okay, then," says Grif. "Next time someone asks me to tell you all about your deep
secret man feelings, I'll tell them that you break mirrors and cry in the middle of the night."
"No. Fuck off. Come up with else."
"Sorry, I have no imagination," says Grif.
"Okay, if someone asks what I was doing in the bathroom in the middle of the night, just tell
them--"
"Sorry, I don't have long-term memory either," says Grif.
Simmons opens his mouth. Shuts it. Grits his teeth in visible irritation.
"One or the other, man," Grif says cheerfully. "Either you've got a singular, lonely pimple, or
you're a cave-dwelling DnD-playing nerdlord who breaks mirrors in the middle of the night
while crying."
Simmons groans. Rubs the unbloody parts of his forearm over his face in exasperation.
(Probably why he gets pimples.)
"No pimples," says Simmons at last.
"You got it, Nerdlord."
"Don't call me that."
"You got it, Zitlord."
"Nerdlord is fine."
For a moment, Grif stares at Simmons. Simmons stares at Grif. Simmons's eyes is twitching
with the effort of not laughing like a guilty teenager.
Grif says, with a completely straight face: "So is Nerdlord going to clean the glass out of his
hands or what?"
Simmons starts sniggering. It's cute enough that Grif doesn't mind, so much, that Simmons
had been a rude little shithead not two minutes ahead, and helps Simmons with the band-aids
with minimal complaint. Simmons does not say thank you.
Simmons comes out the single-stalled bathroom in Valhalla just as Grif is walking down the
hallway, and his eyes are red. He looks a bit like he’s been crying--his eyes are red, his face
puffy and swollen--but Grif knows that he wasn’t.
Simmons looks up and their eyes meet. Simmons freezes.
Are you okay? Grif doesn’t ask.
Simmons grimaces. Looks away. Squares his shoulders and walks right past.
If Grif remembers right, they put one band-aid across the right palm, one band-aid around the
left index, and one band-aid around the left pinkie. There were a pair of calluses, one on the
ring knuckle, one between the ring finger and pinkie, around which Grif put no bandages
because he didn’t think anything of them and didn’t know anything about Russel’s sign and
didn't think he'd ever have to.
Simmons has a metal left arm, nowadays. Grif has Simmons's left hand--y'know, the one
Simmons shoved through a mirror, and then cut off entirely to save Grif's entire left side of
his body? There’s one scar around the left index and one scar around the left pinkie. Hard and
lumpy and patchwork and rushed, as scars do.
At the time, he hadn’t really thought that the scars and calluses would look so similar.
Letter Day, pt. 3
Chapter Summary
"Condensed milk. And breadcrumbs. And bacon. And peas."
Grif goes to Blue Base one day to escape Simmons. He walks through the door and finds
none other than Simmons making Caboose mac and cheese.
For God’s sake--can Grif never escape this motherfucker?
“You want me to put what in the macaroni?” Simmons asks.
“Condensed milk. And breadcrumbs,” says Caboose. He’s got his helmet off and is flipping
through pages. There’s open envelopes sitting on the table. “And bacon. And peas.”
“Peas? Why?” Simmons says, disgusted.
“It’s how my sisters got me to eat my vegetables.”
“Peas are a starch,” Simmons mutters, like peas did him a personal wrong. “They’re just tiny
potatoes in disguise, and potatoes are just pasta in disguise, and pasta is just bread, and bread
is just a waste of calories… No fats for brain health, no protein for muscle growth…”
“Peas are friendly and round and roll on your plate,” Caboose says, in the tone of voice that
implies that Caboose is two inches from becoming definitively unfriendly for the defense of
peas.
Simmons, always a head for danger, scowls, but takes down an ancient can of peas from the
shelf. “And you’re sure you want breadcrumbs?” he asks, sounding pained.
“I don’t think you’re very good at making mac and cheese,” Caboose says.
“You can’t just eat nothing —”
“Lieutenant Cupcake makes me Poptarts.”
Simmons mutters under his breath again.
“And if you won’t make mac and cheese right, maybe you should go back to Red Base,”
Caboose says testily. “Or let Gruf cook.”
Simmons whips around. Ah, fuck. Busted. Caught staring at Simmons flailing in the
domestic kitchen like a fucking creeper.
But Simmons doesn’t look pissed--actually, he looks relieved. “Thank god,” he says, shoving
the hodgepodge of kitchen equipment on the counter and sidling up to Grif. Close.
Real close.
“This is like the first time he’s talked to anyone but Donut since we talked to him two weeks
ago, and I’m fucking it up,” Simmons hisses.
Simmons’s arm is touching Grif’s arm.
“Do something!” Simmons whispers.
Oh shit, Simmons’s shoulder is touching Grif’s shoulder. Wait, no, be cool, Grif’s cool, it
doesn’t matter anyway, why would shoulders rubbing matter to Grif anyway? Totally
unimportant, unremarkable, Grif doesn’t care at all!
“Grif!” Simmons says.
“Uhhh,” says Grif. (Smooth.)
“For god’s sake, I’m not socially competent enough for this!”
Simmons’s face is really really close to Grif’s. Oh fuck. Oh Jesus. Look at his eyes and not at
his lips. Wait no he’s looking at Grif’s eyes don’t look at his eyes then it just gets weird and
like, soul-gazey-bullshit. Then where is he supposed to look—
Caboose sighs and picks up his helmet, dumps a bunch of letters from the table into it, and
makes to leave.
“--Hey!” Grif says. “Hang on—”
“No, thank you,” says Caboose.
Now, it’s none of Grif’s business what Caboose does. Grif has been long under the
impression that sometimes, the greatest form of respect is just leaving other people god damn
alone, y’know? Don’t fucking hover --what’re you, a Pelican? Doesn’t work out for anyone
when you care too much.
Grif watches Caboose disappear into another room. The door closes and the lock turns.
“Damn,” Grif mutters, despite himself.
Simmons gives a little huff. Screws up his nose like he’s just smelled something foul.
Glances at Grif, who tries his motherfucking best to get his head on goddamn straight and do
the Manly Repressed Communication Head Nod and stop thinking about why Simmons is
standing close enough to literally rub elbows with him. For god’s sake, Grif, Caboose’s
friend is fucking dead; stop looking at Simmons’s jawline, you useless horny fuck!
Wait, no, he didn’t say horny. Scratch that. Forget he mentioned that. Unthink it. Unthink it--
“Caboose is pretty boring nowadays,” Simmons says, sounding at a loss for anything else to
say.
“That's the worst attempt at sympathy I've ever heard,” Grif says. "And nonetheless, I'm
proud of you for getting your head out of your ass and having a thought about someone other
than yourself."
“You don’t have to sound so shocked ,” Simmons sniffs, like an uppity middle-aged haole
woman. “I know we’re doing our best.”
“Who are you?” Grif says, genuinely in disbelief. “First you’re telling Sarge to fuck off, now
you’re being nice ? Empathetic ?”
“I never said your best isn’t perennially disappointing and underachieving,” Simmons says.
“There we go. Don’t scare me like that,” Grif says. “I’m just a simple man who wants things
to stay the same.”
Both of them look at the door Caboose locked. (Talk about shit changing, huh?)
“Psst,” Simmons whispers. “Are you gonna go fix it?”
“ Me ?” Grif says. “Why would I go fix it?”
“Don’t you want things to stay the same?”
No, he won’t be bamboozled into doing more work than he has to, even if Grif actually wants
to do the work. Especially if Grif wants to do the work, because nothing's more suspicious
than Grif being motivated. "I also want to expend as little effort as possible," Grif says
suspiciously. "Why don't you go fix it?"
“First off, I tried. Second off,” Simmons says in his snotty Granger-voice, “it’s Sarge’s job to
come up with something stupid, Donut’s job to do something stupid, Caboose’s job to be
something stupid, my job to be irritated with the something stupid, and your job to mock the
shit out of something stupid.”
“If Caboose’s job is to be stupid, why would I go in there and mock him? How would that fix
anything?”
“I don’t know!” Simmons complains. “Isn’t laughter the best medicine or whatever the fuck
—isn't that how humor works?"
“Not that kind of humor!”
“It's not my job to come up with the ideas!” Simmons wails. “That’s Sarge’s job!”
“Yeah, but it’s also your job to analyze how fucking stupid it is and then suggest something
slightly less stupid!” Grif says.
“False,” says Simmons. “I make an exception of analyzing myself. If I critiqued myself for
everything stupid I did, I’d be in a constant state of paralysis.”
Grif covers his mouth. “Incredible,” he says. “This honestly explains everything I’ve ever
known about you.”
“I can still hear you!” Caboose calls through the door.
“Does this mean you’ll come out now?” Grif calls back.
“Go away!”
“But humor solves everything! And there’s nothing funnier than Simmons being un-selfaware!”
“Go! Away!”
“Let’s try a joke at Grif’s expense now,” Simmons says.
“Oh, right, because we’ve never done that before,” Grif mutters.
“Go!” Caboose yells. “ Away !”
“I’m eating your mac and cheese then!” Grif yells back.
“It doesn’t even have any peas!”
“And you were going to inhale the mac and cheese anyway,” says Simmons.
They both look expectantly at the door.
“Making fun of Grif won’t make me come out either!” comes Caboose’s voice.
“Blues suck so much ass,” Simmons mutters.
There’s a heavy thud. The metal door rattles in its frame. Ah, there it is: the end of Caboose’s
patience for the day.
Grif leans over to Simmons. “Let’s try again some other time.”
“We can bring the Nat Geo,” Simmons says.
They beat a hasty retreat back to Red Base. Man, warfare in Valhalla just ain’t like it was
back at Blood Gulch.
Shovel Talk
Chapter Summary
“I’m in the closet,” Simmons says.
Chapter Notes
the long awaited return of really shitty spanish!! because lopez is what yall are waiting
on the edge of ur seats for. shhh. it's ok. i know. i gotchu
Simmons is sitting on the railing of the roof. Which Grif hates; always makes him nervous
when people sit too close to edges with a long ways to fall. He thinks falling might be one of
the worst ways to die. He heard that you regret it before you hit the ground.
“The fuck are you doing up there?” Grif yells.
“Jerking off to sandstone gradients,” Simmons yells back.
“Well, do it inside, you fucking exhibitionist!”
Simmons does not do it inside. Grif goes up there to drag him off the railing himself.
Simmons sits on the roof and bounces one leg and crosses his arms and glares at the wall.
“What is it now, you big baby,” Grif says.
“The fuck makes you think there’s anything? It’s nothing. Leave it alone.”
He’s lying, Grif’s gut says. “Whatever you say,” says Grif.
Simmons glares. “Just bored. Slacking off is boring,” Simmons says.
He’s still lying, Grif’s gut says. Boredom gets him wound up, but not this wound up.
“Everything is boring,” says Grif. “We’re at a base in the middle of nowhere with nothing to
do.”
“Everything is more boring than usual.”
Lying, lying, lying. It’s something else.
“You gotta make your own fun,” says Grif. “Creativity. Imagination. Clever repurposing of
your resources. Can’t just rely on Sarge to tell you what to do. Be free, Simmons.”
“Freedom is boring.”
Grif scowls. “Having an existential breakdown, are you?”
“We ruined the old team dynamic,” Simmons says.
“The old team dynamic’s been ruined for ages,” Grif says. “Donut was missing for like,
almost two years, and Tucker’s still gone. Church is binary code in a three-pronged dildo.
Also, the old team dynamic sucked ass.”
“We can’t not have a kiss-ass on Red Team,” Simmons mutters. “Nothing’s getting done.”
“There’s nothing to be done.”
Simmons sits up. “Grif,” he says.
“No,” says Grif.
“You haven’t even heard what it is, yet.”
“I don’t want to do it,” says Grif.
Simmons groans and goes back to bouncing his leg and fiddling with his fingers.
Now--look--there’s zero way that Simmons would ever win a verbal argument against Grif,
because Simmons couldn’t argue his way out of a wet paper bag, and also routinely loses
arguments with himself. Simmons wins arguments only when he pulls out the teeth--the very
serious, very un-funny and un-friendly teeth. The kind of teeth that end with both of them
licking their wounds and pretending they don’t live in the same building for the next week.
Simmons hasn’t won an argument in a long, long time. On one hand, Grif likes it that way.
On the other hand, with Simmons looking like he's going to bounce off the roof...
“Okay,” Grif sighs. “What is it?”
Simmons’s Great and Wonderful Idea is to tell Sarge to get Donut back, so that Donut can be
the New Resident Kiss-ass. Theoretically, this is a good idea--except that the person who
goes to propose the idea will most certainly be the person most at risk of being roped into
becoming New Resident Kiss-ass in the steamroller way that Sarge does. “Therefore,”
Simmons had concluded, “ you should do it.”
Which is why Grif is now doing it. Fuck him.
Sarge is in the holoroom, working on that stupid new jeep that doesn’t actually work because
it emps its own damn self every time it fires. (How did the phrase go—people creating in
their own image, or something like that…?) Grif, reluctantly, stations himself in plain view
on one of the plastic kitchen chairs, like he’s some kind of bait, slathering himself in
barbecue sauce and posing on the grill for the Big Bad CO to come and roast him alive
because Grif is too much of a dumbass to turn down Simmons for some reason Grif isn’t
examining very closely.
“I’m in the closet,” Simmons says.
Grif chokes. “Uh—uh, you are?”
Simmons pauses in the process of holding the actual, literal hallway closet open. “Yeah?” he
says. “So I can eavesdrop on the conversation to hear how it's going?”
“Right,” says Grif. “Right. Closet. Literal closet.”
Simmons looks at him funny, like he can’t fathom what Grif might have heard instead, even
as a high red color spreads across his neck and cheeks. (For fuck’s sake, how many mixed
signals can one man give off?)
Lopez chooses the moment to clatter through the door, glancing irritably at both of them,
which means Sarge will come up any second. Grif sighs. Simmons shuts the door. Grif leans
back in the kitchen chair and acts casual.
Lopez stops, looks around, and says, “Oh, esto será bueno (Oh, this will be good).”
“Lopez, you’re blocking the door!” Sarge’s voice begins, before Sarge stops dead in the
doorway and nods at Grif. Grif hesitates.
“Realmente bueno (Really good),” Lopez says.
Now, let’s get one thing straight: Grif does not intend to bring any problem to Sarge. He does
not intend to tell Sarge jack shit. He does not intend to put himself in any position in which
he could be roped, accidentally or not, into doing anything he has not thought of doing
himself for his own reasons and benefits; he does not intend to live under any banner but the
one he chose. He does intend to run rings around Sarge until both Sarge and Simmons
(eavesdropping from his hetero-closet) forget that they ever wanted to actually have a
functioning task force capable of killing Caboose. Grif isn't taking the chances that anyone
might get shot or killed, especially under Sarge's command, and Sarge's command does not
need to be amplified with any new second-in-kiss-assery.
Grif’s got this. He’s done it before and he can do it again. He nods and says, “Hey, Sarge…”
“We need to talk,” Sarge says.
Grif knows in a single instant that he’s completely, totally, and utterly boned. He would
wonder why he keeps ending up in these situations but, alas, he knows exactly why, and it’s
because he is getting hoisted by his own petard. His lies are catching up with him. Oh, god,
he knew it was only a matter of time, but not like this. Anything death is preferable than
having An Emotional Talk.
“Donut did it! I don't know what it is but he did it,” Grif says.
Sarge takes off his helmet and sits at the kitchen table. He clears his throat and tries to not
look nervous.
Grif is super ultra mega boned.
“Private Grif,” Sarge begins. “I’ve been thinking…”
“Well, uh! I’ve just remember that I have to, uh, assist, uh, Simmons…” Grif says, just as he
realizes that Simmons is not the person to be bringing up right now, particularly since
Simmons was eavesdropping on Grif trying to get out of the conversation Simmons had put
him up to—oh, hell, shit, god fucking damn—
“Actually, this is about Simmons,” Sarge says.
Lopez begins snickering. Grif would punch him if he wasn’t busy freaking out. Grif clears his
throat and tries again: “Wh-wh-what could there, ahahaha, possibly be to say about Sim—”
“Look—I don’t trust you, Grif,” Sarge interrupts.
Okay, that’s nothing new.
“But!” Sarge says. “I have eyes! And though it may be old and crusty and largely covered in
gasoline and motor oil, I have a heart, too!”
Grif is actually sweating bullets, because for fuck’s sake, Sarge is trying to have an emotional
talk about a fake relationship that Grif has been having with Simmons while Simmons is
literally eavesdropping ten feet away--Grif is fucked on every level, a beautiful parfait of
getting fucked, this cannot be happening to him. “Sarge,” Grif says, shakily, “I think you
need to stop right th—”
“AND I JUST WANT TO SAY,” Sarge continues, “that I—may not trust you, and by god, it’s
hard having to run this team without Simmons’s constant validation of my leadership and
tactical decisions, and I will forever resent you for having seduced that away with your—
your— whatever wiles you have—”
“SARGE—”
Sarge slams a fist on the table. “Dammit, Grif, stop interrupting! I need you to hear this!
Although I may never understand what Simmons sees in your oversized and repellent
carcass, and I may never forgive you for having undermined my leadership by taking away
my most vocal support, and I may never trust you and your intentions—by god, Grif, don’t
you see this is an awful idea?”
Grif freezes. Every thought flies out of his head.
“An awful idea?” Grif echoes in disbelief. Him, sleeping with Simmons—such an awful idea
that Sarge, Professional Engineer Of Awful Ideas, is telling him that it’s an awful idea? Like
it’s Sarge’s fucking business what Grif and Simmons do? Like he’s got any place to judge
this--this--this thing that isn’t even happening, which Grif absolutely isn’t going to get
defensive about because it’s not happening anyway, remember, don’t lose your cool, Grif-Sarge crosses his arms. “Of course it's an awful idea! wWhich is why I've taken it upon
myself to inform you—”
“Fuck off!” Grif snaps. “Neither of us asked for your god damn opinion!”
“Let me finish!” Sarge snaps right back.
“Este es el mejor dia de mi vida (This is the best day of my life),” Lopez says.
Grif chucks his proverbial cool out the window.
“Hell no,” he says, standing up from his chair so fast it nearly topples over. “I’ve tolerated a
whole lot of bullshit from you over the years, but I’m a hundred percent sure that what
Simmons and I do is none of your concern and that you have no place telling us what’s a
good—”
“If you’re going to do an awful idea,” Sarge shouts over Grif’s head, “you have to do it with
gusto!”
“--or bad idea, we’re going to do whatever the hell we—”
Grif stops. Blinks.
“What?” he says.
“You have to give the awful idea heart and passion!” Sarge says, holding up one finger like a
professor in a lecture hall. “The trick to preventing an awful idea from backfiring is to do it
with everything you’ve got! Go the full mile! Bet everything you own!”
Grif is almost speechless. “Is this your idea of… Are you giving me advice?”
Sarge harrumphs. Puts his hands on his hips and holds his head high. “I,” he announces, “am
giving you my blessing .”
“WHAT part of that,” Grif says, “was your BLESSING?”
“You’re not listening, numbnuts! I said it’s an awful idea!”
Grif throws up his hands. “I am listening, and I’m telling you that’s not a blessing! That’s the
opposite of a blessing!”
“Dammit, Grif, I knew you were slow, but I didn’t think you were this slow! This is Red
Team,” Sarge says, speaking slowly, as if to an idiot. “Red Team doesn’t do good ideas. A
good idea would be to leave it at a one-night stand so you can pick up your crushed feelings
alone and in the dark like true men! The best idea would be cut this thing off with Simmons
before you even get that far! But no—the true Red Team life, the true lifeblood of the Red
Army, is to choose the worst idea you can think of, the idea that should have been smothered
in the cradle and never seen the light of day, the idea with the worst risk and the best reward
and the nearly-impossible odds of ever actually succeeding--choose that big bad son of a
bitch, then pull it off.”
“My god,” Grif whispers. “This explains everything about you.”
“And—as I said—I may not trust you, I may not like you, I may not trust these odds or this
plan or this idea, but I can acknowledge a foolhardy, harebrained, trueblooded Red scheme
when I see one,” Sarge says. “Contrary to the usual one-night-stand, you’re playing for
hearts, Private Grif! Both your own and Private Simmons’s! Incredible odds, considering that
as of a month ago, I didn’t even think you had a heart in that whale blubber chest of yours!”
Grif says, “I don’t even know what part of this to respond to—”
Sarge points one gloved finger at Grif. His eyes are pinched, his mouth flat with distaste, but
his expression is oddly still. His finger doesn’t waver. The lightbulb overhead flickers out.
“So do not,” Sarge says, “fuck it up.”
The light flicks back on, buzzing merrily. Sarge leans away.
“Which you will, of course, by virtue of being yourself,” Sarge declares. “Anything less
would be out of character! So it’s only a matter of time before this crashes and burns.”
Grif suddenly remembers why he hates Sarge. Vehemently and viscerally. “Oh yeah? Fuck
you too, old man,” he sneers.
“No, thank you,” says Sarge neatly.
“That’s—that’s not what I—! ”
“Good luck, Private Grif!” Sarge says, scoops up his helmet and, apparently self-satisfied in
having given whatever the fuck that talk just was, leaves without another word.
Grif stands there, absolutely seething. What the fuck? What's Sarge's problem? Why does he
need to butt his head into everything that doesn't concern him? Why does he feel the need to
ruin things going perfectly well without him?! Why can't he just be—not infuriating for once
—?!
“Dios, ojalá pudiera comer palomitas de maíz (God, I wish I could eat popcorn),” Lopez
sighs. “Como una maldita livre d’amour (This is just like a shitty romance novel).”
“Whatever, Lopez,” Grif snaps without thinking.
“Lo que sea que digas, idiota. Ya has cavado tu propia tumba (Doesn’t matter what you say,
dumbfuck. You’ve already dug your own grave),” Lopez says.
And then the closet door cracks open, and Simmons’s head pokes out. Grif, suddenly,
remembers what he was supposed to be doing. And that Simmons has been in the closet
listening to the whole conversation.
Grif stares at him. Simmons stares at Grif.
“Wow,” Simmons says. “That conversation didn’t go as planned at all.”
Lopez cackles in Spanish.
Heterosexual Olympics
Chapter Summary
"Who's gonna beat you up for being gay--Donut?"
Grif’s brain does a rewind of everything Sarge just said. What’s damning? What can he play
off? How much more bullshit can he come up with to layer on his bullshit cake to prevent the
whole thing from falling apart? “Playing for hearts”--isn’t there a card game called Hearts?
Boom. Lie number one. “Giving you my blessing”--harder, but uhh, maybe he could say it’s a
religious thing…? Sarge recently converted to Pantheism? Sarge is leaving Valhalla to join a
Panite commune run by religious beach dwarves? Right, okay, that sounds plausible, lie
number two.
A good idea would be to leave it at a one-night stand so you can pick up your crushed
feelings alone and in the dark like true men --aw, fuck, Sarge said that out loud, didn’t he?
No, it's--it's still salvageable, Grif can do this, he's gotta be able to or else-“I can explain,” Grif says. Because the best solution is to just start talking and see what
happens, right?
“I just,” Simmons says, sounding faint. “I had no idea, you know?”
Lopez is lounging on the kitchen chair and drinking motor oil through a straw.
Simmons comes out of the closet (no, not that way, stop it, brain ) and stands, hands hanging
awkwardly at his sides, in the middle of the hallway. He looks… lost. Oh, shit, Grif did that.
“No, I, c’mon,” says Grif, feeling like he’s just kicked a dog. “It’s not… as bad as it sounds?”
Simmons jerks to attention. “Of course it’s as bad as it sounds!” he snaps. “Sarge thinks I’m
sleeping with you !”
It’s the same offended, snooty, condescending tone that Simmons always uses--the one that
Grif should have hardened himself to a long time ago--but for some reason, it feels like the
clean slide of a knife right through the armor plates. He feels like he can’t breathe. Fuck,
what’s wrong with Grif now ? (Why can’t he stop expecting Simmons to be nice? What the
fuck was he expecting from Simmons?)
"Un golpe devastador (A devastating blow)," Lopez narrates. "¿Cómo se recuperarán? (How
will they ever recover?)"
“You okay?” Simmons asks suspiciously.
“Who, me?” Grif says, a little bitterly. (Christ, Private Grif, what’s your damage ?) “Yeah,
I’m fine. Course I’m fine. 'm always fine.”
The fuck does Simmons care? Grif wants this conversation to be over. Can it be over yet?
Can Grif go lie down in bed and turn the lights off and stare at the wall for a few hours yet?
“Hey, I’m just trying to be considerate, okay?” Simmons says, a little defensively. “He
assumed you’re fucking me, too.”
"Un error crítico del equipo visitante (A critical mistake from the away team)," Lopez
whispers.
“I,” Grif begins.
Grif drags his brain out of the tar pit, because he’s not out of the fire yet and right now he has
to function, and does a very quick recalculation from Simmons’s point of view: Simmons
makes gay jokes in Grif’s room. Sarge overhears. Simmons doesn’t see any of Grif’s flirting.
Three weeks later, Simmons overhears Sarge lecturing Grif over Simmons’s virginal honor,
with Grif confused and defensive and upset. Therefore:
Grif raises one finger. Points it directly at Simmons.
“Correct,” says Grif with conviction. “I’m the victim here.”
“Y ahora vemos una nueva jugada audaz de Private Grif (And now we see a bold new play
from Private Grif),” Lopez narrates.
Simmons starts looking uncomfortable. “Um, well… Look, I tried to correct it, and…”
Grif shakes his head. He thinks he feels smug, but his teeth are clenched. “Avoiding the
blame for your actions,” Grif tsks. “Simmons. You know that the only reason he thinks we’re
banging—”
(Simmons’s face turns a blotchy red.)
“--is because you couldn’t stop talking about your massive hard-on for me at the top of your
lungs—”
“I wasn’t talking about my hard-on for you!”
Grif pauses. “Okay, uh, was that bad wording or did you mean to imply that you actually do
have a hard-on for me that you’re not talking—”
“NO TALKING AND NO HARD-ON. AND THIS ISN’T…”
Simmons stops. Inflates with all the words he’s trying to say. Deflates, slowly, with
acceptance.
“Okay,” he says. “The fact that Sarge thinks we’re… we’re together, might be kind of
because of what I said.”
Grif nearly falls to his knees and bursts into derisive laughter. Holy shit. Holy shit . Did he
just dodge the bullet of a lifetime . Oh, praise the Lord and Jesus and Korean Baptist Jesus
from down the street, he’s just managed three weeks of doing no work purely by staring
inappropriately at Simmons’s ass and now he’s gotten Simmons thinking that Grif had
nothing to do with Sarge’s sudden conviction that Grif and Simmons are playing grab-ass in
the Warthog’s back seat at all hours of the day so now Simmons won’t have a gay panic and
freak out and never speak to Grif again and now they can go back to being friendly straight
friends who never have to worry that their copious fake-relationship lies to get out of work
will bite them in the ass. Fuck. YES.
Grif should maybe feel a little bad about leading Simmons around the blame game by the
nose but, for whatever reason, he really, really can't muster up the sympathy.
“Don’t look at me like that! I don’t know what to do!” Simmons cries. He’s started wringing
his hands like a middle-class housewife. Grif's sympathy rolls over and drags itself back out
of the grave. No, this is is bullshit, Grif needs to stop forgiving this asshole for everything he
does; if Grif doesn't hold Simmons accountable, who will?
“Hmm, yeah,” says Grif, stepping viciously on that twinge of weakness, “but considering
that awful, awful situation is entirely your fault, I think that you should probably, y’know, do
the responsible thing and fix it." He crosses his arms. "Alone. And by yourself.”
“I tried! Okay, I tried to set the record straight, I didn’t want him assuming that you’re-you’re--gay, or something, not that I, not that I have a problem with gay people, I know
plenty of gay people, like whole entire friends who were real people who were gay…”
“Uh-huh,” says Grif.
Simmons throws up his hands. “I thought he’d forget about it! Okay?! I figured that since he
never brought it up again, he’d just figured that it was one of our stupid jokes gone wrong!
Which it was !”
Yep, right, just a stupid joke gone wrong. Because it’s the end of the goddamn fucking world
if Simmons and Grif were to ever, you know, be involved like that. Yep. It’d be fucking
awful. “Uh-huh,” says Grif, with that odd, bitter note in his voice that he doesn’t know
anything about.
“Can you stop being mad at me?!” Simmons says. Wow, he sounds panicked. “I’ll try and fix
it, okay?! I’d have already done it if I knew! I just--don’t know how!”
“Hey, here’s a fucking idea,” says Grif. Then he swallows real hard on his tongue, because
that came out real nasty, and there’s only room enough in this base for one passive-aggressive
bitch. “You ever wonder why Sarge hasn’t been riding our asses these last couple weeks?”
Simmons hesitates. “Because we’re not a real military and he can’t actually give us orders?”
Simmons says, flatly.
"Cristo y Jesús (Christ and Jesus)," Lopez mutters.
“No, dumbshit,” says Grif. “Well, okay, that too. But it’s because he thinks we have gay
cooties. And he doesn’t wanna walk in on any weird-ass PDA shit, so he’s avoiding us like he
thinks we’re the ultimate Schrodinger’s trap of potentially having got our hands down each
others’ pants whenever he wants to talk to us, and he doesn’t wanna risk it.”
There’s a silence.
There’s a longer silence.
Grif isn’t even sure if Simmons is breathing, but hell if he’s gonna check.
Lopez slurps his motor oil.
“Okay, Lopez, can you fucking leave?” Grif snaps at Lopez.
“Estoy esperando el choque y la quemadura (I'm waiting for the crash and burn),” says
Lopez. "Quema que resulta que los cabrones son malos incluso en eso (But it turns out you
fuckers are bad at even that)."
Grif grabs Lopez by the forearm and drags him out of the kitchen and throws him into the
hallway and would slam the door if there was one but, alas, there is none. He glares at Lopez
until Lopez, snickering, mopes away into Sarge's room.
“Are you telling me,” Simmons says, slowly, “that being mistaken for being in a gay
relationship with you is… a good thing?”
Grif dusts off his hands, which aren't actually dusty but feels like the thing to do after
throwing your team's annoying monolingual robot out of the kitchen. “Gee, it could be,” says
Grif, still a tad grumpily.
“Not a reputation-destroyer that will get my ass beat in the locker room?” Simmons asks.
“What reputation? What locker room? Who’s gonna beat you up for being gay-- Donut ?”
"You don't know that he wouldn't!"
"It's Donut, Simmons!"
"But it's weird, and--and, y'know, uh, disingenuous, like false advertising or something,
and it, it changes... things...?"
"Changes what?" Grif snaps, because he's rapidly losing patience for this thing that Simmons
can't even put words to.
Simmons gesticulates. Now even he looks irritated with his own bullshit. “Are you just
saying this so I don’t feel bad for making shit weird?!” Simmons says instead.
“Make what weird?!” Grif retorts, and fires back (as if quoting Private Jackson from all those
years ago): “Nothing’s weird if you’re actually straight! Straight dudes can do whatever the
fuck they want and it’s never weird!”
Simmons stands bolt upright.
“Well, that’s--that’s good!” Simmons says. “Because I am straight! Very straight! Super
duper straight!”
“Yeah?!” says Grif. “Good for you! So am I!”
“Yeah?!”
“Yeah!”
“Great!” says Simmons. “So I guess we’ll just--keep it up!”
“Yeah, I guess we’ll—”
Grif stops.
“...We'll what?” he says.
“Of course!” says Simmons. He looks like he’s physically steeling himself, and that red color
is creeping up his neck again, but yeah, he--he doesn’t look like he’s fucking around. “It’s
like a high-level slacking technique, right? Putting on a show to get away with the most
amount of profit. And it’s all okay, because I'd never ever have an unnecessary neurotic
obsession about my reputation, and if we pull it off, it just-- proves how straight we are!”
Grif hesitates. Okay, something definitely feels off with this logic, but? Does he really have
any other options? “...Yyyyyyyes? That… makes sense…? Wait, no, pkay, let me get this
straight,” says Grif. “We’re going to feed Sarge’s suspicions about our illicit horny gay
honeymoon to… get out of work… which is a good thing because we get to, y’know, get out
of work, but we’re also going to do to prove… how… straight we are…?”
“Yes,” says Simmons, with a remarkable level of confidence for someone doing a feat of
mental gymnastics that Grif had previously thought impossible.
“So,” Grif says, slowly, “we’ll physically affectionate, purposefully displaying PDA to make
everyone awkward, probably gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes, possibly even holding
hands, calling each other our usual pet names and having in-jokes, and generally spending
most of our time with each other."
“Yes,” says Simmons.
“And this makes us straight,” says Grif.
“Yes,” says Simmons.
Grif thinks about this.
“This... makes sense?” says Grif.
“Yes, it does,” says Simmons.
“...It does?” says Grif.
“Yes,” says Simmons.
“Yes?” says Grif.
And then Simmons crosses the room and shoves his hand in Grif’s hand and holds it hard,
wraps his fingers all the way around Grif’s palm like he’s daring Grif to pull away, and looks
Grif in the eyes. He nods vigorously. “Because we’re straight,” he says again, like he’s
proving a point.
Simmons’s grip is firm around his hand. Grif can feel calluses on the webbing between his
fingers. Grif looks up at Simmons’s irritated, sharp-eyed glare, feels his pulse thudding in his
ears. For some reason, being straight feels a lot like wanting to get his other arm around
Simmons's waist and slide his hand into Simmons's back pocket if he'd let him.
“Right. Yes. Because we’re very, very straight,” Grif says firmly.
Heterosexuality is so complicated.
Late Examples
Chapter Summary
“Then don’t ask. Like, duh.”
Chapter Notes
hello i try not to have long a/n but this chapter deserves some preface:
1. i am here to posit unfriendly/unpopular grif sibling ideas! i know some of y’all have
awesome grifsib headcanons and they’re all awesome and i love them and i might even
use them in another fic—but those headcanons are not in this one
2. tucker mentions that grif had a gf—yknow, the one “with a dick”? that's the character
being referenced
3. warning for usage of the word “trannie” and other shitty transphobic and homophobic
talk, but not in relation to grif's ex-gf
4. also general warning for donnie like, as a whole human being, because i tried to
recreate as faithfully as possible the raw power of the real person he's based off of lmao
5. here's a flash index of terms related to living in hawaii you might like to know:
"haole" = white person; "slippers" = flip flops; "mainland" = refers to the 48 continent
states in the US; "Longs" = common convenience story similar to CVS; pidgin = local
creole slang/amalgamation of hawaiian+japanese+tagalog+korean+buncha other shit
that happened during plantation days and is usually not spoken by white people unless
theyre douchebags trying to be cool; "micros" = micronesians; Iz = Israel
Kamakawiwoʻole, who was both a wonderful singer and a native hawaiian sovereignty
activist, may he rest in power
6. thank u to the kind and lovely aryashi for beta. ilu dear!!!!!
Grif goes to bed that night and thanks all his lucky stars that he’s not in love with Simmons.
Because that, no matter what the value judgment of Grif and Simmons dating would be—
yeah, no, being in love with Simmons would be Real Bad. You can inherit the ways you love
people, like you can inherit a tendency towards OCD, or a bad tendency to drink, or a
malignant, vicious heart disease.
Take, for example, the man living in the basement of the Makiki District Park community
library, whom Dex would have gladly avoided meeting if Kai hadn’t seen him and dragged
the haole shirtless shithead over to where Dex was trying to fix his bike chain. Trapped
without any escape, as Kai tends to coincidentally capitalize upon without fail. A real
entrepreneur in the making, skeeving deals off her own brother.
“Hey, Dex! I didn’t know you were here today!” she says, quite brightly. “Oh, right, duh, I
haven’t introduced you—Dex, this is Donnie!”
“Donnie” is sunburnt and covered in grey chest hairs. His hair is frizzy from the beach and
just as steel grey as his chest. His wide lips look fleshy and wrinkled, and are melting
downwards like old wax into a sycophantic, sneering smile. His chest is taut with muscle. His
belly is a mass of loose skin. His chicken legs end in overgrown toenails and the brown
leather slippers that are so popular on the mainland among people who enjoy paying eighty
dollars for slippers you can’t even wear to the beach. (Shit, dude, just go to Longs? They
have rubber slippers for like, five dollars? They even have shirts there, sometimes?)
“Hi,” says Dex, and nothing else.
Donnie’s bushy grey eyebrows go up. His smile becomes even more distasteful. “Well, I
certainly don’t see the family resemblance,” Donnie says. He laughs at his own joke and
pinches Kai’s butt, and she giggles and puts an arm around his waist.
What Donnie means is that Dex’s face is brown and flat, with the thick neck and thick
stomach and thick arms and legs and prematurely thinning hair of most Native dudes. Kai has
a nose with bridge and a sickly lighter shade of skin from being indoors all the time. Kai
collects fat around her hips and thighs, not her stomach. Kai’s hair is long, taken care of,
well-oiled, and wavy.
Also, Dex is eighteen and Kai is fourteen.
“Cool,” says Dex. “Okay, I’m leaving now.”
“What, you’re gonna walk home?” Kai says. “With that bus’-up chain?”
Dex eyeballs Donnie again. “I sure am,” says Dex.
“Well, we only just met,” says Donnie.
“Good. We can keep it that way,” says Dex.
“Naw, that’s not the way to get ahead in this world,” says Donnie. “Look--I’m sure you’re a
nice guy, or something--you got a hell of a nice sister, I tell you that--I tell you what. I give
you some advice, me to you, prime, quality life guidance.” (Grif’s eyebrows travel up his
forehead at the butchered pidgin accent.) “Take it from me, okay, when you go around,
making friends, networkin’--don’t turn down other people’s advice, you gotta introduce
yourself to everyone you meet, you gotta go with the classic handshake, you know? None of
this ansy-pansy trannie bullshit, limp wrist, weak grip-- definitely not over vidcam, nothing
ever gets built over webcam. Take it from me, yeah? You know the reason why the kids like
you aren’t going anywhere? No eye contact . Kids can’t do it, too busy with some nonsense
about sexual identity crisis and racial identity crisis and gender identity crisis, like people got
the time in the world for that—” Donnie scrunches his face-flesh-flaps into an expression
even more mockingly pandering ”--yeah, look, wah wah boo-hoo nobody cares, shut up and
shake the damn hand, alright? Nobody gives a fuck if you’re a shemale or a he-it or a theyher— listen to other people when they fucking talk to you and make the business deal . Better
yet, I give you some better advice—”
“I’m okay, thanks,” says Dex.
“You sure about that? You sure you wanna be like the rest of those fucking micros, bent on
putting their heads in the sand, get all tough and big and proud about being poor as shit and
having lost a colonization with the U-S-of-A? Your sister knows what’s up. I work my ass
off, remodeling that library from scratch with these two hands, using my engineering degree
for good work on this shithole of an island--it’s just that curse I’ve got, you know, can never
stop thinking, something about my brain just never can settle down, just something about
being a proper MIT grad--you know what MIT is, right? Look, I’ve been building a boat with
these two hands--”
“I’m really okay,” says Dex. Kai starts laughing.
“--a fucking boat , made of wood, carved that shit myself. Like the fucking Polys used to do,
except not shitty. And you know what my advice to you is? Do the god damn thing yourself.
Fuck other people. You’re a good listener--good listeners make good learners, you’ll go
somewhere, kid, not like these other fuckin’ micros--these fucking monkeys with their dicks
out, lumbering around, hating school and going to work and then complaining why life don’t
hand them one paycheck on a silver platter--no, I’ve been telling your sister, I’ve been
building a boat, and I’ve been fending those shithead micros away from the library, and I’m
telling her: ho, she got a body , you know? She’s got a ticket out of this place. Men go so
fucking ape stupid for this ass—” Kai, of course, giggles “--and if she look like this now ?
She can go anywhere. She can get a whole plane ticket if she want. Can travel across the
whole mainland if she likes, just flash a little skin and say ooooh mister take me along in
your truck. Had a girl like that just last year--taught her everything she needed to know to get
off this junkyard of an island--‘cause look, you know, I’m a realistic dude, I know I’m a little
stupid--not that stupid, because I know I’m stupid, but I know I go a little ape stupid when I
see a good lookin’ girl. I know I go a little ape stupid when I see a girl like Kai . ‘S not my
fault. Girls these days, shit , they can go anywhere , they developin’ tits and ass by age nine
or some shit, they can walk right over you because you’re too busy drooling all over
yourself--you and me, kid, if you get your neck out of that shithole micro crowd, fermenting
in the Hawaii ghetto filth, you better watch it for these girls, you can never tell if the girl you
get is eighteen or eleven! Shit! My advice, kid, is you better watch your dick, or at least
watch who knows where you’re putting your dick--Kai, you’re fine, just play stupid and
you’ll get away with anything, bet the police would let get away with anything if you let
them have their way for a bit, take it from me—”
Dex walks away. Kai is absolutely howling in laughter. Donnie keeps fucking talking even
when Dex is halfway across the soccer field.
Dex spends about a week trying not to bring it up. He really does. He tries really, really
fucking hard to let it go. But—man. Man . Some people are just… Like, Dex didn’t even
know someone like that motherfucker could exist? Where the shit did Kai find him?
“In the Makiki community library, obviously !” says Kai. “He lives in the basement and
scares the ‘fucking micros’ away from smoking pot in the storm drain.” She snorts loudly.
“He’s awful,” Dex blurts out.
“Oh, psh, yeah!” Kai says. “But man , does he know how to use his—“
“I don’t want to know!”
“Then don’t ask,” Kai says. “Like, duh.”
Dex knows he’s on thin ice. Kai won’t snap back, but she’ll leave, probably for more days
than will be legal for a fourteen year old. He doesn’t even know if he has the words for what
he wants to say.
“I just think you could do better,” he says, at length, because it’s a phrase he’s heard other
people use and he doesn’t know what else to say.
Kai makes a face. “Who gives a fuck about better? Live shit, die young, Dex, c’mon!”
“At the very least it'd be nice if he wasn't—if he wasn't an awful asshole who…”
( Destroys you so you don’t have to do it yourself? )
“Hello? Earth to Dex? I don’t need him to not be awful,” Kai says cheerfully. “I just need him
to be fun! But, oh, speaking of—“
“—wait—“ says Dex, realizing where this is going.
“—there’s a party I forgot was happening! Happening like, right now ! Okay bye see ya Dex
—“
“—wait—!”
—and Kai does not return from her party for six days. After forty-eight hours, Dex is
probably supposed to legally assume her dead, or some shit. (The ice gets thinner every day.)
She comes home chewing a wad of chewing gum, complaining the flavor’s out. Spits it out
on the sidewalk.
Two weeks later, Donnie stops coming around.
“Flavor’s out,” Kai says. Flicks her tongue piercing at him from between her teeth and grins.
Dex thinks that Donnie lasted as long as he did because Kai just wanted to spite Dex for what
he’d said—but on the other hand, Kai has better things to do than be spiteful. Spiteful is
never Kai's game. Spiteful requires a level of commitment Kai doesn't have. Or maybe being
spiteful just isn't fun enough.
Or take, for example:
The way Mom falls in love: airy, floaty, like a three-hundred-pound butterfly, buoyed up on a
happy-hour ethanol cloud, flitting from flower to handsome, boy-toy flower. She likes the
ones that are just as airy and silly as she is, so they can giggle at each other when they fuck
on the living room couch.
“If you love someone,” Mom says, “it’s best to let them be, Dextie. Let them be a little
stupid! It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“She’s dating a senior citizen !” Dex cries. “She’s fourteen!” (This, of course, being before
Donnie had disappeared, and before he’d learn later to let Kai’s boyfriends disappear on their
own time.)
Mom fiddles with two shades of almost identical bright neon pink lipstick, adjusting her
blouse in the mirror. Hot date tonight, or something like that. She takes another drink of beer.
“Oh, psh, I had a sugar daddy at thirteen.”
“That’s not a sugar—he’s not even rich , Mom, he lives in a library basement.”
“She’s getting an early start,” says Mom. “She’ll get the hang of it!”
“Mom !”
“Stop hovering so much,” Mom says. “She’ll be fine. Plenty of condoms to go around.”
“She hasn’t been to school,” Dex begins, “she hasn’t done any homework, she’s not even
making friends with anyone her own age, just hanging around fucking parking lots, drinking
god knows what—“
“Would you stop being such a spoilsport ?” Mom complains. She throws down her lipstick
tube on the vanity, nearly missing the beer can. “Fuck! Like school’s so important! As if a
diploma changes anything! Changed a whole lot for you, did it? Working at Domino’s?"
Dex goes silent.
“Let her have her fun, yeah?” Mom says sweetly.
Let her have her fun sounds a bit like the bucket-list license a person gives to the dying. Dex
wonders what about his family makes them assume they won’t live past thirty. Dex stays
silent.
“Or,” Mom says, adjusting her earrings, “be more like her, Dextie. Lighten up a little. Life’s
too short.”
Easy for Mom to say. Mom is in love with anyone with a dick—not in lust, but truly,
genuinely in love. Life for Mom is wonderful and roses all the time. Buying flowers love.
Looking at wedding dresses love. Paying her boyfriend’s debts love. Imagining a white
picket fence with a dog love. Singing from the rooftops love, which Mom actually does,
singing along to every Iz song ever sung, perfectly in tune and not understanding a single
Hawaiian word. She is never single. She’s never been “just broken up with.” She always has
someone there, parades of nice men with bubblegum personalities, too stupid to hold their
own jobs, too stupid to do any damage, too stupid to ask Mom to spend her entire paycheck
on treating them to nice massages, too stupid to tell Mom to forget to buy Kai’s textbooks for
the sixth year in a row. Mom is entirely the master of the domain of her draining wallet; her
self-destruction is in nobody's hands but her own. Mom loves life. She loves loving. Nothing
better to do on this fucking island.
Or take, for example:
Dex had one girlfriend before he got drafted. Shailene Hashimoto was recruited for women’s
volleyball to Santa Clara one year after they broke up. They dated for all of two months.
She was... fine.
Actually, she had a bad habit of binge-watching as many Asian horror films as she could in a
single night and being unable to sleep for days. She liked the beach and burnt like bacon even
with her tan, and hated jumping off high cliffs into the ocean until she actually managed to
jump. Her winged eyeliner was almost always ugly, but she thought wings were so pretty and
tried so hard every morning to pull it off and sometimes it wasn't even half bad. She had a
killer side-eye whenever someone fucked up her pronouns. She thought lizards were cute and
dogs were gross, which Dex would have been fine with—white picket fence and a big
fucking lizard, hell yeah.
(She was so wonderful. She was so lovable. She was so fun.)
She once talked about him applying to Santa Clara with her, even when she was still in junior
year and only just beginning to talk with the college recruiters. But Dex had suspected, even
then, that you can inherit the ways you love people, and he hadn’t wanted to find out. One
day, without warning, he stopped texting her for twenty-one days straight, then let her break
up with him over a phone call.
Better to quit while you’re ahead.
“Agreed,” says Jackson. “The friends-with-benefits thing is always the best option. Marriage
shouldn’t even be a blip on your radar until you’re past thirty-five.”
Their outpost, sitting stubbornly in the middle of its shitty tundra, has a little glass bubble
sitting on the top of a tower, like a bullet-proof crow’s nest. Not the safest guard tower, in
Grif’s opinion, but there’s also no one else for miles, and the three-sixty-degree glass is a hell
of a view of the frozen wasteland they’re… defending. Or whatever.
Grif mostly enjoys watching the snow collect at the top of the bubble. Feels like they’re
hanging out inside a snow-globe turned inside out. Jackson and Grif take turns tapping the
glass until the snow falls off, which is by far the most exciting part of their job—especially
when Grif’s paired with Jackson, whose sense of humor can never compare to Wesley’s. Nah,
dude, not with the middle-aged English professor haircut, no fucking way.
“Not like there’s a lot of options around, dude,” says Grif, draping himself along the bottom
of the bubble. “All dudes at this outpost.”
“Fucking men is more fun than fucking women,” Jackson says. Which should be vulgar,
except that Jackson’s got those ugly little glasses and the English Professor haircut that make
everything he says sound like the thesis in a dissertation. “You should give it a shot,” he adds,
like an afterthought.
“Wow, that’s pretty gay,” Grif says. “C’mon, dude, you can just come out of the closet.
Nobody cares.”
Jackson shakes his head. “No, I’m serious. Dating women is a competition. You have us men
on the Guys Team, and you have the women on the Ladies Team. And the Guys Team dukes
it out with the Ladies Team for the right to not be a lonely basement-dwelling loser. If you
win, you get the girl as a prize. Right?”
Grif gets the distinct feeling that both agreeing and disagreeing would be a trap—disagreeing
would be betraying his “team,” and agreeing would be betraying how fucking stupid of an
idea Grif thinks that is. Goes to show how smart dudes in glasses are, even if they are pretty.
“Sure, that sounds legit,” says Grif, and snorts.
“So sometimes you don’t want the relationship to be so hard,” Jackson says. “Everything’s
more fun when you’re playing with your team. Your teammates have your back. They
understand you. They don’t criticize you or nag you or make you do your laundry when you
don’t want to. They’re on your side, not the opposite side. It’s you and them against everyone
else.”
Grif squints. “Isn’t that called being… friends ?” Grif asks.
“Exactly,” says Jackson. “That’s what I said. It’s not gay because Parker and I are friends.”
Grif squints even longer and harder. “Seems like an odd thing to do with your… friend,” says
Grif.
Jackson looks at him funny, and at that moment Grif holds absolutely still, buffs all his
defenses and braces for impact, like at any second Grif is going to be outed as too curious,
too inquisitive, too invested in the going-ons of the Ambiguously Gay Elephant sitting in the
corner.
But Jackson just shrugs. “Nothing’s weird if you’re actually straight,” he says.
Grif raps on the glass until the snow falls off and says nothing.
(Or take, for example—)
The morning after Simmons holds Grif’s hand, Grif jolts out his half-dozing to the sound of
his own alarm beeping at seven in the morning.
No. Fuck that. Fuck this. Fuck everything. Grif doesn’t even turn it off. Grif rolls over and
shoves his head under his pillows and goes back to sleep, or whatever sleep he can manage.
He drifts in and out. The alarm won’t shut up.
Eventually, Simmons opens the door and turns the alarm off for him, and leaves as quietly as
he can to—shockingly—let Grif sleep in. Grif just wants Simmons to come back. But he
doesn’t say anything, and Simmons leaves.
Thanksgiving Trials
Chapter Summary
Grif chews through the last of his garlic bread like he could make Donut feel his teeth
gnashing through it like some sort of weird proxy voodoo doll.
Grif drags his sorry ass out of bed at ten in the morning after a fitful dozing session to find
Simmons sitting on the common room couch, head leaning on his hand, staring at nothing,
until he notices Grif and jerks into motion. Sarge is fiddling with a tablet and nursing a mug
by the coffeemaker.
“Morning,” Simmons says, a little stiffly.
“Mmghgh,” says Grif. He shoves his hand in the cereal cabinet.
Sarge looks up from his tablet over his glasses. Looks at Grif and at Simmons and back.
Simmons sits at the plastic kitchen table while Grif dumps something crunchy and sugary
into a bowl and, apparently needing something to do with his hands, pours a cup of coffee,
fixes it with sugar and milk, and passes it to Grif.
“I don’t drink caffeine,” Grif mumbles, despite the fact that he probably desperately needs
caffeine at this given moment.
“It’s decaf,” says Simmons.
So—what, Simmons (who drinks coffee stronger than hell itself) specifically brewed decaf
just for Grif? Grif inspects the liquid. It is, indeed, the nearly-white color of heavily diluted
coffee, in exactly the way that Grif fixes his coffee on the occasion that they actually possess
decaf.
Simmons does a little pissed-off chin nod, as it to say: C’mon, don’t leave me hanging,
asshole, take the cup . Grif stares at the coffee, feeling a little bit like the earth is tilting.
“Thanks?” says Grif, eventually, being too tired to really think of anything else to say, and
takes the mug.
Simmons shrugs awkwardly and fiddles with his fingers.
Sarge packs up his tablet and coffee mug and high-tails it without a single word.
Simmons watches him go in near-confusion. “What’d I do?” Simmons whispers. “Why’d he
leave? I wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to be flirty, I just thought, like, if the relationship thing were
hypothetically happening, then hypothetically I should try and be nice to the other person, but
I didn’t even…?”
Didn’t even what , Grif’s brain wants to know.
Grif watches Simmons fidget in the kitchen chair, exactly like a deeply-uncomfortable
internalized-homophobe does when pushed to fake-flirt with his friend… or, perhaps, like a
blushing newly-wed greeting their lover on the morning after their wedding night. Depends
on the point of view, doesn’t it? Depends on what, say, a sergeant intending to keep his nose
as far out of other people’s business might expect to see, right?
Grif drinks his milk-coffee and tries not to grin.
So now they definitely know this fake-dating thing works.
Which means that, now that Grif has gotten some glucose in him, they need to make a plan.
“If we’re really, actually doing this fake-dating thing,” Grif says, “we gotta set some
guidelines for what fake-dating looks like. Which I call dibs on describing, since I’m pretty
sure you don’t even know what real dating looks like.”
Simmons crosses his arms. “How would you know—?!”
“Shhhhh,” says Grif. “Let the professional speak.”
See, fake-dating Simmons, in Grif’s opinion (as Grif describes more or less to Simmons),
should look absolutely no different from real-friending Simmons—
“And since when are friends?” Simmons interrupts.
“Okay, okay, then real…” Grif looks at Simmons. He’s already worked himself into a corner
by attempting to define their relationship. “Real-teammating…?”
Grif stifles a yawn. Simmons looks increasingly doubtful. Shit. Whatever.
The point is, they sit around, preferentially choose each other’s company over everyone else,
shoot the breeze at all times, talk shit about everyone else, talk shit about each other, argue,
call each other endearing pet-names like “kiss-ass” and “asshole,” and every time Sarge
comes over the horizon, Grif and Simmons studiously look like they weren’t doing anything
gay until Sarge, convinced that they were, in fact, being riotously and raucously gay, gets
suspicious and uncomfortable and leaves, which is virtually identical to what they’ve been
doing for the last—oh, seven or eight years, now? Give or take—
“That’s not what happens!” Simmons interrupts again.
(Oh, buddy. Does Grif has some news for Simmons.)
“ Okay , okay, fine,” says Grif. Fuck, he’s so tired that his eyes won’t focus. “The point is, we
should be able to change absolutely nothing and still appear to be dating as hell.”
“I dunno if that’s really…” Simmons begins. “Grif, you look kind of shitty.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s my face.”
“No, I mean, you look exhausted,” Simmons says.
Grif attempts to respond and is foiled with another yawn.
“Uh, I’ll take a nap or something,” he says.
“Seriously do that,” says Simmons.
Grif lays down and feels his entire spine sigh with relief, along with most of the rest of his
body. “Aw, fuck, that’s good,” he says. “I guess wake me up if Sarge blows something up?"
They’re sitting in the shade of a tree that’s becoming a frequent haunt; it’s shady but warm,
with grass that isn’t too scratchy, a nice hill with the perfect incline to be mostly horizontal
but still propped up enough to look at the sky. (Simmons joked about carving their initials
into the tree, as if his new recent hobby is to give Grif minor heart palpitations.)
“Wait!” Simmons says. “What am I supposed to do if you go to sleep?”
Grif cracks open an eye and shrugs. “I dunno, dude, sleep with me?”
Simmons visibly inflates with stress.
“I mean nap with me,” Grif says quickly, because he very genuinely had not intended that
innuendo. “Take a nap. Sleep next to me. Look, anyone comes by and sees us taking a nap
side by side, they’ll be like, oh shit, better let the sleeping lovers lie, and fuck off.”
Simmons’s mouth flattens. “Can you not call us lovers?”
“What, too nineteenth-century for you? You wanna be boyfriends like we’re in high school?”
Simmons is beginning to stress-inflate again.
“We can be the Ambiguously Gay Duo,” says Grif. “Like Batman and Robin.”
“Please never imply that about Batman and Robin ever again. I have very firm headcanons
about how the Batfamily works.”
“We can be Bros-Before-Hoes,” says Grif. “And also Bros-Before-Generally-Other-Bros,
unless this is a poly thing?”
Simmons begins tearing up grass in his hands, as he always does during Nervous Thinking
Time, which also means that Simmons has checked out to think something over in his head.
“So we’ll look gay… without actually doing anything gay,” Simmons says, slowly.
“Yeah! That’s the whole point . See, I’m full of great ideas.”
“Didn’t we sleep together before we were fake dating?” Simmons says.
“That was, uh,” says Grif. “That was a heterosexual sleep-together. We’re talking about that
other time we took a nap, right?” Unless Grif somehow missed sleeping with Simmons?
“But there was literally zero difference between the heterosexual nap and the gay nap!”
Simmons cries.
God fucking damn, did Simmons have to be so smart and stupid at the same time? How come
this man and his mental gymnastics are so high maintenance? How come Grif keeps getting
suckered into these high-maintenance people? “Okay, look, it’s still a heterosexual nap, got
it? Because we were both straight dudes then, and we’re both straight dudes now, so both
naps are straight.”
“Then how’s anyone going to know it’s gay by looking at it?” Simmons asks irritably.
“Because they’re expecting to see something gay. The whole beauty of fake dating is that you
don’t actually have to change anything,” says Grif. “You do the exact same things you did
before, but now it looks different. Simple.”
“False,” says Simmons.
“Oh, what, like you’re some kind of fake-dating expert, now?”
Simmons does that thing where he extends his neck as high up as he can go with the sheer
pompousness of what he’s about to say. (Does wonders for showing off his genuinely nice
neck. Very biteable tendons. It’s just a fact, not Grif’s opinion.) “If you do the exact same
thing, then that means either the nap now looks too straight, or the nap before looked too gay.
But it definitely can’t have been the second one, so it has to be the first.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re overthinking this,” says Grif.
“Well, there has to be some sort of difference between having a friend and having a—a—”
“A Dick-Before-Chicks?” Grif supplies.
“—a significant other ,” says Simmons. “It can’t just look exactly the same but somehow be
different without any noticeable difference to show for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t hear any
of those stories about people who started dating their best friend and could never make it
work because they were so entrenched in a pre-existing platonic relationship.”
Grif’s eyebrows go up. “Wow, we’re friends, now? Since when?”
“You—you know what I mean!”
“No, I don’t,” Grif says grumpily. Simmons is getting between Grif and some much-needed
sleep, and this really, really isn’t a subject that he’s keen to dissect. He has the feeling that
it’ll fall apart like sand in his fingers if he tries. “I dunno, maybe they shouldn’t have tried
dating a platonic friend? Platonic friends are fine, too? They should stick to dating their
friends who they have palpable sexual tension with.”
Simmons visibly blanks. “Well, I guess so, but… what does that have to do with us?”
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” says Grif.
“Maybe this discussion isn’t relevant to us because we’re not friends,” Simmons says, at
length.
“Right,” says Grif, quickly. “Yes. That’s it. That’s exactly it. Because you’re an annoying
suck-up, and I’m a lazy do-nothing.”
“But the argument still stands,” says Simmons. “You can’t just carry on the MO of a platonic
relationship and expect it to look like a romantic one!”
“Oh my god, Simmons, trust me, we’ll look fine.”
“But that’s like saying that we already looked like we were dating!”
There’s no real answer to that that doesn’t send both Simmons and Grif running for the hills.
“Okay, you know what?” Grif says, because he might not have started this conversation, but
he’s definitely going to end it. “You’re right.”
Simmons narrows his eyes. “Any time you say that I’m right, I get the feeling that it’s a trap.”
“We do have to make it gayer,” Grif concludes.
“Uhh, okay, wait a minute—”
“No, you’re absolutely right, Simmons,” says Grif. “We absolutely have to make sure there’s
a clear distinction between our Before relationship and our After relationship.”
“This is definitely a trap and I hate this,” says Simmons.
“You’re the one who insisted,” Grif says, entirely unrepentantly. “Uncross your legs and
move over.”
“ Why ?”
“I’m gonna make the nap gay, Simmons, what do you think?"
Simmons looks at Grif like he’s some sort of incubus here to eat his dick, if incubi were fat
Hawaiian dudes who were too lazy to take a shower this morning.
“We can’t prove that we didn’t look like we were dating before this if we don’t change
anything now, Simmons,” says Grif.
Simmons groans and sighs and mopes and rolls his eyes and drags his feet but does,
eventually, gingerly, stretch his legs out and leans against the tree, and then continues his
suspicious stare.
Grif puts his head right on Simmons’s leg like it’s a pillow. Simmons is so tense Grif wonders
if he’s having some sort of cyborg-limb lock-up.
“Boom. Now it looks gay,” says Grif. “Happy now that we’ve proven that we are doing our
part to look gayer than we did before?
Simmons, frankly, looks too overwhelmed to say anything in response, which Grif takes as a
yes. “Cool,” says Grif. “Good night!”
“You asshole,” Simmons hisses. “This means I still just sit here and do nothing while you
take a nap!”
“Hey, if you don’t come up with the gay ideas, you get the short end of the gay stick.”
Simmons makes an irritated noise. “This is stupid,” he mutters.
“No, this is a prime napping position. Shut the fuck up and let me cat-nap.”
For two whole, blessed seconds, Simmons shuts the fuck up.
Then Simmons starts squirming, trying to shimmy his way out from under Grif. Grif groans.
Well—nothing unexpected, he guesses. Simmons is only in this for the PDA and getting
Sarge to go away, so he’s frankly surprised Simmons put up with it this long...
Simmons scoots downwards until he’s lying down and Grif’s head is resting on his stomach.
“Your head was on my cyborg leg,” says Simmons. "It'd be too hard."
“Oh,” says Grif.
Resting his head on the soft concave space of Simmons's stomach does feel nicer. He can feel
Simmons’s soft breathing against the back of his head. Grif tries really hard to not broadcast
whatever the fuck kind of spinning flip his heart is doing, but he’s not sure it’s working. Grif
doesn’t even dare look at Simmons’s face.
“Bits of your stomach are still hard from the metal plates,” Grif hears himself say.
“Shut up. It’s the best I’ve got. Also, you’re hard.”
Grif chokes.
“Wait, no, I didn’t mean it like that,” Simmons says quickly, “I was just trying to make a
joke!”
“Nah, it’s okay, babe, you know I—”
“Don’t you dare do the Tucker impression.”
Grif starts snickering. The motion rubs Grif’s shoulders into Simmons’s side. Whatwith the
muted sun, the clear sky, the dirty grass, the warmth of Simmons's body, this entire scenario
is gathering the distinct sense of unreality, and Grif fully expects himself to wake up from
this dream at any second.
“Okay, whatever you say, dear,” says Grif, with as much sarcasm as he can muster. “Is this
gay enough for you?”
“I—it’s not that I need it to be gay! I’m just pointing out the flaws in the structural integrity
of your argument! It matters if we’re going to pull this off!”
Simmons is still lying there like a dead fish, which just makes Grif laugh harder. “Yeah, fine,
whatever,” he says. “Can I go the fuck to sleep, now?”
“Like I’ve ever been able to stop you before,” Simmons retorts.
“Damn fucking right,” says Grif, and closes his eyes.
Grif doesn’t fall asleep for thirty minutes. Simmons’s entire body is stiff with tension, but he
doesn’t move away. At some point, the sun shifts onto Grif’s face, too bright even against his
closed eyelids, so he turns his face away and winds up with his half his nose pressed right
into Simmons’s shirt.
“God fucking dammit,” Simmons whispers to himself.
Grif tries not to overthink it.
The metal plates of Simmons’s stomach have warmed up in the sun. Grif listens to Simmons,
eventually, make himself breathe a little easier.
Grif wakes up and Simmons is asleep with his head propped up against his own cyborg arm
and his organic one resting on his stomach, just brushing Grif’s hair. Grif wonders how many
heterosexual points they’re going to get for being able to do this outrageously gay shit
without freaking out because they’re just so firmly secure in their own heterosexuality.
Probably a bajillion, right? Yeah, eat shit, Jackson. Grif closes his eyes and goes back to
sleep.
He has never been so sure that Sarge won’t come breathing down their neck than he is right
now. He is so, so glad that his sleep will finally, for the first time in years, go completely
undisturbed by his asshole teammates.
“WOW!” says Donut’s voice. “LOOK AT YOU TWO, ALL SNUGGLED UP LIKE—”
Grif flails awake and jams an elbow into Simmons’s stomach (“ow!”) and kicks Donut square
in the pelvis. Donut shrieks and clutches his codpiece.
Donut wails, “Oh god I just wanted to see what was happening at Red Base—”
“NO AND GO AWAY, DONUT!”
Simmons is wheezing and glaring at Grif. Fucking Donut.
But then Donut goes crying to Sarge that Grif is picking on him, like some kind of shitty
tattle-tale in preschool, which means that Sarge gets all kerfuffled and ruffled and demands to
have “a team meeting” with only Grif about “proper Red Team teamwork!” which is mostly
just thirty minutes of telling Grif that he’s a disgrace to the Red Army and by god Donut
might not be the best soldier but the least Grif could do is not make everything worse with his
team-undermining self!
At which point Grif, still running on more sleep debt than he’d ever allow under normal
circumstances, snaps, “Then he shouldn’t have come fucking meddling while Simmons and I
were—”
Sarge immediately claps his hands over his ears. Grif immediately claps his hands over his
mouth.
“LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU,” Sarge says loudly.
Grif grits his teeth. “Oh my god, I wasn’t going to say anything personal, okay?!” Like hell
Grif’s sharing more than he absolutely has to with Sarge , of all people!
“I DIDN’T SEE ANYTHING, I DIDN’T GO LOOKING FOR YOU—”
“Good! That’s the way I--wait,” says Grif, “ did you see us?”
“NO! NOTHING! I SAW NOTHING! I REFUSE TO BE PRIVY TO THE POSSIBILITY
THAT PRIVATE DEXTER GRIF, A PERENNIAL MASS OF DISAPPOINTMENT AND
GREASE—”
“Keep your voice down—!”
“—HAS AN ACTIVE SEX LIFE, THANK YOU!”
Grif groans into his hands. “Fine! Okay! Good! That’s the way I like it too!” He’s spent the
last seven years not letting a single one of these clowns know anything more about him than
absolutely necessary, and he’s not going to change that now! “So now go tell Donut to get his
powdered nose out of our business!”
Sarge lowers his hands.
“Hmmmmmmmmmmmm,” says Sarge.
“What,” says Grif.
“Well—you know how Donut is,” says Sarge. “Has a certain— stiff will about him, if you
know what I mean… He’s real good about respecting no for an answer sometimes , but other
times, when there’s some good gossip to be heard...”
“So what? He’s going back to Blue Base in like, half an hour, isn’t he?”
“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” says Sarge.
“... What ?” Grif says.
“So it looks like I’m moving back to Red Base for a bit!” says Donut cheerfully. “Isn’t that
great?! We can have one of our fun, friendly, Red Team family dinners agai—”
Grif retreats to his own room like a sulky fucking teenager while Donut putters around the
kitchen, making cheesy potatoes and baked asparagus stalks out of ancient canned goods he’d
dug out of Blue Base. Eventually, Simmons pokes his head in.
“Shoes off,” Grif says immediately. “What’re you doing here? I thought you were helping
Donut?”
Simmons shudders. “He said I was breathing down his neck and making him feel weird while
he was cooking the potatoes,” he says, without meeting Grif’s eyes. “Lopez is helping, so I
guess that means everything is going to be either covered in motor oil or ten layers of hot
sauce. Also, it’s almost done, so he says you should come out and stop, quote unquote,
sulking in your room like a fucking teenager.”
God, Donut is so irritating, Grif thinks.
“God, Donut is so irritating,” Grif says aloud.
“Tell me about it,” Simmons sighs.
Not exactly constructive advice, but it does make Grif feel better.
So Red Team sits down for their lovely, friendly, reunion family dinner, or whatever the shit
this is supposed to be. Donut serves chicken breast, asparagus, cheesy potatoes, and garlic
bread that he got from… somewhere. Grif immediately pops the garlic bread in his mouth.
Oh, hey, this actually tastes... good?
This means that Donut didn’t cook it. Definitely Lopez.
“Well?” Donut says. “How is it!”
“Awful,” says Grif.
“Di eso a mi puta cara, perra (Say that to my face, bitch) ,” Lopez says.
“But not the asparagus and the potatoes, right?” Donut says. “That’s the parts I did!”
Grif makes a mental note not to touch either. “Those are especially awful,” Grif says.
“You didn’t even try it!” Donut complains, putting together another plate and passing it to
Simmons.
Simmons, slowly, takes the plate. Puts it down in front of him, like he’s received deployment
orders to the front lines.
Grif looks at Simmons’s plate.
Simmons looks at Grif looking at Simmons’s plate.
Grif looks at Simmons looking at Grif looking at Simmon’s plate.
Grif looks away.
Simmons looks away.
“Well, at least Donut is back from being diabolically tortured by the Blues,” Sarge says, with
a dull sort of obligatory enthusiasm.
“Hooray (Hooray) ,” says Lopez, with his awful, flat, text-to-speech voice.
“You bet I am!” Donut says cheerily. “And yes, Sarge, it was awful ; Caboose has absolutely
zero concept of using natural lighting to his advantage. So many windows and he’s not using
any of them!”
“What windows?” Grif asks.
“Yeah, isn’t his base a carbon copy of ours?” Simmons says, who has taken the opportunity
to not even touch his fork.
“ We don’t get windows,” says Grif.
“It’s tactically unsound for your military base to have windows,” Simmons says.
“We made some windows,” Donut says airily.
“What, like,” Grif says, “you just—punched a hole in the steel wall, or…?”
“Why, yes,” says Donut. “What about it?”
Grif and Simmons look at each other. Sarge and Lopez look at each other. Grif and Sarge
look at each other. Simmons and Lopez do not look at each other because Lopez would
probably punch Simmons’s lights out if Simmons ever tried to share a significant look with
Lopez.
At length, Grif says, “Okay, Donut, I’ll bite. How ?”
“Caboose is very strong!”
“Need to get Red Team a heavy-weight like that,” mutters Sarge.
“Porque yo, el equipo rojo de peso pesado, no existo (Because I, the Red Team heavy-weight,
don’t exist, I guess) ,” says Lopez.
“Some people like a little adventure with their man,” says Donut serenely. “But—jeez louise!
—even after all that effort, you know, he just kept all the shutters up! Barely went outside!
Most days, he wouldn’t even talk to me.”
Grif and Simmons look at each other again.
“Shouldn’t you be at Blue Base with Caboose, then…?” Simmons asks. “Like, keep him
company or something?”
“He kicked me out because I told him he shouldn’t be talking to the Epsilon unit until four in
the morning. When I’m just trying to look out for him! No sleep hygiene at all!”
“Right. How worrying,” says Grif. “Bad sleep hygiene .”
“I wonder what’s up with that!” says Donut.
“Es porque todos sus amigos están muertos (It’s because all his friends are dead) ,” says
Lopez.
“You’re right, Lopez! Too much caffeine is bad for you!”
“Deja de pretender que me entiendes (Please stop pretending you understand me) ,” says
Lopez.
“Man, we have so much catching up to do, Lopez,” says Donut. “I’ve really been brushing up
on my Spanish lately! How are you?”
“Estoy completamente comprometido a morir mal entendido y no escuchado, sin haber
logrado nada (I am fully committed to dying misunderstood and unheard, having
accomplished nothing) ,” Lopez says. “¿Y cómo estás? (And how are you?) "
“I’m doing well, thanks!”
“Espero que te disparen y mueras (I hope you get shot and die) ,” says Lopez.
“Thanks, Lopez! I’ll get to work on that soon, hopefully! How about you, Sarge?”
“Hhmgmgh,” says Sarge.
“Fascinating! And you, Grif, Simmons?”
Simmons opens his mouth.
“None of your business,” says Grif.
Donut pouts. “Aww, don’t be like that! You can tell me the good deets! Why, just earlier I
saw you and Simmons—”
Simmons opens his mouth again.
“You didn’t see anything,” says Grif.
Simmons shoots Grif a look.
“I definitely saw something ,” says Donut, and winks.
“You saw me having a snooze,” says Grif. “Slacking off and not doing my job.”
“And Simmons —”
Simmons opens his mouth again .
“—was lying five feet away from me,” says Grif, testily. “Also having a snooze, completely
unrelated to mine.”
“That’s not what I —”
“Your eyes are broken,” says Grif. Sarge chokes on nothing.
“ Grif ?” Simmons says, sounding uncertain.
Sarge is chugging water from his water glass and pretending to not be here. Lopez’s face
looks like today is the best day of his entire life.
“Mmmmm, no,” Donut says, “I definitely saw —”
“Private Donut,” says Sarge, with an awkward harrumph that nearly doesn’t make it out of
his throat.
“ Grif ,” Simmons says again. “I think I forgot something in your room. Come help me find
it.”
Not a suggestion. Grif chews through the last of his garlic bread like he could make Donut
feel his teeth gnashing through it like some sort of weird proxy voodoo doll, but does, in fact,
go with Simmons. They’re barely in the hallway when Simmons rounds on him. “The fuck
are you doing?” Simmons hisses. “What’re you being so cagey for?”
“It’s not his business,” Grif snaps right back, and Simmons hushes him, because Sarge and
Donut and Lopez are literally just around the corner. Grif grabs Simmons by the arm and
drags them further down the hallway and lowers his voice: “He doesn’t need to know, and we
don’t need to broadcast it to him.”
“Isn’t the whole point that we do embarrassingly sucralose-splenda PDA nonsense until
people leave us alone?”
“You think Donut’s going to leave us alone if we tell him we’re dating ? He’ll be all over it!
He’ll never get his claws out of it!"
“If we go far enough,” says Simmons, with an odd steely look in his face, “then yeah , he
doesn’t have any other choice, does he? Even Donut respects the important boundaries.”
What the fuck does ‘go far enough’ mean? Does Simmons hear himself when he talks? Does
Simmons think fucking twice about his own implications ever ? Grif grits his teeth.
Gesticulates. Makes despairing and frustrated noises. Flaps his arms some more.
“ What ?” Simmons says. He keeps coming closer every time he speaks. How come this
nerdy, angry, stupid, suck-up son of a bitch is so tall ?
Grif groans and whispers, “Look, I know , okay—”
Simmons makes a gesture for ‘ I can’t hear you ’ and comes even closer . Grif could shriek .
He wonders if he can get away with putting a hand on Simmons’s chest to keep him away, or
—or something.
“Grif?” Simmons says again.
Grif snaps out of it. “I know that’s what we’re supposed to do,” Grif hisses. “But Donut’s an
actual clown who has no business knowing anything about me or you! And especially you
and me together!”
“I don’t think that’s the point of a fake-relationship?” Simmons says.
“The point of doing a fake-relationship is that you act like it’s real to best simulate a
relationship that’s fake,” Grif says, “and if I was having a real relationship, Donut can go fuck
himself .”
“That’s…” Simmons falters.
“C’mon,” says Grif. “If you had a real relationship going on in your life, one that you were
taking seriously, would you want a single one of us assholes knowing anything about it?!”
“I, uh,” says Simmons. “I… dunno, I never thought about…”
“What, seriously ?”
Simmons shoots him a glare. “Yes, really, I never thought of it! I guess I’d tell you, but…”
When Simmons appears to run out of words, Grif waves the topic away. “Look, I don’t—I
can’t stop you from wanting to, I dunno, flaunt a relationship status or go wild with the PDA
because it’s a fake relationship or whatever that we’re just doing for shits and giggles and to
piss off Sarge”—Grif watches Simmons flush, so yeah, Grif didn’t think Simmons would be
the PDA type—“but I don’t see why, if we’re gonna do this fake-dating thing, why I should
be spilling my guts about my business— our business—about any relationship! Straight or
gay or fake or real or inside-out or upside-down! I don’t want anyone’s greasy fingers over
shit that’s important in my life!”
Simmons is looking at him funny. For the first time in years, Grif feels like he’s utterly
transparent—like he’s tipped his entire hand, and he doesn’t even know what his hand is .
“So—what,” says Simmons, “we’re just gonna… fake-date and… not tell anyone about it?”
“Sarge knows,” Grif says, grumpily. He doesn’t, on second thought, want Sarge to know
anything about this, either. Feels like bad luck. “But Sarge won’t pry like Donut does. Sarge
will leave us the hell alone with our own privacy, because Sarge actually fucking respects a
man’s privacy. And Sarge is the only one who really matters in this situation, because it’s not
like Donut can make us do work.”
Simmons doesn’t say anything.
“And Lopez can’t even speak English, so who gives a shit,” Grif adds, on afterthought.
“And Donut,” Simmons says slowly, “probably would just ask for more details if he got any.
It’d have the opposite effect that it has on Sarge. So there’s no point in telling him about the
fake relationship if we want him to leave us alone.”
“Right,” says Grif.
“So we’ll just… keep doing our fake-dating thing. But without telling Donut. By ourselves.
Where… no one can see us?”
“Right,” says Grif.
There’s a moment where both Simmons and Grif reflect on some shit about fake-relationshiptrees falling in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, or whatever.
Lopez knocks on the wall.
Grif nearly yells. Simmons does yell.
“¿Ya están listos para salir del armario? (Are you two ready to come out of the closet yet?) ”
Lopez asks. “¿Querías besarte y maquillarte? ¿Tomarse de las manos? ¿Tienes una pelea de
pelea? ¿O estás contento de perder piro entre vosotros como lo has hecho en la última
década? (Did you want to kiss and make up? Hold hands? Have a bickering match? Or are
you content to waste away pining after each other like you have for the last almost-decade?)
”
“Go away , Lopez!” Simmons cries.
“The food is getting cold!” Donut yells from the other room.
Simmons makes a disgruntled noise.
“Fuck off, Donut!” Grif says.
“Yeah, fuck off and suck it, uhhh, lightish-Red!”
“Oh my god, Simmons, could you be any more uncool?”
“Yes,” says Simmons promptly. “By a lot, and easily. Is that a challenge? Because I can do it.
Don’t tempt me. I’ll do it.”
“No, it definitely wasn’t a challenge, you fucking nerd,” Grif says, but the--the familiarity of
the argument does settle him a bit. “Let’s just get back out there, and keep this fakerelationship shtick on the down-low, okay?”
“I’m beginning to think you don’t actually know how a fake-relationship works,” says
Simmons suspiciously.
Grif waves him off. Simmons follows him, slowly but surely.
“...'¿Relación falsa?' ('Fake relationship'?) ” Lopez repeats.
Bastardo Opaco
Chapter Summary
"Wouldn't you like to know!"
Grif now enters a new round of his latest near-least-favorite hobby, which is playing “Guess
What Simmons Will Eat Next?” Alongside its even lesser favorite brother, which is “Guess
What Simmons Won’t Eat Next?”
But it’s okay, because Grif only plays that game because it’s, like, incredibly obvious. Not
because he’s invested or interested or cares. That’s above his pay grade, and also out of
character.
Today, when Simmons and Grif come back from their misadventure in the hallway, Simmons
is confronting chicken breast, asparagus, cheesy potatoes, and garlic bread. Donut is still
talking about something Caboose did. Simmons is scraping the cheese off the potatoes, but
only bits of it. He’s cutting the fibery ends of the asparagus off and shoving them to the side,
in the obvious “trash” pile, with the garlic bread. Separates the asparagus bits from the garlic
bread. Puts the garlic bread on a napkin. Puts the garlic bread back on the plate and puts the
asparagus bits on the napkin. Starts tearing apart the chicken, which (by the nature of having
been a freeze-dried frankenfood) dissolves into dry, tasteless powder. Simmons scoots the
potatoes and garlic bread even further away from the asparagus and chicken. Eventually,
eventually, begins to put chicken in his mouth.
“What?” Grif says, at the sound of his name.
“Weren’t you listening ?” Donut says.
“Floating off to la-la land,” Sarge grumbles.
“You know it,” says Grif, flatly. “Hopeless romantic on cloud nine over here.”
Sarge harrumphs and lets the subject drop, as he does with any veiled reference to Simmons
and Grif and their explicit, steamy, illicit honeymoon relationship. Donut looks at Sarge
oddly. Lopez glares fucking daggers at Grif, for some reason.
“Sarge, no te enamores (Sarge, don’t fall for it) ,” says Lopez. “Él está mintiendo. En realidad
no están saliendo (He’s lying. They’re not really dating). ”
“I said , Caboose wants to go and save Tucker!” Donut says.
“Dios, maldita sea, escúchame (God dammit, listen to me) ,” Lopez says.
“And where’s Tucker?” Grif asks.
“Dammit, Grif, were you not listening at all ?” Sarge says.
“Escúchame (Listen to me) ,” Lopez says, increasingly irritated. “Estás siendo engañado.
Estás viviendo con miedo innecesario (You’re being bamboozled. You’re living in
unnecessary fear). ”
“Of course not,” says Grif.
“One day, I will stop being disgusted by your lack of competence,” says Sarge.
“Keep me posted,” says Grif.
Because Grif gives absolutely no shits about Simmons whatsoever, Grif gives himself full
license to wonders if he should offer to take the food that Simmons isn’t going to eat. He’s
not trying to like, take food away from him, but if he doesn’t want to eat it, if it’s bothering
him—they can swap, right? What’s wrong with that? Grif doesn’t really want the shitty
chicken anyway; nobody could catch him dead with a vegetable. They can switch Simmons’s
potatoes and bread for Grif’s chicken and asparagus. It’s a good plan, right?
But what’s he supposed to do—just up and ask? You can’t say that kind of shit out loud. Then
everyone’s like, why’re you going out of your way to offer? And Grif can get away with shit
like “oh, well, I was just doing it because I’m a fatass who loves starch and carbs and I love
stealing double portions of everything, hurr durr” (which is absolutely true, to set the record
straight), but then Simmons gets put on the spot. Hey, Simmons, why’re you letting Grif steal
your food? Hey, everyone, look at Simmons who doesn’t want to eat a potato! Hey, everyone,
look at Simmons make a decision under the gaze of literally everyone in Red Base! Hey,
everyone, look at Simmons be forced to make a decision!
“Sargento, maldito tonto (Sarge, you god damn fool) ,” Lopez says. “¿Recuerdas todas las
veces que te quejaste de que no puedes hacer nada porque no quieres interrumpir su fase de
luna de miel? Estas siendo jugado (Remember all those times you complained about how you
can’t get anything done because you don’t want to interrupt their honeymoon phase? You’re
being played). ”
“Donut, what’s Lopez saying,” Sarge says.
“Something about how great you are and how thankful he is to be on Red Team!” Donut
chirps.
“Heh heh, good old Lopez.”
“Jugado como un violín, viejo (Played like a fiddle, old man) ,” Lopez says.
“I love playing the violin too, Lopez!” Donut says.
Grif isn’t a particularly analytical person, he doesn’t think. Probably. (Whatever,
introspection is for nerds.) He’s not super invested in picking apart the intricacies of a human
brain. But man, is it so wrong to wish that he knew what the hell was going on here?
He doesn’t even have the vocabulary to describe what’s happening. Simmons is picking at his
food like—like someone picking at a scab, or wondering how to rip a band-aid off, or like an
animal caught in a trap, or a lab rat lost in a maze. Simmons is tuning out Donut like he’s got
five thousand tabs open in his mental browser and all of them are playing music. Simmons’s
eyes are unfocused like he’s staring at the time display in the corner of his cyborg vision, but
there’s twenty million displays and they all read a different time. He keeps scraping at the
bread like he can’t figure out what to do with it. He keeps pushing the dry-chicken-powder
into little clumps.
What’re the words for that? What’s the, the, the clinical language? And if Grif knew it, would
they do any better job than he can do with the words he has right now?
—Not, of course, that it’s a super pressing concern. It’s Simmons’s business and well-being,
which Grif is not weirdly invested in. Grif is going to shut up and eat some bread.
“Hey, Simmons, I’m putting the chicken in the fridge,” says Donut. “Yes or no?”
“What?” says Simmons, clearly having just checked back into the conversation. He glances at
Grif, but Grif also has no idea what’s happening.
“Man, you two are a pair of space cadets, aren’t you?” says Donut. “Sarge, what happened to
your firm hand on these two?”
Sarge takes a long, extended drink of water in favor of answering.
“ESCUCHA (LISTEN) ,” says Lopez. “¡Solo llámalos! ¡Obviamente no están saliendo! Están
fingiendo todo! (Just call them out on it! They’re obviously not really dating! They’re faking
everything!) ”
“I’ll think about it, Lopez!” Donut says. “But first, I need to know if Simmons wants sloppy
seconds or not.”
Grif nearly chokes. Sarge does choke. “Do I what ?” Simmons says.
“Por el amor de Dios, solo escúchame (For god’s sake, just listen to me) ,” Lopez says.
“I,” Simmons begins. “No, I, uh, I’m fine, thanks.”
“Are you sure? You’ve barely eaten!”
“I’m very fine, thanks,” says Simmons, tartly, and shoves a chunk of potato in his mouth.
“Very fine,” Grif mutters under his breath.
Simmons turns a bright pink. Sarge shoots Grif an ungrateful glare.
“LA RELACIÓN ES FALSA (THE RELATIONSHIP IS FAKE) ,” Lopez says. “QUE NO
FUE GRIF HACIENDO UN COMENTARIO SLY. ÉL ES SER LITERAL (THAT WASN’T
GRIF MAKING A SLY COMMENT. HE’S BEING LITERAL). ”
“No need to insult Grif’s intelligence, Lopez!” Donut says, sliding the chicken tray into the
fridge.
“No, no, keep going, Lopez, I’m always in favor of insulting Grif’s intelligence,” says Sarge.
“Tell me more about how stupid Grif is being.”
“Eres el único estúpido aquí. Tienes la lana tirada tan lejos sobre tus ojos, cara de oveja
(You’re the only stupid one here. You’ve got the wool pulled so far over your eyes, sheepface) .”
“Oh, Lopez,” says Sarge, “your inventive and witty insults towards Grif always bring me
joy.”
Simmons begins peeling garlic bread apart and eating the fluffy middle bits, which Grif is
inclined to think of as a good thing, but… he’s not really sure? God damn, Grif thinks, not
being able to do anything fucking sucks. Like Grif is a side character in a story he’s narrating.
But on the other hand, he thinks, nobody’s really the main character in anything, and nobody
really has any real ability to change things. The belief in the right to give the fuck up has
carried him through every trial, and he doesn’t think it should stop working now.
“Yeah, Lopez, you’re being way more talkative than usual!” Donut says. “I like it! It’s a good
change! Much more interesting than Bert-and-Ernie over there!”
“ Excuse me?” says Simmons.
“Excuse you ,” Grif says, glaring at Donut.
“Solo soy más interesante porque inventas mi diálogo para mí (I’m only more interesting
because you make up my dialogue for me) ,” Lopez says, sourly.
“Why, Lopez, I would never do such a thing!” Donut replies.
“Eres un bastardo opaco. ¿Cuánto realmente entiendes? (You opaque bastard. How much do
you really understand?) ”
“Wouldn’t you like to know!”
“What’s he saying?” Sarge asks.
“GRIF Y SIMMONS NO ESTÁN CITANDO (GRIF AND SIMMONS ARE NOT DATING)
,” Lopez says.
“Grif and Simmons are not dating,” Donut translates.
Grif nearly falls out of his chair. Sarge sits perfectly still.
“Mierda (Holy shit) ,” says Lopez. “Donut. Donut, por favor, eres mi única esperanza.
Escúchame (Donut. Donut, please, you’re my only hope. Listen to me). ”
“I’m listening!” says Donut.
Lopez faces Donut, and says, very clearly: “Grif y Simmons están enamorados (Grif and
Simmons are in love) .”
Donut says, “Grif and Simmons are in love.”
Simmons looks at Grif in panic. Grif feels like Lopez just punched him in the chest. “Now
hold on a minute—” Sarge begins, already wearing his uncomfortable face.
Lopez says, in the same clear voice: “Pero la relación entre Grif y Simmons es falsa (But Grif
and Simmons’s relationship is fake). ”
“REALLY?” Donut says at the top of his lungs.
“Sí, en serio. Son citas falsas (Yes, really. They’re fake dating). ”
Donut drops his fork. “Grif and Simmons are engaged ?”
“What?” says Sarge.
“What?” says Simmons.
“What?” says Grif.
Sarge seizes his shotgun. “GRIF, YOU SLY, TWO-FACED—”
“NO I DIDN’T—”
“DONUT IS LYING AND—”
“—LYING SCHEMING PIECE OF—”
“—BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS—”
“—LIES AND SLANDER ON OUR REPUTA—”
“—IMPUGNING ON SIMMONS’S HONOR—”
“—NOT A VIRGINAL BRIDE—”
“—FUCK OFF!”
“—SHOUTING, IT’S NOT—”
“—NOT WHAT YOU THINK—”
“—ELOPING LIKE THE YELLOW-BELLIED TRAITOROUS COWARD YOU—”
“—DOESN’T KNOW ANYTHING!”
“—ALREADY MARRIED—”
“—NOT GETTING MARRIED!” Grif shouts. “FUCK! FOR GOD’S SAKE! WE’RE JUST
DATING, OKAY!?”
Silence.
Dead silence.
Sarge, slowly, puts his shotgun down. Simmons’s entire face is as red as his own shirt, but he,
goddamn him, doesn't contradict Grif. Donut stares at Grif, wide-eyed, the beginnings of a
delighted smile beginning to grow on his face.
"Shit," Grif whispers.
Lopez throws up his hands and leaves.
Amateur Pornstars
Chapter Summary
"Fine! I'll do the hot voice!"
Chapter Notes
warning for like, pg13 material??? no smut but also p risque
The next two days are some of the worst days of Grif’s life.
“—to really talk about how you two got together,” Donut says. “I’m dying to know the
answer! Oh, can I guess? Please tell me there were rose petals involved! Scented candles! Oh,
maybe there was a lovely outdoor picnic in the sun, relaxing by the river, scenic trips to the
waterfall—”
“No,” says Grif, and leaves.
Four hours later in the pantry:
“There you are, Grif!” Donut chirps. “Simmons won’t talk to me, but I’ve been thinking: all
this shyness isn’t good for your health! Of course you’re entitled to your privacy, but in my
opinion, secrets are like blackheads, you know? You have to really scrub to make sure they
don’t get any worse, really get in there with your fingers! The problem with just about
everything, from secrets to health to socks, is when they start to ferment—”
“Stop talking,” says Grif, and leaves.
The next day by the coffeemaker:
“Good morning, Grif! So I was thinking that we don’t have to talk, but if you ever need some
supplies, I’m your man! I’ve got condoms, which you guys are gonna go through at twice the
normal rate, how fun—I’ve always got plenty of lube, take your pick between strawberry,
vanilla, banana, flammable, non-flammable—”
“Go away, Donut!”
Two hours later on the road between Blue and Red Base
“Grif, if you ever scare me like that, I swear I will put you six feet under,” says Sarge,
apropos of nothing.
Grif glares back. “I never said we were eloping! Donut is the one who said it was
happening…!”
“Are you saying you would run off with Simmons to get married without telling anyone?!”
Sarge demands.
“I—what—I haven’t thought about it? Probably not? Why would we?”
“ELOPING IS A COWARD’S WAY OUT,” Sarge declares. “THE VERY IDEA OF NOT
TELLING EVERYONE YOU KNOW, INCLUDING AND PARTICULARLY ME,
BEFORE THIS NEW DEVELOPMENT IN YOUR RELATIONSHIP? AND TAKING
ADVANTAGE OF YOUNG AND INNOCENT SIMMONS ONLY WEEKS INTO YOUR
COURTSHIP—”
“We’re not eloping! And Simmons is twenty-nine !”
“I EXPECT A TWO-WEEK NOTICE FOR YOUR PROPOSAL,” Sarge continues.
“STOP,” says Grif, and hoofs it back to Red Base.
“YOU STILL HAVE TO REPORT FOR MORNING TEAM TRAINING EVEN AFTER
YOU GET MARRIED,” Sarge hollers after him.
“I don’t go anyway!”
“I EXPECT SIMMONS’S TUXEDO TO BE MAROON AND YOURS TO BE YELLOW!”
“Wh—I’M NOT YELLOW!”
“AND THE HORS D’OEUVRES BETTER BE RED!”
Grif is sulking on the roof when Lopez’s head pops up through the rooftop trapdoor.
“Oh, thank god,” says Grif. “At least I don’t understand you.”
“Te mereces esto, mentiroso con citas falsas ( You deserve this, you fake-dating liar ),” Lopez
says.
“IS HE UP THERE, LOPEZ?” Donut’s voice calls. “Because Sarge just mentioned the
maroon and yellow tuxedos and let me tell you, I have never heard of a worst color
combination in my life ! They should both be in matching red for Red Team, although that
might bring out Simmons’s pink undertones and not in a good way—”
Grif flees to Simmons’s bedroom.
Grif hangs out in Simmons’s room and waits for Simmons to be done throwing up the lunch
Sarge made. Simmons comes back radiating a heck of a lot of calm for someone whose
supposed gay relationship just got grilled by Satan himself. Simmons’s calm smells like
handsoap and toothpaste, and he barely responds when Grif starts talking. Xanaxed as fuck,
apparently, except without the Xanax. Honestly, the fact that Grif can identify it on sight is
kind of creepy.
Grif sighs and groans and resigns himself to carrying the two-man team of just himself and
this useless bulimic idiot.
Figuratively speaking, of course. You can’t have a team of two people, and guys don’t
get bulimia.
Donut opens Simmons’s bedroom door without knocking . Grif nearly shrieks.
“Oh! Now we’re all together!” says Donut. “We can have a group discussion—like a
threeway, but—”
“SORRY I JUST REMEMBERED SOMETHING I HAVE TO DO IMMEDIATELY RIGHT
NOW,” says Simmons, and books it.
“Wait, Simmons, don’t leave me—UHHH, WOW WHAT A COINCIDENCE ME TOO,”
Grif says, leaps up and barges through the doorway after Simmons.
They collapse into Grif’s room and slam the door and lock it.
“Shoes off,” Grif wheezes. Simmons is too terrified to protest.
“Donut is a public menace,” Simmons declares, after some time of both Grif and Simmons
lying shoeless on Grif’s floor and trying to calm down
Grif looks at him in disbelief. “ You think so?” Grif says. “ You’re not the one being hounded
by him!”
“Where do you think he was when he wasn’t hounding you ?” Simmons snaps.
Grif rolls over and groans into the floor.
“It was such a good plan,” Grif complains. “Sarge would never overstep boundaries like
this…”
“Surprisingly,” says Simmons.
“We were supposed to be left alone…”
“I know,” Simmons sighs.
“Does Donut even know what a boundary is…”
“Yes, probably,” says Simmons.
Grif rolls back over. “That’s a high estimate of Donut’s character.”
“No, I’m pretty sure even Donut wouldn’t walk in on…”
But Simmons falters before he can finish the sentence.
“What’re you suggesting?” Grif asks, knowing full well what Simmons is suggesting.
“I’m just saying… theoretically, he would go away if it was, um… intimate couples time…?”
“So we should fake having sex,” says Grif.
“ What ? No! I meant that we should put on a porn soundtrack and make him draw his own
conclusion!”
“That’s still faking having sex,” says Grif.
“Okay! Okay, fine, yes, we should fake having sex!”
If it wouldn’t have been suspicious as hell, Grif would have narrowed his eyes to absolute
slits right now, because Grif hasn’t forgotten the time Simmons stood in the hallway with him
and said, to Grif’s face : If we go far enough, then yeah, he doesn’t have any other choice,
does he? Even Donut respects the important boundaries. (Was Simmons thinking about this
before today?—Oh, shit, was he?)
“I don’t see why not if we’re fake-dating!” Simmons says.
(What does it mean if he was thinking about it?)
The doorknob rattles. Simmons squeaks.
“Grif, I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding me,” says Donut’s voice, with that awful,
unrepentant tone that makes Grif think that Donut actually does know exactly how annoying
he’s being. “Frankly, I think that if you have something to say to me, we should talk it out
face to face!”
“Fuck,” Grif whispers. Because now they actually have a plan to deal with this, but the plan
is… possibly just as bad as talking to Donut?
Grif looks at Simmons. Simmons looks at Grif.
“I’m going to guess you don’t want to take one for the team,” says Simmons under his breath.
“It’d be out of character,” says Grif.
“It’s so easy,” Simmons whispers. “You just like, I dunno, say in a hot voice, oooh,
Simmons…”
“ What ?” Grif says. “‘ Oooh, Simmons ’? What kind of second-rate pornstar do you think I
am?”
“Fine! I’ll do the hot voice!”
Having to listen to Simmons make second-rate pornstar noises is infinitely worse. “No! It’s
my room! I’ll do the hot voice!”
Simmons holds up his hands. “Go for it! I don’t wanna do it!”
Grif opens his mouth.
Nothing comes out.
Closes it again.
“Well?” Simmons says.
“I’m working up to it,” Grif snaps.
Donut knocks again. “Griiiiiiiiiiif,” he sings, “I know you’re in there, and you know I’m not
going to give up that easily!”
Get it together, he tells himself. He can do it. This is a matter of life or death! He doesn’t
have a choice!
Grif says, “Uunngh.”
There’s a silence.
“What the fuck was that,” Simmons whispers.
“A sex noise!”
“No it wasn’t! That was a, a groan or something!”
“Newsflash, Simmons, you sometimes groan when you’re having sex! Not,” Grif adds saltily,
“that you would know, I suppose...”
“ I possess a dick and a hand. I know what sex noises sound like ,” Simmons hisses.
Why did Simmons have to say that. Why. Like, Grif knows objectively that Simmons jacking
off has occurred before but, like, c’mon . Hearing it from his fucking own mouth, out loud, is
not a situation that Grif is equipped to deal with. It’s not fair .
“So I know,” Simmons goes on, as if what he just said is no big deal, “that what you just
made was a shitty and half-assed groan!”
Grif attempts to pull himself together: “You asked me , Dexter Grif, to do something! Of
course it’s shitty and half-assed!”
“Should I come back when you’re not jacking off?” Donut asks.
Grif puts his head in his hands.
“Because I’m pretty sure you’ve tried this trick before,” Donut continues.
“ What ?” Simmons says.
Grif makes a real groan, because he had, actually, been caught neck-deep in some fantasy and
jacking off to it by Donut a billion years ago at Blood Gulch, and the motherfucker had just
assumed that Grif was doing it to make Donut go away. Which he hadn’t been , thanks, but he
was , in an ironic twist of fate, now actually attempting to make Donut go away with implied
masturbation, and, perhaps more ironically, now Simmons was actually in the room and not
just imagined.
“Uhh, I don’t want to talk about it,” Grif says. “Mission failed!”
“What, we’re just throwing in the towel?”
“Yep!” says Grif, who’s had enough harassment within the last forty-eight hours to last him
forever and frankly, he’d rather put up with Donut than have to listen to Simmons talk about
fucking masturbating, or have to sit in a room with Simmons while Donut talks about Grif
masturbating. Time to abandon ship, boys.
“We barely tried,” Simmons protests.
“Par for Red Team, then,” says Grif. “Let’s get out there and put up with this annoying
gayster.”
“Griiiiif!” says Donut.
And then Simmons, without looking at Grif and with terror all over his face, opens his mouth
and does a loud, drawn-out, longing porn-star moan.
Grif immediately shoves his hands over Simmons’s face. “The fuck do you think you’re
doing ?”
Simmons shoves Grif’s hands off. “Hang on! Just…”
And then he does the noise again , with the hoarse octave and the breath hitch and the voice
crack like he’s getting dragged through the blowjob of his life, except now Grif is right in
front of him, two inches away and frozen as he watches Simmons’s head tilt back and his
eyelids flutter and his lips falling open and holy shit holy shit?
Grif must be dead. This isn’t real, and he’s descended to hell, where he has to watch
Simmons make hot noises right in front of his face and he’s not allowed to do anything about
it .
“Wh,” says Grif. “Hh.”
Simmons looks at him like he’s lost his mind, which he has. He definitely has. He’s
hallucinating with his ears and also his eyes. No fantasy-Simmons has ever been so real
before, but there’s a first time for everything.
“Nnnmmm. Mhhh,” says Grif.
Simmons says, “Earth to Grif? If you do a sex noise, then he thinks you’re jacking off
because it’s your room. If it’s me who makes a sex noise, then he thinks…”
“Ohh,” says Donut’s voice. “Sorry! Never mind! Didn’t mean to interrupt! Have fun and stay
safe and use plenty of lube! Also a condom! Actually two condoms! I have spares if you need
them! Okay bye!”
There’s the sound of Donut walking away, and then a silence.
Simmons crosses his arms. He’s resolutely not looking at Grif, and he’s got a weird, fixed
look in his eye, like he’s just one inch from unraveling into a terrified, embarrassed mess and
is holding it together by his fingernails.
“You definitely imitated that noise from a porno,” says Grif.
Simmons gives a hysterical giggle. “Um, okay, yeah, I definitely did.”
Something about the way Simmons says that makes Grif think that he definitely didn’t.
“Not half-bad, though,” Grif says. “Maybe the porn industry takes voice-actors?”
“There’s no way I’d be able to tell Sarge I’m leaving Red Team to be a porn VA.”
“I mean, at this rate you’ll just be on Red Team and a porn VA,” Grif mumbles, and Simmons
does another nervous laugh, the one with the doofus grin that’s all lopsided and and cute and
embarrassed.
Grif puts his face in his hands and groans and can’t explain why when Simmons asks him
what’s wrong.
Sugar Scrub
Chapter Summary
“Normal as in the usual state of impending and oppressive unspoken feelings held back
by a thin, crumbling dam of denial?”
Simmons closes Grif's cracked-open bedroom door and leans against the metal paneling in
defeat. “I’m pretty sure we have to change tactics,” he says. “He’s got Lopez on guard duty.”
“That dastardly son of a bitch,” Grif breathes.
This is why Grif hates Donut: the man is uncrackable. Impenetrable, so to speak. You can’t
get back at him because he’s too stupid to be played; but the instant you stop trying, he pulls
shit like laying siege to your bedroom and waiting for you to emerge with your gay lover so
you can talk about your feelings.
“It’s none of his business,” Grif mutters.
“We can wait him out,” Simmons suggests.
Grif hesitates.
See—logically, this tracks. Simmons knows, and Grif knows, that the magic of being Grif
and Simmons is that whenever you think, “Oh, they absolutely can’t go on like this,” it turns
out they definitely, totally can.
Shunted into Nowheresville for five straight years with only five to ten other people for
company at any given time?
Paired up with an asshole they can’t stand for guard duty every single day?
Wound up with the world’s stupidest CO?
Wound up with the world’s most annoying recruit?
Wound up in the Nowheresville, Tunnel Edition, for a straight year with Grif as a sergeant in
a chain of command he’s underprepared for and doesn’t give a damn about?
Grif—and Simmons, for that matter—they’re not good soldiers. Grif’s a good time-killer. A
self-entertainer. A day-waster. The little moments of nothing, when the sun doesn’t move and
the clock doesn’t tick and none of the words on the page make sense and nobody is running
this army and nobody says anything they mean or means anything they say—it turns out that
Grif can absolutely go on through those moments, if he’s got the right partner. Grif and
Simmons are not status-quo-changers. They’re status-quo-survivors.
That is to say, Grif’s one and only talent is being able to wait forever.
So this shit with Donut veritably laying siege to Grif’s room, waiting for either one of them
to come out unarmed and unprepared? Please. You think this is their first rodeo? What kind
of slow-burn emotional-repression scrubs do you think they are? And when Simmons says,
“We could wait him out,” that makes sense —theoretically. Logically. Everything they’ve
ever done says that yes, if there’s a shitty status-quo to be endured, they could endure it.
Logically.
As if logic has ever told them anything useful before.
“Earth to Grif?” Simmons asks again.
“We’re not on Earth,” Grif says automatically.
“You know what I meant,” Simmons says tartly, who’s heard that smart-ass response one too
many times to get properly irritated.
“I guess there’s nothing better to do,” Grif says. “Yeah. Let’s wait him out.”
“I’m just saying,” says Donut to Sarge, “that if Grif and Simmons are gonna be sharing the
bed, wink wonk, then I shouldn’t have to share a room with Lopez! I think that Grif should
donate his room to me—”
"You come anywhere near my bedroom," Grif interrupts, "and I punt you back to Blue Base."
Donut tsks. "Geez! So touchy..."
Grif is not going to wait Donut out. Donut needs to stop this, right now, immediately.
After Sarge has gone to bed at the ripe old hour of seven o’clock, and Simmons has scurried
back to the safe haven of his own bedroom, Grif walks right up to Lopez’s bedroom where
Donut is spending the night and bangs on the door.
Donut opens the door with a bright, cheery smile and a charcoal sugar scrub still on his face.
(Where’d he even get the—no, never mind.) “Oh! Grif! H—”
“You gotta stop,” Grif says.
“Stop what?” Donut asks.
“You know what you’re doing,” Grif says.
Donut blinks. “I don’t, actually! What am I doing?”
“What are you doing?” Grif repeats in disbelief. “You’re—you—this— psychological
warfare, that’s what!”
Donut thinks about this. “No, I don’t think warfare was covered in my AP Psych class,” he
says.
“Don’t give me that,” Grif says. “You’re trying to get me to admit to having feelings.”
“Why would I try to get you to do that? I already know you have feelings!”
“What? No,” says Grif.
“Yes, Grif, everyone has feelings! Like, every day, almost!”
Grif squints.
“Do you, uh,” says Donut, “think that feelings are not normal to have—”
“I’m not getting psychoanalyzed,” Grif says.
“Excuse you!” Donut says. “Psychoanalysis is nonsense and everyone knows it! I subscribe
only to the phrenological schools of thought, thank you very much!”
“I don’t know what that is and I don’t want to and also I don’t care. I’m not talking about my
feelings and you can’t make me and you need to stop prying into my business.”
Donut looks genuinely floored. “Prying? Me? I would never! What kind of gossiping
midwestern househusband do you think I am?”
“I don’t care! I just—”
“Because let me tell you,” Donut says, “I don’t talk nearly enough to be a midwestern
househusband! Maybe Southern. Do you think I could be a Southern househusband? Ohh,
but I always wanted to be cool and trendy like the West coast—”
“DONUT,” says Grif. “FOCUS.”
“No me hagas venir allí (Don’t make me come over there) ,” says Lopez from behind the
door.
“All I want,” says Grif, “is for you to swear you’re not going to stick your gossiping Westcoast househusband nose into my business!”
“But I feel so distant!” Donut complains. “What happened to us, Grif? I feel like we never
talk anymore!”
“Just the way I like it,” says Grif.
Donut gasps. “You don’t mean that!”
Grif groans. Why does every conversation with Donut have to be like pulling teeth, except all
the teeth have puppy-dog eyes? (Oh, geez, that’s not a great mental image.) “Look—Donut.
Just say it. Say that I don’t have to admit to any cheesy dramatic feelings if I don’t want to,
and then I can go back to doing nothing and you can go back to making everyone
uncomfortable and everything can go back to normal.”
“Normal as in the usual state of impending and oppressive unspoken feelings held back by a
thin, crumbling dam of denial?” Donut asks.
“Yeah, that one.”
Donut sighs. His shoulders droop. Makes a whining noise.
“What now,” says Grif.
“Denial is so bad for you but it’s so easy,” Donut sighs, a little dreamily, like someone
talking about a cake when they’re on a diet. “Nothing like unbelieving in your feelings hard
enough to make it slightly more fake...”
Donut hangs his head.
“Okay,” Donut mumbles.
“Okay, what?” says Grif. “I need to hear you say it.”
“Nobody on Red Team has feelings and therefore I shouldn’t ask about them,” says Donut.
Grif breathes a sigh of relief. “Alright,” he says. “We’re cool.”
There’s a silence.
“Soooooo…” Donut begins.
“What now,” Grif says dully.
Donut claps his hands together. “Tell me all about Simmons!”
“WHAT DID WE JUST TALK ABOUT,” says Grif.
“We talked about me not asking you about your feelings!” Donut said. “Which, like, I dunno
why you’d bring that up out of the blue like that, but whatever!”
“I was referring specifically to you asking about me and my feelings with the--the Simmons
thing! What did you think I was talking about?!”
Donut looks at him like he’s crazy. “Please, Grif, I know you’re only dating Simmons for his
hot bod!”
“WHAT,” says Grif.
“Yeah! Two guys, clean friendly sex! A whirlwind fling, a fun friend-with-benefits! No need
to be ashamed!” Donut says cheerfully. “I know how it is, when you just start banging and
you’re in the honeymoon phase and you’re totally in love with the idea of being in love! But
after the twentieth reach-around and you’ve got sand up your—”
“STOP,” says Grif. “STOP TALKING. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.”
“Anyway, I figured, there’s absolutely no way Tucker’s right—”
“What does Tucker have to do with anything?! Where did that segue come from?!” Grif
demands. “—Wait. Wait a minute—”
“He’s so sure you guys are super secretly in love,” Donut prattles on, “so when Lopez said
you guys were in love, I was like, oh no! I might have to owe Tucker those twenty bucks!
And also twenty blow—”
“Donut—”
“—darts!” Donut finishes. “Blow-darts to send to Junior for his little whatchamacallit—”
“Tucker thinks we’re in love?”Grif echoes, feeling… odd.
“—for Junior’s birthday gift! Which are really hard to find in the desert, let me tell you. So I
was trying really hard to be positive—”
“Tucker thinks we’re in love?”
“—when Lopez said you guys were in love, you know, because I wanna be a good friend and
Doc had this thing about being a so-called Negative Nancy—”
“Tucker thinks we’re in love?”
“He says you were broadcasting it from space,” says Donut. “ He’s convinced you guys were
each other’s one true love! Destined soulmate! Endgame ship!”
Grif hesitates. “What do boats have to do with anything...?”
“ I said that he was being ridiculous,” Donut says matter-of-factly, rather than answering,
“that a little friendly sexual tension wasn’t uncommon between dudes, and there’s no way
you two are in love! The idea that sex and love are the same thing is such a juvenile concept,
and you guys are the spitting image of heterosexual friends-with-benefits!” Donut pats Grif
on the shoulder. “It’s okay. I’ve got eyes like an eagle! I know what’s really going on with
you two! Nothing wrong with having some sexy dates for fun with a good friend.”
“Okay, let me get this straight,” says Grif.
“Yeah?”
“We’re dating… but we don’t like each other,” Grif says.
“Yeah!”
“And we’re banging,” Grif says. “But we’re not gay.”
“Of course!” says Donut. “Anyone can tell just from looking at you!”
Grif puts his hands together and takes a deep breath. Tells himself that this is not a bad thing.
It’s not what they’d intended, but it’s--it’s not a bad thing. It’s not. It’s not . Donut is a
fucking idiot and it doesn’t matter what he thinks and wasn’t Grif the person who didn’t want
other people knowing anything about his business anyway?
“Tucker’s absolutely ridiculous sometimes,” Donut says, rolling his eyes. “Honestly! You
two, in love! A friendship and a sexual attraction does not a romance make. I mean, look, no
offense and all, but… Simmons is obviously not your type, you know?”
“Not my type,” Grif repeats flatly.
“Simmons is lovely, but between you and me, I dunno how well he’d fare in a relationship!”
“Really,” says Grif.
“Doesn’t seem like a really stable commitment! Sometimes I get the feeling that he’s a little
unsteady? Like, as a person?”
“A little unsteady,” Grif says.
“Yeah! So probably not exactly prime dating material...”
Grif closes his eyes. Tries to go to his happy place. Tries not to think about how Tucker, who
wasn’t around for any of their shitty fake-dating charade, thinks they’re in love. And Donut?
Donut doesn’t think they’re in love?
Simmons isn’t prime dating material?
“And what was all that about us being in love and eloping?” Grif says, very carefully.
Donut shrugs. “You did say that you weren't eloping! I guess I must have translated it
wrong. Y’know, I think that my Spanish isn’t quite as good as I think it is, sometimes?”
Grif slams open Simmons’s door. Simmons nearly falls out of bed.
“Simmons!” Grif declares. “Donut thinks we’re not in love! We have to be gayer!”
Nine Takes
Chapter Summary
What does “being in love” look like?
After Simmons is done having his snit about “what do you mean we have to be gayer” and
“for god’s sake what did you do this time” and “you did WHAT,” Grif and Simmons sit down
on Simmons’s floor like a pair of middle-school girls having a sleepover, and get to
discussing one tiny, itty-bitty, insignificant set-back:
What does “being in love” look like?
“I thought we covered this,” Simmons complains. “Didn’t we? The whole thing at the tree,
with the gay naps and being the Ambiguously Gay Duo who looks exactly the way we did
before, but now the Unambiguously Gay Duo?”
“No, it’s different, because before we were just doing the ‘we’re mostly the same chill guys
but now we’re dating’ thing, which means we could just be like, banging or something. Now
we have to look like we’re in love . And to look like we’re in love, we have to know what
being in love looks like!”
“The fact that you’re explaining this with the wild hand gestures of an alien theorist from
Ancient Aliens doesn’t really convince me,” says Simmons.
“Simmons, oh my god, aliens are real! We fought them!”
“We fought a singular alien!”
“Who then immediately knocked up Tucker who then gave birth to Junior, who is a Blue, so
therefore we’ve fought aliens plural.”
“Junior was a toddler ! That’s like saying Red Team fought a two-year-old !”
“You think Sarge would even fucking hesitate to fight some two-year-old wearing a full bluejeans outfit—”
“If anyone was wearing an entire outfit made of jeans then of course Red Team would fight
them, but—”
So they got a little off topic. Take two: What does “being in love” look like?
“We don’t know anything about being in love and therefore we’re going to get everything
wrong and then crash and burn and then probably die,” Simmons cries. “I’m too young to
die, Grif!”
Grif holds up a hand. Takes a deep breath. Simmons is about to get schooled in the art of
love. “Relax, my young Padawan, I know everything there is to know about being in—”
“You insult the Jedi Order by using their terminology when you don’t know shit about being
in love, Grif, don’t lie.”
“The Jedi Order was a bunch of useless conservatives who deserve to be insulted and you
know it,” Grif replies.
“Too soon, Grif,” Simmons whispers. “Too soon.”
“They’ve been dead for hundreds of years, Simmons, get over it!”
“If we were in love, you’d respect my strong feelings about Star Wars,” Simmons says saltily,
and sits in a corner and mopes like a six-foot-tall baby until Grif promises to help him escape
Donut’s wine and cheese hour next week.
Take three: What does “being in love” look like?
“Uhhh, I figured something like… a shitty apartment?” Grif says.
Simmons squints suspiciously. “Is this a metaphor? Like, ‘love is like a shitty apartment
because they both have windows to the soul’ or something like that?”
“Windows to the soul are the eyeballs, Simmons.”
“I know what the windows to the soul are! I was making a joke! And it’s the eyes , Grif, not
the eye balls; eyeballs sounds like something that belongs in a serial killer’s collection.”
“Newsflash,” Grif says. “Did you know, right now , as we speak, you contain not one , but
two eyeballs in your—”
“Shut up , Grif!”
Take four: What does “being in love” look like?
“Probably divorce,” says Simmons.
“Not like I’ve ever been divorced,” Grif says, “but I’m pretty sure divorce is what happens
when you’re not in love.”
Simmons is looking studiously at the wall. “Well, if you’re in a, a bad spot or something,”
Simmons says, “like it’s not working out, or you both really like each other but something’s
gone wrong, then it’d be better for both of you to leave the other person alone, rather than,
um, staying together for money or some… stupid pride thing, or even because you love each
other.”
“Oh,” says Grif.
Simmons is still looking at the wall. “What was this about a shitty apartment?” Simmons
asks.
Grif, who’s been about to say something about getting a shitty apartment and settling down
and getting to sleep in and having enough food in the pantry and maybe a late-night job so
that they can spend most of the day watching movies together before they go off to work and
then come back at 2AM exhausted but okay because they get to crawl into bed with each
other, says instead: “Uhhh, nothing.”
Take five: What does “being in love” look like?
“Maybe we can combine out ideas about what love should look like and then see what the
commonalities are,” says Simmons.
“Like data analysis for love?” Grif says.
“Yeah!” says Simmons brightly.
“Nerd.”
“I’m only a nerd if the data analysis doesn’t come up with anything,” Simmons retorts.
They make a Venn diagram. The only commonality is “desire to be left alone.”
“Hm,” says Grif.
“That doesn’t look right,” says Simmons.
Take six: What does “being in love” look like?
“Let’s go ask Donut,” Simmons suggests.
“ Absolutely not ,” Grif replies.
“C’mon, Grif, Donut would absolutely know what love looks like! Isn’t that his whole
thing?”
Grif thinks about Donut saying You guys are the spitting image of heterosexual friends-withbenefits! Grif grits his teeth. “I’m somehow doubtful,” Grif says.
“What even happened with you two?” Simmons asks. “Isn’t the whole point that Sarge thinks
we’re dating? Who cares what Donut thinks?”
“Well,” Grif says. “That’s, uh, y’know. It was... the way he said it. Uhh. I thought that maybe
he might, er, tell Sarge? Or…”
“Wait a minute,” Simmons says.
Grif freezes, like he’s been caught in a lie.
Simmons looks delighted. “I just realize--I don’t have two eyeballs! You were wrong! I
actually only have one because I lost one from the cyborg surgery!”
Grif bursts out laughing at him, which means Simmons goes to mope in the corner again.
Take seven: What does “being in love” look like?
“Griiiiif,” Simmons says. “ Please go ask Donut.”
Simmons asking nicely is the worst, because it usually means Grif is going to do it.
“Donut doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Grif mumbles.
“Donut is the person who’s determining whether or not we’re in love or not,” Simmons says.
“So doesn’t his opinion matter the most?”
“Ignore the critics, Simmons,” Grif says in his faux-wise voice. “Do your own thing. Walk
only the roads you’d walk for yourself.”
“Which brings us back to the original point,” says Simmons. “We don’t know what road to
walk.”
Grif really doesn’t like when Simmons asks nicely.
“He’s not going to say anything important,” Grif warns.
“It’ll be worth a shot,” Simmons says.
Take eight: What does “being in love” look like?
“Hey, Grif!” Donut says, sitting at the kitchen table with Lopez. “Fancy meeting you here! I
was just talking to Lopez about how he killed your sister!”
Take nine: What does “being in love” look like?
“What’d he say?” Simmons asks.
“Nothing important,” says Grif.
Simmons doesn't push it.
Frost Defrost
Chapter Summary
Prissy? Lame? Screechy? Pushy? High-maintenance?
Valhalla is beautiful, by the way. In case anyone was wondering. That’s definitely what we
were all wondering, right? Valhalla’s weather is completely relevant to what we were just
discussing.
Like, Valhalla is objectively wonderful. Subjectively, the weather is a tad cold, and there’s
snow melting along the tops of the surrounding hilltops more often than Grif would like, but
the weather reaches the sixties and even, on good days, seventies and eighties. It’s not so cold
that you can’t go out in a single layer of clothes, nor so stiflingly dry like Blood Gulch, nor
breezing and blazing like Honolulu. Permanently in a state of transitioning from frost to
defrost, cool and sunny simultaneously and never. Valhalla, unlike other places Grif has had
to suffer through, is… tolerable.
Grif doesn’t enjoy being finicky about something silly like the weather. Doesn’t enjoy being
high maintenance. Preferring his environment to be one way or another is… what’s the word?
Prissy? Lame? Screechy? Pushy? High-maintenance? Discontent. Unhappy. Unwanted.
Expendable. Impermanent. Insecure. Dangerous. And Grif’s a coward at heart, you know.
It’s not healthy to want too much. You think it’s a mistake that there’s entire religions
dedicated to learning how to stop wanting?
By the time Grif gets his lazy ass out of bed and stops wondering about the fucking weather,
every single member of Red Team has pounded on the door and told him he was going to
miss breakfast, as if MREs were anything to mourn over. Grif heads into the kitchen, as he
does every morning, to see Sarge reading something on a tablet (as always), Simmons
fretting over coffee (as usual), and Donut (less usual) sitting on the nearby couch with Lopez
—
And there’s nothing wrong with Lopez. Or Donut. Both Donut and Lopez are always around;
just because he’s not hanging out in their back pockets like Simmons or constantly aware of
how to avoid their shitty ideas like Sarge doesn’t mean they’re not, y’know, on Red Team,
and therefore usually in Red Base. Shut the fuck up, Grif. Eat some bread.
Grif eats some bread. It doesn’t taste very good.
“Around here,” says Donut, “is where Tucker and I were holed up--very tiny hole, too, very
tight--but honestly there was a whole lot of nothing there, so I don’t see why it was such a big
deal that Tucker and I got sent there! Just some old alien junk! Lots of kinds of junk. Junk in
the trunk, even!”
Both Sarge and Simmons visibly suppress any reaction to just about everything Donut said.
“ (Stop talking to me) ,” Lopez says.
“That’s what I was thinking! Which is why Tucker send me to go and get help, so we can
really get up in there and firmly pry him out of that tight spot!”
“ (That’s not even a proper innuendo. It’s just the way you said it that makes everything
awful). ”
“Anyway, Caboose was really bent on helping Tucker, which is odd, because Caboose never
liked Tucker,” Donut says. “So I guess if Tucker comes back, there’ll be more Blues in the
canyon for us to blow up?”
“ (More meaningless and delusional war games. Hooray) ,” says Lopez.
“I’m so glad you’re here to help us, Lopez!” Donut chirps. “Man, it would have really sucked
if you’d had to stay back in Blood Gulch just because Grif’s sister was still ther—”
Grif decides to take his bread somewhere else.
It still doesn’t taste very good.
There were some things that Grif was supposed to do today. He had a plan. He hadn’t really
called it a plan, but he’d had like, some thoughts about the way he wanted things to go,
y’know? The path forward was so clear.
Now he can’t remember any of it. Where’d they go? Was it ever even there? The future had
been easy when he’d thought of it. Even fun. Something about flirting?
What the hell had he been doing? As if doing something like flirting blatantly with Simmons
could be anything but terrifying, and therefore impossible. Grif’s a coward at heart, after all,
and too damn lazy do anything for himself.
Grif and his half-eaten bread have been hanging out for… some amount of time? Valhalla’s
sun has set a handful of times. Better than Blood Gulch. Still eye-burningly long. Fuck if
Grif’s going to set the clock on his HUD. Just chilling out at the back of the base. Has the air
always been this chilly? Maybe Grif needs more than a t-shirt.
Maybe this would be better if his bread was liquid bread. Alcohol makes everything better,
right? If he wants to be a fucking mess like the rest of his family, that is. Grif’s got some
pride.
Probably.
He hears Donut’s voice off in the distance. Grif moves back inside the base and back to his
bedroom.
Wonders if he can get away with going back to sleep.
Worth a shot, as Kai would say. He does.
Someone bangs on his door. Grif would amuse himself with trying to guess who’s knocking,
but it doesn’t seem very amusing. He hopes they’ll go away.
The door opens. Simmons peeks through the crack in the dark, the single robot eye glaring
red. Simmons is too wise to Grif’s napping spots. He shouldn’t be, Grif shouldn’t have let
him get that way. Not that Grif had been trying particularly hard, just crawling right back into
his own bedroom. What a fucking joke--"what does being in love look like"; give Grif a
fucking break. As if they could have ever pulled that shit off by themselves.
“Really?” Simmons says. “You slept in, and now you’re back here?”
Grif makes a grunting noise. Simmons can take it as affirmative or negative. Doesn’t matter.
Simmons doesn’t really listen to half the shit Grif says anyway, which is just marginally
better than not listening to him at all like Sarge.
“Sarge is getting ideas about blowing up Blue Base again, or at least annoying Caboose,”
Simmons says. “C’mon, fatass, before he ropes me into helping him.”
“Do I gotta do everything for you,” Grif mumbles.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Grif says, and buries his face in his pillow.
Simmons permanently has a bee in his damn bonnet. Always in a snit. Always angry or
wound up. Sometimes, it’s just too... much. Too much. Too everything.
“Okay,” says Grif. “Let’s go.”
Grif goes. Doesn’t do much of anything. Simmons still gets roped into harassing Caboose.
Sarge is shouting at clouds or something. Grif feels Donut side-eyeing the empty space
between Grif and Simmons at all times. Simmons keeps staring at Grif, keeps lobbing
different conversation starters at him. Grif's brain won't even move fast enough to catch them.
Eventually, Grif slips away from the group and goes back to his room.
He doesn’t see why this song and dance should be fun anymore. Didn't Kai say that having
fun was most important?
Local Kids
Chapter Summary
There’s no reason to miss Kai.
Chapter Notes
first, go check out this super cool fanart that prim commissioned from creatrix!!!
http://creatrixanimi.tumblr.com/post/168900741027/primtheamazing-commissioned-meto-make-a
Grif and Kai don’t really like each other, but they’re siblings, so what’re you gonna do about
it, y’know? Oahu was a small island. Everybody knows everybody. There’s only so many
teams you can join in a game that size. Only so many people will have your back. It’s—it’s—
Ah, shit, Grif can’t explain it.
The moment Shailene breaks up with Dex—the moment Dex let Shailene break up with him
—he crawls back under the covers with a newly-acquired bottle of Kai’s tequila and waits.
He doesn’t go to school. He’s going to flunk, anyway.
He doesn’t go to work. Who gives a shit about Domino’s, anyway.
He doesn’t answer the phone when the landlord calls. They were probably going to get
evicted sooner or later.
He doesn’t answer the phone when Mom calls. Whatever it is she has to say, Grif doesn’t
really want to hear it, and she doesn’t come home long enough anyway. The way Grif likes it.
He doesn’t really know what he’s waiting for. For something to be over, maybe. He just
doesn’t know what the something is.
He takes a lot of shots and stares at a live feed of KHON’s traffic cams until he passes out.
He didn’t know what he was waiting for the end of during the twenty-one days when he
didn’t answer Shailene’s texts, calls, didn’t answer the door when she banged on the
apartment door. Then the relationship ended, and that wasn’t what Grif had been waiting for
the end of.
It ended anyway.
Kai bangs open his bedroom door and demands to know why he got fired from the Domino’s
job, which is a fine time for Kai to start giving a damn about money.
“I was gonna go Jenai’s place. She has an outdoor pool ,” she whines. “Now guess what ! I
gotta, like, go to the bank and settle this shit with First Hawaiian ‘cause we overdrew last
month?”
Dex doesn’t say anything.
“Dex, what the fuck ! You know Uncle Ed gon’ kill us if we borrow again!”
Dex doesn’t say anything.
“How come you're so lazy ,” she complains, and whirls away in a cloud of alcohol.
Yeah, that’s Grif.
Real lazy. Do-nothing. Fat and useless. Does nothing but eat and waste good people's tax
dollars.
It’s how you know he’s Polynesian.
Once, Dex’s ninth grade class went to the Polynesian Cultural Center. Something about
government mandated Native Hawaiian history. Dex is supposed to find it enriching, or
something.
He stares at one actress, sitting in a traditional leaf-hut, or whatever the shit they’re called,
weaving a little green bowl out of ti leaves. She's real big. Fat and sun-baked and solid as a
mountain on her ti leaf mat. She smiles, with her big, leathery mouth, and points at the class
leaving. “Hui. All pau here. You gotta go, or your class gon' leave you.”
"I'm supposed to research my culture, Auntie," says Dex.
The Polynesian woman keeps weaving. "No culture here, dear."
"It's the Polynesian cultural center. You're doing the..." Dex gestures. "...leaf... thing."
"Aiya, this is just a party trick. I got it from my auntie. She went Kamehameha.”
The only thing Dex really knows about Kamehameha High School is that Kai had the
bloodline and the brains to go, but didn’t want to because she didn’t want to learn Native
Hawaiian. She called it a waste of time. To be fair, it probably is. The Hawaiian language
isn't going to last and everyone knows it.
"It's a cultural trick,” Dex says.
"Culture is a way of life," Auntie says, and winks. "Nobody pays money to see people live."
Auntie didn’t mean it the way that Dex remembers it. But that’s tough shit on her end.
There’s a flash flood on the day of Dex’s and Shailene’s first date, the kind of rain that fills
up the Manoa river and floods the streets and collects in the misshapen intersections and
turns the road between Maryknoll Elementary and the field where Punahou Carnival gets
held into a water geyser, because the state can’t get its shit together long enough to fill in a
damn pothole. Everyone in Hawaii is a chickenshit who drives twenty miles under the speed
limit when it rains. Shailene yells at Dex for driving over the H3 in a flash flood, through the
damn jungle and through the mountains, just so he can take her out to Starbucks to get their
new seasonal drink—peppermint whatever-the-shit, Dex can’t even remember. But Shailene
is also endlessly amused that Starbucks bothers with seasonal drinks when Hawaii’s weather
always remains at a sweltering eighty-something degrees all year round, and it seemed worth
it to Dex.
Shailene remains convinced that Dex was going to get himself killed, driving over the H3 in
a flash flood. Dex is personally more scared of the ghost who sits in your backseat if you
drive over the Pali with pork in your trunk. She’s real, you know. So are Menehune. This
doesn’t convince Shailene that Dex is any less of a crazy person.
The truth is, Dex loves the H3 highway. Unironically, even. He loves being in his Mom’s tiny
Toyota Echo, sliding the car between the dotted lines on the highway, like he’s filling in a
coloring book. The H3 is a raised highway, one long strip of road with an attempt at a railing,
raised on giant concrete stilts that go down hundreds of feet to disappear into the jungle.
There’s a moment where the road swells, like the crest of a wave, and the railings and the
road disappear behind the edges of his windshield, and it’s just him and his windshield
driving through the rain-beaten valleys in the massive mountains towards an endless ocean.
The KHON traffic cam isn't the same, but it's soothing nonetheless. Stop and start.
Downtown traffic. Four o'clock is always traffic jam for hours. It's brain-melting. That's what
Dex wants.
“What you mean, she broke up with you ,” Kai says.
Kai likes hanging out with the weird pot-smoking micronesian dudes at the back of their high
school. Their mom has no accent, and neither do Dex and Kai, but sometimes, now, Kai gets
the little sing-song pidgin lilt in her voice. Dex wishes she wouldn’t do that. He really wishes
she’d just get through Hawaii’s shithole of a public education system and steer clear of all the
teen-bruiser weirdos, and he really doesn’t care that she picked up how to improvise on the
ukulele from Kainoa, thanks.
Dex doesn’t say anything. He just puts his face back in the pillow. KHON traffic cam is still
playing.
“Oi,” Kai says. “Oi. Dex. Dex .”
Shailene is an Iolani chick. Or was, before she got caught with pot brownie in her locker, ‘cuz
they’re strict about that at swanky places like Iolani. But when you're the kind of person who
went to Iolani, you can go anywhere else, and you stay the kind of person who went to Iolani.
Iolani’s a prissy nerd school. Punahou’s the haole jocks, Iolani’s the Asian nerds,
Kamehameha’s the—well, the bigger Polynesian jocks, the ones who beat Punahou’s haole
ass before Punahou alumni go off to Tufts and Brown, and Kamehameha grads swing a job as
a construction worker, ‘cause thanks for nothing, Captain James Cook. At Iolani, it’s all about
“one team” and “working together” and “put your nose in the grindstone until you shit the
Pythagorean Theorem out your ass.” In true Iolani fashion, Shailene’s a hundred-pound hapa
volleyball player who wears her straightened hair up in a high ponytail, athletic leggings
instead of real pants, big-ass hoop earrings, and does her own manicures while she vidchats
with Dex. (Or she used to, anyway.)
What Dex means by this is that Hawaii’s public education system is a shithole. Either you go
private and shell out enough money to pay a college tuition for your kindergartener, or you
eat shit and die. Nobody likes being in a school-to-prison pipeline. Kids can smell the
worthlessness of getting an A. Public school is just a lot of prisoners, banging at their jail cell
bars, losing hope, getting restless.
Kai comes home from school one day at noon. She’s eating a popcorn bag mixed with
furikake and kakimochi and swearing up a storm because she can’t chew anything with two
teeth missing.
Dex doesn’t even have the energy to ask. He barely has the energy to be alarmed. He asks her
if she wants to go the ER, half-heartedly, even though they couldn’t pay for it anyway. Mom
hasn’t really come home in like, a week or something.
“The fuck are they gonna do, shove my teeth back in?” Kai giggles. She keeps chewing
through popcorn. “Shit, Dex, your private-school bitch can actually throw one punch. Elbow
like knives, brah. Skinny rich bitch. Fuckin’ Japanese," she says, with the pidgin lilt she
picked up from the micronesian kids and Kainoa's ukulele-rapping skills.
Dex pauses. “What? Wait—what?”
“I shoved Shailene’s face through one bathroom mirror,” Kai says.
Airily, she says it, like it ain’t no thing.
Dex feels like he’s gotten punched in the gut.
“Ripped her hoop earring out, too,” says Kai. “They didn’t let me keep it, though. Had a lil’
bit ear lobe still on it, too.”
“Kai,” Dex says.
“Pulled it straight through the puka,” Kai says, checking her reflection in her phone’s front
camera. “Suspension for three weeks. Ah, shit,” says Kai, and grins delightedly. She’s got
furikake between her teeth and her tongue in the space where her incisor used to be. “I look
tough as fuck now, don’t I?”
Dex drags his ass to school just to check if Shailene’s okay. She comes back to school in a
week. She has two big-ass shiny red stitches, one of her temple and one on her chin, and
when the stitches come out and she takes the bandages off, she tries to cover them up with
concealer. She is, indeed, missing the bottom half of her right earlobe. Dex tries to apologize,
and she smiles and nods, but Dex isn’t sure that Shailene really hears him. For the rest of
high school, she keeps her head down, doesn’t look at either Kai or Dex, plays a lot of
volleyball, and disappears to college. Her parents can afford it.
Dex gets a job at Longs, after he graduates. He’s not going to college, of course, so he tries to
keep that job. Tries not to lie down and wait to die for twenty-one days, anymore.
But Dex supposes that’s against his nature, probably. Considering how lazy he is.
Kai goes through her own graduation plastered off her ass. The day afterwards, she wonders
if she should have taken the free counseling sessions that they’d offered her while she was a
student. That one gets a laugh out of Dex.
Dex gets fired from Longs. Because he’s lazy, of course.
He goes to Don Quixote instead. There’s a guy in a tent outside the store who sells andagi by
the bag for one dollar. His name is Dave The Filipino Andagi Guy: first name Dave, last
name The Filipino Andagi Guy. Considering that andagi is literally just warm, deep-fried
bread, it’s real fucking good. Eventually, Dave The Filipino Andagi Guy starts giving Dex
one of two extra per bag, and then he gives them to Dex for free. Dex tries to keep the Don
Quixote job, if only so he can shovel as much andagi down his throat as he can while he
shelves kimchi and giant bags of jasmine rice.
Kai is supposed to get a job at Aulani—y’know, the Disney resort? The one where all the
brown people work the concierge desk and dance the hula in little coconut bras for the
mainland tourists and rich Japanese folks who came to get their wedding photos taken? The
one with the man-made lagoons and the actual, literal plastic mountain , because Disney is
just so committed to the “authentic Hawaiian experience.”
Nobody pays money to see people live, as they say. Plastic mountains sell better.
But this is what they’ve got, this is what’s left of Honolulu, and Kai can play the ukulele
enough. She can smile and say “Mahalo” like she means it, if she really tries, even though
nobody really says Mahalo except in customer service anymore. She’s brown, but not too
brown, and would look smart as hell behind the front desk. She’s got an in, because Auntie
Verna, who currently works the Japanese-speaking concierge, thinks Kai’s just the cutest little
cookie, and also Dex suspects that Auntie Verna used to be Kai’s sugar mama at one point
and possibly still is.
The only thing Dex knows is that Kai doesn’t get a job at Aulani, because she never brings
home the uniform she's supposed to wear, and that he doesn’t see her enough. Sometimes,
he’s not very sure they’re really related, or that they even live in the same house anymore.
But right now, Dex is just trying to keep his head above water. He eats free andagi and buys a
lot of Oreos and the cheapest snack-cakes Longs has in stock, a little collection of food that
he keeps under the bed. It’s okay. It’s okay.
By the time he gets up the energy to call Mom, she’s already been living with some strange
new sugar daddy in Nevada for six weeks.
For five years at Blood Gulch, that’s the life that Grif had been trying to go back to. Man,
Grif is so fucking stupid.
The day after Dex gets drafted, Dex actually pays for his andagi. Dave The Filipino Andagi
Guy tries to tell him not to, but there’s a line, and he’s gotta haul ass and fry more bread, not
sit around and talk story. Dex goes home, ready to turns on KHON and eat his andagi, and
walks straight into Kai with fifty million solo cups and twenty bottles of Smirnoff vodka.
“Yo, Dex, I’m thinking about opening a club,” says Kai, for the bajillionth time this month.
She’s mixing what looks like a giant vat of sangria with even more vodka. “Like, why does
Waikiki gotta have all the action, y’know? And all the Waikiki clubs are full of tourists.
Injustice! Equal clubbing for everyone, Dex!"
"I'm leaving," says Dex.
"Yeah? Where?" Kai says, not really listening.
"I don't know. Basic, I guess."
Kai keeps mixing. "Basic what?"
"Uhh... I... don't really know?" Shit, Dex actually doesn't really know what "basic" stands for.
"I think it's called basic training?"
"Training for what ?"
"The fucking military," Dex snaps, at the end of his patience. "I get shipped out in seven
days."
Kai stops.
Turns.
The bottle in her hand is still leaking vodka all over the table.
“Oh, gross, Kai, you better clean that up,” Dex says.
"What?" she says.
"Seriously, Kai, it'll get sticky if you just leave it."
"You're leaving?" Kai echoes.
Dex puts his head down. Not his fault, he reminds himself. He was drafted. "I'm gonna go
and... pack," Dex lies. “Here. Andagi.”
He throws the andagi bag on the table. It lands in the middle of the vodka puddle. Yikes.
Time to get the fuck out of here.
"Wait," says Kai. "Dex, wait—"
Hawaii is constantly changing. Construction all over the fucking place, despite the state’s
apparent inability to fix the god damn roads. All the government money went into making the
buildings bigger and shinier and richer and more appealing to tourists, and also into having
twenty million cops, which Dex doesn’t actually mind, because he knows that the likelihood
is that the cop who pulls him over went to the same public high school as Dex, and he’ll get a
free pass and a compliment on his hair. Local kids stick together. Speeding tickets are for
haoles.
Dex knows that everything goes. Did you know that the reason why Hawaii hasn’t eroded is
because the United States straight up replaced the edges of the island with fucking metal ?
Yeah, bitch, that’s what the future looks like: the US of A couldn’t afford to lose Hawaii’s
tourism industry, couldn’t afford to lose the idea of Hawaii as everyone’s dream vacation
spot, so they fuckin’ outlined the entire damn island with stainless steel, and then put sand
over it.
Yes, really.
Killed basically the entire marine ecosystem, by the way.
The University of Hawaii faculty were pissed.
The state ships in new sand by the tons to replace the sand that the ocean erodes away.
Dex knows that, if he ever comes back from the army, the odds are that Kahala Mall won’t be
there. It’s old, and the theatre barely works anymore, and the Kahala Hotel got edged out by
some new Ritz-Carlton twenty miles leeward. Odds are, next time he walks into Ala Moana
Mall (not to buy anything, of course, ‘cause Ala Moana is too expensive now), he won’t
know his way around because the shops are all changed again. Downtown looks like a
fuckin’ space station, now, full of big metal buildings. Pearl Harbor’s crammed full of weird
space-travel shit instead of boats.
But he figures the beaches will still be there. They’re gross and filled with gallons of tourist
pee, but—hey. They’re not going anywhere.
The day Dex leaves for Basic, Kai doesn’t see him off. Mom obviously doesn’t, whatwith her
nice new life in Nevada.
Dex does, though, receive a phone call, from a very hungover Kai, who (from the sound of it)
was medicating her hangover with more alcohol. She cries into the receiver and apologizes
for twenty minutes, but when Dex asks her what for, what she’s crying about, Kai slurps
down more beer and there's the sound of a man's voice in the background and the line goes
dead.
Mom could have called. Kai did. A real fucking mess of a phone call, too, in true Kai
fashion.
There’s no reason to miss Kai. No reason to think about how much healthier she looked when
sober in Blood Gulch. Yeah, no reason. Grif always knew Kai wasn’t going to stay.
Pass Point
Chapter Summary
Grif is currently unamused with his own bullshit.
Grif is currently unamused with his own bullshit, which isn’t so much a new experience so
much as it is an experience that, for the last near-decade, has been down-regulated to other
people, like Sarge or Simmons. Usually Simmons, though. Aw, geez, that’s embarrassing,
now that he thinks about it. Sometimes, Grif really hates how grossly leechy he can be, like
some sort of cripple. He doesn’t like how ugly it’s going to be when they all eventually go
their separate ways.
But right now Sarge is still keeping his distance and trying to finagle a straight story out of
Donut about Tucker, so Sarge isn’t going to be the one who makes Grif do anything.
Simmons is being weird and cagey and he’s stopped coming by Grif’s room, which is usually
what happens when someone doesn’t give you a response for several days. So it’s up to Grif
to get his own ass up, pull up to the pantry, and dig out as many sugary, salty, fatty foods as
he can find.
In other words, the Fast-Track Serotonin.
Look—Grif’s not super fat. At least, not in his opinion. He’s overweight, and just overweight
enough that he gets shit for it every now and then. People make snide comments about “oh,
there he goes to the kitchen again” or “ another bag of donuts?” or “ugh,” although the last
one is usually just Simmons, who’s never been polite in his whole life. (Brown-nosing
doesn’t count.) What people forget, Grif thinks, is that the more they put him in a box—”fat”
or “lazy” or “disrespectful” or “cowardly”—the less of himself he actually has to share with
them.
This nonsense about shitting on Grif for eating trash is a weird level of neuroticism that
people make fun of for eating more than they personally do, like Grif and his unashamed love
for food is some sort of demon they have to exorcise lest he convince them it’s okay to have
second servings. It smells like the sort of neuroticism that Grif would expect from Simmons,
except everyone does it. How can one fear be shared so world-wide?
Grif’s not exactly an intelligent guy, though, and personally, he likes to keep his trains of
thought short and simple, in case they hit the end of the rail and hurtle off into accidental
freefall. So he drags all the gross, crumb-filled, oil-stained plates littered around his floor,
hauls his dishes over to the sink and dumps them there, runs the water so they can soak a bit,
and—eh, someone else will do the rest. Simmons likes cleaning, anyway. Grif’s pretty sure it
calms him down. Then Grif starts digging through the pantry.
Again, probably not the most kosher way to go about getting himself up and moving, but
Grif’s been keeping a little stash of food under his bed for times like these. If he can’t do
anything else, at the very least, he can still eat, and it still tastes good. Things can’t be real
bad if chugging a bottle of Pepsi is still delicious, y’know? It’s reassuring. Those kinds of
reassurances aren’t going to run away, either, which is, of course, the most important aspect
of a reassurance.
—There’s a lot less junk food in the pantry than Grif expected. Which doesn’t make sense,
because nobody else in this place is eating entire family-size bags of barbeque chips. Right?
Grif shoves his spoils of war into a plastic bag and opens the fridge. Passes on the beer,
because he’s not super excited to open up the binge-drinking can of worms today. (How great
is that--reaching the point where he’s too tired to fuck himself over? Hey, man, whatever
works.) Snags a two-liter bottle of Donut’s diet sodas from forever ago. Shoves that in the
bag too. Turns around.
Simmons is standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking simultaneously disgusted and
confused.
Grif doesn’t see why Simmons should look so confused when he’s walked in on Grif stealing
food before.
“Not like you guys were gonna eat this stuff, anyway," Grif says, by way of saying hello.
Simmons looks unconvinced. By what, Grif also doesn’t know.
“Welp, good talk. Later,” says Grif, and turns to walk away.
“Are you,” says Simmons.
Grif stops. Simmons stops.
“What?” Grif says.
“Never mind,” Simmons says immediately, already looking pissed, as he always is when he
can't figure out what else to do. “Just be glad I’m not snitching to Sarge, fatass.”
If Grif really cared, he'd glare at Simmons with suspicion, but he doesn't really. Maybe
Simmons was going to ask about the fake-dating thing. They were supposed to be doing that,
right? Both of them fired up to prove Donut wrong? Or at least Grif was. Damn, Grif should
get out of here before Simmons asks. “Sure,” says Grif, and slinks off down the hall before
Simmons can change his mind. If Simmons wants to fumble around with his dumb temper
reflex, Grif will take whatever grace period he can.
Empty Nests
Chapter Summary
“Better than none!"
Sarge can be relied upon to alert the entirety of Red Team when events get too quiet, serious,
tense, or potentially character-develop-y. Like, you wanna know why Red Team is the way it
is around emotions? It’s Sarge. Really. For real. Has nothing to do with Grif or Simmons or
Lopez or Donut whatsoever. They all just take after Sarge, who had his tear ducts removed
and replaced with motor oil—yes, really, he really did, Donut and Grif both saw it with their
own two eyes.
The anti-emotion alert sounds something like:
“BUT YOU CAN’T,” Grif hears him yodel from inside Red Base. “WHAT WOULD YOU
DO WITHOUT US?”
Whoever replies is too quiet to be heard through half a foot of bulletproof steel and concrete,
which is around any normal human volume.
“THE RED ARMY COULD NOT SURVIVE WITHOUT YOU!”
Grif, who is in the deep in the excruciatingly difficult task of staring at the ceiling, begins to
wonder if it’s time to get up.
“I’M NOT READY TO BE AN EMPTY-NESTER,” Sarge wails.
Yeah, okay, it’s time to get up. And maybe clean up these five-million snack wrappers, too.
“Private Grif!” Sarge exclaims, pulling himself up to his full height, which is still about an
entire foot smaller than Caboose. “Finally emerged from your slacking and lazy-ing and
skipping team meetings, I see!”
“You mean the team meetings where we sit around and complain that none of us has a laser
sword?” says Grif.
“Yes! They’re vital to upkeeping morale and determination! Keeping in mind the ultimate
goal, which to adopt a new Red to the army who can both punch through steel walls, has a
laser sword, and is almost as handsome but not more handsome than myself!”
Grif cracks his spine and turns the shade up on his visor, so he can actually see in the bright
sunlight after having been a cave gremlin for so many days. He's too tired for this shit. “I can
see how this is incredibly necessary,” says Grif, with zero inflection in his voice, “in order to
defeat the dastardly Blue Army, who’s been such a threat to our way of life so for long,
lurking around in their base, throwing Sunday movie nights, having emotionally-engaging
plots, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Those Blue Teams sound like a real problem for you guys,” says Caboose.
“Blue Team is a problem to itself,” Grif mutters.
“Don’t play coy, Blue!” Sarge cries. “You know the threat you pose to society and the free
man!”
“I don’t see why this means I can’t leave Valhalla,” says Caboose.
“Because without us, who’ll shoot bullets at you and blow up your home?” Sarge wails.
“Who’ll tie your shoelaces and pack your lunches? How will you survive out there in the
cold, cold world without anyone to threaten you with annihilation?!”
“You’re absolutely right,” says Grif. “That’s completely and entirely logical. Good thinking,
sir.”
“Don’t do that deadpan ass-kissing, Grif,” Sarge says. “I’m still holding out hope that
Simmons will resume his position. And hopefully realize he could have a better taste in men,
for chrissake.”
“Well, theoretically,” says Caboose, “if I go find Tucker, then if I got shot and died, then
Tucker could give me a piggy-back ride back to Blue Base, and then I’d probably be all right,
sooooo…”
Grif squints incredulously at Caboose. Not that Caboose can see his expression through the
helmet, but it’s the principle of the thing.
“Why are you looking at me like that,” says Caboose.
“You can’t even see my face,” says Grif.
“Your neck did a sassy chicken stretch,” Caboose replies. “The one I’m not allowed to do
anymore because Church can’t do it and he gets jealous.”
Grif would point out that Caboose is free to do as many sassy chicken stretches as he’d like
because Church is fucking dead, but, alas, that is exactly the reason why Grif can’t point it
out. “And why are you going to go find Tucker?” Grif asks instead. “Tucker, who you hate, of
all people?”
Caboose fidgets.
“See?!” Sarge cries. “He won’t tell me! We’re drifting, Grif! We’re falling apart!”
“Dude. Caboose,” says Grif. “C’mon. I know you want your team back, but. Really?
Tucker?”
Caboose sighs.
“Look, we’ll paint Donut baby-blue and ship him over if you want company,” says Grif.
“They’ve even got the same compulsion to make a minimum of four filthy sex jokes per
minute.”
“Two-hundred-forty innuendos per hour,” Sarge mutters. “Gotta hand it to ‘em, that’s not bad
mileage.”
“That’s now how mileage—wait, did you do that math in your head?”
“Tucker might be Tucker, but he’s still Tucker,” says Caboose. “So I’ll go, and get Tucker,
and bring Tucker, and then there will be both me and Tucker for you to fight!”
“That’s a two-hundred percent increase in Blues,” Sarge says. “Not bad odds, actually.”
“That’s still just two Blues!” Grif protests.
“Better than none! What am I supposed to do if Blue Team is gone from this valley?!” Sarge
cries.
“Go find some other baby to beat up,” Grif mutters.
“Church said I’m not allowed to beat up babies, so maybe you shouldn’t, either,” says
Caboose. “Tucker will be here soon, and then you can beat him up. I can help!”
If the word “Church” comes out of Caboose’s mouth one more time, Grif’s just going to give
this conversation up as a bad job. “That’s assuming you even make it to where Tucker is,”
says Grif, “and considering that Donut barely lived through it, I somehow don’t have the
greatest faith in this mission succeeding."
“That sucks for the mission,” says Caboose. “What does the mission have to do with me?”
Grif is really, really too tired for this shit. “Caboose, seriously,” he says. “Just stay here.
Move in or something. We’ll shuffle the bedrooms around again—you can share with Donut
and we’ll kick Lopez out to, I dunno, live in the basement. Forget Tucker. Leave it alone.
Make like Red Team and pretend it’s not there until it stops being a problem. Let it die.”
“No,” Caboose snaps, so fast that Grif startles.
“Uh,” says Sarge. “C—”
“I’m tired of sitting on the floor doing nothing and being bad at building a friend!” Caboose
interrupts. “It’s boring and stupid and I hate doing nothing and doing nothing makes me hate
me! So I’m not doing nothing anymore. Doing anything is better than doing nothing.”
Grif jerks, involuntarily.
“Hm,” says Sarge.
“I don’t see what the problem is,” says Caboose. “You’re not on my team. If you want, you
guys can just wait here and do nothing while I go get Tucker. Okay?”
“Hm,” says Sarge, again. Grif says nothing.
Caboose picks up his assault rifle. “Goodbye. Have fun doing nothing in your empty valley
with nobody around,” says Caboose, with complete sincerity, and starts walking back towards
Blue Base.
“Hmmrrhghghghghhhggggg,” says Sarge.
Together, they stand and watch Caboose trudge up through the river and around the bend.
“So I guess we just do nothing,” says Grif.
“Should be your favorite plan yet, then,” says Sarge, with more than a touch of irritation.
“I’m going back to bed,” says Grif.
“I knew it!” Sarge cries as Grif hikes back to Red Base. “Lazy, good-for-nothing snoozer!”
Yeah, Grif's aware.
Honest Work
Chapter Summary
"Doing anything is better than doing nothing."
Grif wants to explain himself to Caboose, in a way that he's never really wanted to explain
himself to anyone—not his mother, not Kai, not Sarge, not Simmons. Perhaps especially not
Simmons, whatwith that bitter, passive-aggressive nagging he does. But Caboose—Grif
needs Caboose to understand, in a way that he knows he'd never want to actually do, much
less actually put into motion.
Grif wants to explain why he let Caboose down.
Grif is dreaming about a cold, clear night, when the sky didn’t snow and the wind didn’t
blow, and Grif actually had something worth doing, and consequences.
Specifically, Grif is dreaming about a night when he rolled his eyes at himself, because he'd
never believed that machismo boy-fantasy of joining the military and getting to shoot big
guns and feel part of the team and do something heroic and feel special, because he's always
known that nobody's special, not really. Except that he's beginning to feel like maybe he
missed the point of that myth of the military—maybe the point isn't that you become an
individual, but that you become part of something bigger than yourself, and that maybe that
great creation myth of the military is not so much myth after all. Grif is dreaming about a
night where he knew why he was here, and it was to do good work, protect his team, make a
stand at a base protecting a drop zone connecting two supply routes to major cities full of
civilians, four-hundred miles away.
Eventually, Grif blinks awake.
“What’s up with you?” Jackson asks, in that weirdly blunt, arched-eyebrow way he tends to
ask about other people’s well-being. “Don’t nod off and leave me by myself.”
Grif rubs at his eyes. “Third night shift in a row,” he says.
Grif can’t see Jackson—not really. They’re sitting up in the watchtower bubble, surrounded
by the dark; Jackson’s got a pair of night-vision binoculars strapped to his chest, which he
picks up only periodically, half-heartedly, when he’s particularly bored. There’s no lights in
the bubble, for the same reason you don’t turn your lights on in a car at night. The late-night
lights at the gate are so distant. Without the light, without the snow, the glass bubble seems to
vanish, and it’s just two people sitting three-hundred feet in the air, like they could step off
the tower and disappear.
“Sleep during the day,” says Jackson, unimpressed.
"Don't tell me what to do, rookie."
"This rookie has a better sleep schedule than you because I take naps."
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Grif mutters.
“Then do it," says Jackson. "Aren’t you always talking about how you can sleep on
command?”
“Hell yeah, dude. It’s my super power.”
“Lame,” says Jackson.
“Hey! It’s super useful, and therefore super cool.”
Jackson makes an “ehh” motion with his hand. “Doesn’t seem so useful if you’re falling
asleep.”
“Uh, no, dude, mess hall isn’t open at night.”
Jackson snorts.
There’s a silence.
“And there’s no training drills at night,” Grif says.
Jackson makes a disgusted face. “Don’t tell me you’re staying awake to go to training. Just
skip it.”
“I don’t wanna,” Grif says.
“You have a perfectly legitimate pass because of the night shift. Skip it.”
“I don’t wanna,” Grif says.
Jackson squints. “Are you… by chance… a masochist…?”
Grif starts laughing. “I am the most vanilla person you’ll ever meet, thank you very much!”
“Boring,” Jackson mutters.
“Oh, ew, dude, I didn’t need to know that about you.”
“That reminds me that I have to convince Parker to take a night shift, too, so we can have the
same break times,” Jackson says.
“I said I didn’t need to know this!”
Jackson snickers, but lets it drop.
Silence again.
“Dude,” says Grif, eventually.
“Don’t call me dude.”
“I can call you whatever I want, rookie,” Grif says. “You’re the one who got here like, five
weeks ago and is already skipping drills.”
Grif can feel Jackson roll his eyes.
“Does it ever fuck you up a little bit,” Grif begins, “that like… if we fuck up defending this
base, then that’s… it?”
“That tends to happen when you fuck something up," says Jackson.
“Like,” Grif says, and sits up, and puts his hands out, like he can hold the issue in his hands.
“Like, this place, this base, this little bit of the war—that’s in our hands. Nobody else. This is
it. Nobody else. There’s actually no one else who’s holding this position. If we fuck up, down
it goes, and humanity loses bit of land to the dinos. If we win, we actually do, like, a tangible
contribution , that we did. With our own two hands. This bit of land is our, like…
responsibility? Like the responsibility is a kid, or something? And now we gotta take care of
it? And it… matters ? Y’know?”
“Did that not occur to you,” Jackson begins, “when you signed up ?”
Okay, that’s not really what Grif wanted Jackson to ask. He slouches back against the glass.
“I didn’t sign up,” Grif says shortly. “Drafted.”
“I thought that was illegal.”
“Shit’s wild during wartime, apparently. Survival of humanity and whatever the fuck.”
Silence.
“It's not good to think too hard about how important this base is or isn’t,” Jackson says.
“Don’t tell me what to do. Like you’re some wise fuck sitting on a mountain.”
Jackson pushes his glasses up on his nose, like he does when he’s thinking about how much
wiser and smarter than everyone else he thinks he is but doesn’t want to say it out loud.
“And if I didn’t know we were defending a line of supplies from the drop point,” Grif
mutters, “then, like. I’d just go take a nap, or something. What would be the point of being
here? I don’t wanna do shit if it’s not worth it. Time is money is happiness, dude. I’m only
going to expend energy on what’s worth it."
“How’re you going to defend the supply line if you’re falling asleep?” Jackson retorts.
“How am I going to defend the supply line if I am asleep?” Grif replies. “Just leave that up to
you clowns? You’ll get shot and killed without my fat ass in the way.”
Jackson thinks it over. Jackson has one of those body languages where you can physically
feel his brain churn through material, like a hand crank, and just as noisy. Grif thinks he does
that intentionally, because he likes to show off his brain.
“I guess it does matter,” Jackson says.
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been saying,” Grif says.
“And that it is good that it matters,” Jackson says, slowly.
“Yes!” Grif exclaims. “Yeah, dude, that’s what I’m talking about! Like, if it didn’t matter,
I’d’ve gotten the fuck out of here by now, y’know?”
Jackson snorts. “Then you really should go take a nap.”
“Nnnnnoooooooo, that’s the opposite of what I’m saying,” Grif says. “I’m saying I’m here
because this base is important and we’re doing important stuff. This night shift matters. What
if the aliens attack?”
“Oh, what’re the odds of that,” Jackson mutters. “And even if they do, I’ll still be here, and
I’m slept through training today, unlike you. I’m perfectly capable of pulling an alarm by
myself. It only requires one hand. One finger, even.”
“You don’t know that there won’t be an attack or something, and you’ll be all alone up here,”
Grif says. “What if tonight’s the one-in-a-million unlucky night?”
“Then you’ll be better rested to defend yourself and stay alive,” Jackson says.
“But—”
“I’m pretty sure I’ll live if you go take a nap,” Jackson interrupts.
Something in Grif’s gut doesn’t like the way that sentence was phrased, but he can’t put his
finger on it.
“Go on,” says Jackson. “There’s a closet on the ground floor that everyone naps in. Take the
second left, then—”
“I know where it is, rookie, don’t mansplain my own base to me.”
“Then get going,” says Jackson. “Take care of yourself.”
Jackson isn’t smiling. (Grif isn’t sure if this is faulty memory, or if Jackson really hadn’t been
smiling that day, or if he’d really said this at all.)
“If you’ve got something worth doing," Jackson says, probably (?), "then make sure you’re
well enough to do it. Got it?”
Grif’s gut doesn’t like the way that sentence was phrased, either.
“Make Parker switch shifts with me,” Grif says. “That way I can go to training, and you can
hang out with Parker all night.”
Jackson’s mouth quirks up. “Oh, that’s an idea,” he says, a little too slyly with a little too
much eyebrow-waggling.
“I said hang out , not have sex all over the watch-tower!”
“You won’t be in the watch-tower with us to care about it,” Jackson says smugly. “Go take a
nap, over-achiever.”
“This is so gross,” Grif complains, and opens the hatch at the bottom of the bubble, shimmies
into through the trapdoor, begins crawling back down the ladder. He can hear Jackson
snickering. “It’s not funny! It’s really gross, and I hope you know that! You weirdo
exhibitionist! The watch-tower is literally a giant window! Everyone will be able to see your
naked dick!”
The last thing Grif sees is Jackson beginning to laugh, and then the hatch cl—
Grif wakes up.
It’s dark.
He’s in Valhalla.
All the words dissolve back into thought, and then from thought back into memory, and then
from memory back into person. Grif only rolls over and tries to go back to sleep, and nearly
succeeds. Grif will not explain any of this to anyone—not to Caboose, not in the morning,
not ever.
But that's fine. These sorts of words come out in the end, one way or another.
Walking Garbage
Chapter Summary
“And Command will hold a parade in our honor before Caboose goes off to college and
forgets to call and forgets to send a holiday Hallmark card and before you know it, it’s
been forty years and you don’t recognize his face when he’s sticking you in a retirement
home…”
Grif doesn’t wake up ready to talk to Caboose.
He does wake up keenly aware that if Caboose goes off by himself, Caboose is going to die.
Now, Grif might be a useless, good-for-nothing, walking and talking waste of offensive
garbage who doesn’t know what he wants or why he’s here or what he gives a shit about—at
best, he’s a useless waste of garbage whose only aspiration is to sleep for longer than
eighteen hours in one go—but he can recognize that everyone in the universe agrees that
Caboose should not die. And more specifically, Caboose shouldn’t go off and die walking to
the desert to find a horny alien fucker, which is what Caboose is going to do if nobody either
stops him or goes with him.
And it’s like. Holy fucking shit, man. Caboose is going to die.
“No, for real,” Grif says. “You’d think that we should, you know—do something about that?”
Sarge doesn’t look enthused by the idea—more like years and years of anti-Blue propaganda
is warring with the fact that Caboose is Caboose. He angrily slurps tea and glares at his own
bagel and and swipes at his tablet to flip the e-reader page, but Grif is fairly sure he didn’t
read a single word.
“When was the last time you took a shower,” is the first thing Sarge says.
Oh. Maybe that’s what Sarge looks so unenthused about.
“Today,” Grif lies. “I’m just naturally this repellent. Seriously, Sarge, at this rate, Caboose is
going to go from being the only Blue to the last Blue.”
“And then Red Team will have prevailed over the evil Blues,” Sarge grumbles. “And
Command will hold a parade in our honor before Caboose goes off to college and forgets to
call and forgets to send a holiday Hallmark card and before you know it, it’s been forty years
and you don’t recognize his face when he’s sticking you in a retirement home…"
“Nobody will be going off to college and forgetting to call because Caboose will be dead,”
says Grif. “Am I speaking English to you? Dead, Sarge. D-E-A-D.”
“I know what ‘dead’ is,” Sarge says, testily.
Grif holds out his hands. Waits for Sarge to say anything.
“He’s still a Blue,” Sarge grumbles.
Grif throws up his hands.
“Okay. Okay, fine,” says Grif. “You know that if there’s no Blues in Valhalla, there’s nobody
for the Reds to fight, right?”
“Hhhmrrrmrmrmrrmmmrrrmm,” says Sarge.
“You’re really going to let our only enemy escape and get himself killed without a proper, uh,
glorious death by Red Team?” says Grif. “Especially when he’s on a mission to go and
increase the number of Blues in Valhalla by two-hundred percent?"
“That’s still only two Blues,” says Sarge.
“The two-hundred-percent factoid is your garbage logic, Sarge. I’m quoting something you
said.”
“Hhrmmmrmrmghghghfghfhfhfhghjfkjfhg,” says Sarge. “And we just leave our base in
Valhalla undefended?”
“Who’s going to take our stuff? Nobody else is here!”
“Ah, yes,” says Sarge, “I’m sure that two fully-equipped and fully-stocked military bases that
provide near-indestructible protection against the weather and elements in a breezy, scenic
woodland plain with acres and acres of farmable land won’t be attractive to anyone walking
by—”
Grif sighs.
“—not to mention the small armada of secret high-tech jeeps I’ve been creating off military
records, or the spare robot parts we’ve left around, or the UNSC power armor pieces we’ve
got by the crateful, or the entire basement capable of projecting full holographic images—“
“Okay!” says Grif. “We’ve got five people on Red Team and only one person has to go with
Caboose! It’s not the end of the world! You’re not going to lose your house, geez!”
Sarge finally puts his tablet down. “Have you cleared this with someone who actually has a
brain?”
“Yeah, myself.”
“Not you! You don’t qualify.”
“Well, I don’t speak Spanish and there’s no other options,” says Grif.
“For god’s sake, let me get breakfast in me before you tempt me to shoot you,” Sarge replies.
“Go find out what Donut and Simmons think.”
“I said I’m not racist!” says Simmons’s voice, audibly angry. “There’s nothing wrong with
you translating for him!”
“Mmmmmmmyeah, I know,” Donut’s voice replies, “but it probably should be racist to be
asked to participate in verbally beating up our Latino robot, so…”
Grif peeks around the back of Red Base. Simmons, Donut, and Lopez are standing in a loose
triangle, obscured from general view by some of the larger crates, looking a bit like they’re
secretly swapping drugs. Or like Simmons is about to shove Donut in a locker.
“I’m not asking you to beat him up! It’s just translating! And you can’t declare that it should
be racist just because it makes you uncomfortable!” Simmons protests.
“Well!” Donut says. “You can’t declare that it isn’t racist just because it makes you
uncomfortable!”
“Deje de usar el lenguaje objetivo para hablar sobre la experiencia subjetiva (Stop using
objective language to talk about subjective experience),” Lopez says. “Específicamente, deja
de usarlo para hablar sobre mí (Specifically, stop using it to talk about me).”
“This has nothing to do with his race!” Simmons cries. “He doesn’t even have a race! He’s a
robot! He just happens to speak Spanish!”
“Being color-blind is a white-man myth, Simmons!”
Simmons’s robot hand clenches. Grif has the sudden, abrupt conviction that Donut’s about to
get punched, and that between Donut’s square jaw and Simmons’s hand, Donut’s face is
probably going to win. It’s very square.
“I just! Want to know! About what Lopez did!” Simmons hisses. “Did he turn his back on the
body at all? What’d he do with it? Did he just leave the body there in the canyon? Lying in
the sun? He didn’t even bury it? Even the Blues buried Church! Lopez didn’t think that was
fucked up or anything to just kill her and lea—”
“Simmons agreed with me,” Grif says.
“Of course he did,” Sarge said, rolling his eyes. “You couples, and your incessant need to like
each other! Threatening the proper God-given chain of command! Never thought Simmons
would wind up a spineless househusband, but life moves in mysterious ways…”
“Please don’t ever call either one of us a househusband.”
Sarge snickers. “Aw, does Private Dexter Grif have commitment issues?”
“ANYWAY,” says Grif, who did not enact a whole elaborate plan concerning fake dating to
get ribbed by Sarge over a relationship he’s not actually having. “So that’s settled, right? We
don’t even have to decide who’s going with Caboose, since it’s my idea, so I’ll, like, feed and
water and walk him every day, I guess.”
“Not settled,” says Sarge. “We’ll have to have a team meeting about it.”
Grif groans. Loudly, and for as long as he can.
“Oh, you big baby,” says Sarge. “Man up! They’re only eight hours long, you coward!”
Something inside Grif begins shrieking. “Jesus, Sarge, we don’t need a team meeting to talk
about Caboose for eight hours! By the time the meeting is over, Caboose will be gone!”
“We’ll invite Caboose,” says Sarge.
“Psh, yeah, like he’d come.”
“We’ll have cookies,” says Sarge.
Grif stops. “Is this… real cookies, or just cookies we’re telling Caboose we have to make
him come,” says Grif.
“The second one, of course! We’d never show any real hospitality to a Blue!”
“We never get anything nice on this fucking team,” Grif whispers.
“Excuse you! You’ve got me! I’m very nice. Why, once I was voted for Hottes—”
“I’M NOT LISTENING and this conversation is over,” says Grif, grumpily. Maybe he can go
back to sleep now. Oh, ugh, if they’re gonna have a team meeting and Simmons will be there,
maybe Grif actually has to shower. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea if there’s hot water left,
actually.
Sarge is squinting at Grif. “But volunteering? Really, Private Grif?” he says.
“Oh my god, I've basically volunteered to take Caboose for a walk in the park, not a
minefield. I practically requested a vacation from this stupid team."
“Are you sure? You’re not feeling faint? Coming down with a case of Competence? I’ll have
to kick you off Red Team if you are,” says Sarge. “Maybe you got body-snatched by a podperson? What’s wrong with you really?”
“I’m only doing it out of self-preservation," Grif says.
"Oddest case of self-preservation I ever saw," says Sarge suspiciously.
"Nothing's wrong with me," Grif snaps, and sulks off to use up all the base’s hot shower
water.
Lunar Friends
Chapter Summary
"Why the hell would I need to go to the moon?”
“Oh! That’s very nice of you!” says Caboose. “It'll be so much fun, just you and me, walking
to the desert! But are you sure you want to come with me?”
“Unfortunately,” says Grif.
At the current moment, Grif is attempting to bake Caboose some hot chocolate—yes, bake
the hot chocolate. See, the kitchen is such a disaster zone that Grif’s almost tempted to clean
it, and when he, Grif, Dexter Grif, is being tempted to clean , that’s how how you know this
kitchen is bad. Half the kitchen rags are lying on the floor to cover various spills, like
Caboose could literally sweep them under the rug, and just about every bowl, plate, utensil,
and cooking appliance is covered in either cheese powder or grease. The sole exception is the
microwave, which has a handwritten sign on it that reads do NOT touch or u DIE!!!!!!!, for
some reason; this means that the (apparently lethal) microwave is spotless, but the microwave
is also blockaded off by five piles of dirty dishes, and the sink is already full of dirty dishes
so it’s not like Grif can just move the piles there, and therefore the microwave might be clean
but it’s still unusable. And then the electric stove nearly exploded when Grif tried to turn it
on, so there might be some sort of grease spill on the inside of the electric interface? Either
that, or Caboose tried to take it apart and didn’t put it back together entirely right.
Anyway: that’s why Grif is heating up milk for Caboose’s hot chocolate in a brownie pan in
the oven.
“Won’t Simon be sad if you leave without him, though?” says Caboose.
That’s not really the objection that Grif was expecting Caboose to have. “He’s a big boy, he’ll
live,” Grif mutters.
“Simon is pretty tall,” Caboose agrees.
“Yeah, okay, whatever—seriously, though, we need at least enough room on the table to put
the cups down.”
Caboose mumbles and grumbles, but he does start clearing his greasy, motor-oil-y metal
mechanic parts off the kitchen table. At least Sarge never brings his workshop into the
kitchen. Like, Grif really doesn’t want to be that asshole who tells other people how to live
their lives, but Grif is discovering that when you’ve actually got shit to do, you gotta at least
have enough order to have workable space, and sometimes that means kicking Caboose’s ass
to make him clean his kitchen table.
“Don’t you have to go to your moon first?” Caboose asks.
“What? Why the hell would I need to go to the moon?”
“Because you take your best friend to the moon?” Caboose says, like this is obvious.
“Sure, if I wanted my best friend to get jettisoned off into space, never to be seen again.”
“Don’t be silly,” says Caboose. “Everyone knows you don’t jettison off the moon.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You just fall off.”
“Uhhhh-huh.”
“That’s why there’s no dogs on the moon. They’ll run right off the edge, and they’re too
small to catch.”
“Your brain is a work of art,” says Grif.
“So if your best friend falls off the moon when you take them there,” Caboose says, “you
have to be very sure to catch them. You have to catch them! Or else they’ll just fly away and
you’ll never see them again, and they’ll probably just float around in space being lonely and
sorry.”
“I’m not taking any friends to the moon, and I’m especially not taking Simmons to the
moon,” Grif says.
“Yes, you are?” says Caboose. “When a man and a man love each other very much, the moon
turns into honey, and then they go to the honey-moon.”
Grif nearly dies. There’s no real physiological cause for it; he doesn’t choke on air or have a
minor heart attack. He just feels a gentle, insistent tug of his spirit attempting to enter the
afterlife on the spot at the sheer mention of Caboose even thinking that they’re fucking
married.
“Simmons and I are not going on our honeymoon,” says Grif.
“Why not? Do you not like moons?”
“Because we’re not married,” Grif says. “Why is it that every time, you assholes assume that
our relationship is one step higher than it really is? We tell you we’re acquaintances, you
assume we’re friends. We tell you we’re friends, you assume we’re dating. We tell you we’re
dating, you assume we’re married!”
“Well, people are always saying things but meaning something else,” says Caboose, very
slowly, like Grif is an idiot.
“No! Sometimes we say exactly what we mean!”
Caboose stares at Grif.
“Okay, that’s not true,” Grif mumbles.
“You said a thing but meant something else,” Caboose agrees.
“Tell you what,” says Grif. “If Simmons and I wind up with a moon made of honey, you can
go there with your best friend in our place.”
“But there’s no dogs allowed on the moon,” Caboose says.
“You don’t even have a dog, Caboose. Bring a different best friend—”
—and there’s half a second where Grif is going to let that sentence stay right where it is, but
he knows, on the spot, that the “different best friend” is going to be Church, except that
Church is in this weird Schrodinger state of being both dead and alive to Caboose, and Grif is
not going to let that can of worms open up:
“—Hell, take Sarge with you,” Grif goes on. “You can have a camping trip, and then maybe
Sarge will fall off the moon instead.”
“But I wanted a dog when I lived on the moon,” Caboose says sadly.
“Oh, so that’s why you’re going to find Tucker,” Grif says. “Hairy, noisy, and humps
everything in sight, huh?”
“Tucker’s not a dog,” Caboose says. “You’re thinking of Junior.”
Grif is so, so sincerely sorry that Tucker himself wasn’t present for that burn. “You know
what? You’re absolutely right,” says Grif. “You’re probably going to find Tucker in the
desert, and Junior’s going to bite your hand off in the first five seconds, because he’s a hairy,
noisy, smelly dog.”
Caboose’s expression turns genuinely distressed. “Oh no! That would be bad! Then I
wouldn’t have a hand to catch him if he flew off the moon!”
“Oh, Jesus,” Grif mutters.
“And Tucker doesn’t know Junior is a dog! So he might take him to the moon! And then
Junior will run right off and never be seen again!”
“Never mind,” Grif says loudly. “Nobody’s going to the moon, Caboose. Seriously, don’t
worry about it. Things will be fine.”
“That’s true,” says Caboose.
Grif hesitates. Then the oven dings, and it’s time to take the brownie pan with the probablyburnt milk out.
“Hey, Grif?” says Caboose.
Grif busies himself with the oven knobs and cups. “What?” he says, as if he’s not really
listening.
“We should go back to Blood Gulch,” says Caboose.
Caboose doesn’t quite get a look at Grif’s expression, which is good, because Grif’s very sure
that his expression is nothing short of nauseous. “Do I even want to know why you’d ever
want to go back to that hellsite,” Grif says.
“At Blood Gulch, things always get better,” says Caboose. “And things always get better out
here, too, of course. But it was easier to tell things were getting better when we were at Blood
Gulch. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like things are getting better even if I'm supposed to know
they are.”
Grif is about three seconds from spilling hot, semi-burnt milk all over the precariouslybalanced cups, but he is, perhaps, feigning more interest in making hot chocolate than he
actually has. “I’m pretty sure everything was worse at Blood Gulch,” says Grif, with faux
nonchalance. “Nothing to do, nobody to talk to, no real point, and no way out.”
“But things got better,” Caboose insists.
“And you said things get better out here, too,” said Grif. He dumps chocolate powder into the
cups and shoves a spoon in both. “Things getting better doesn’t count if it’s in a useless,
forgotten shithole like Blood Gulch.”
Caboose is frowning, now, because Caboose is a gigantic child who doesn’t like it when
people disagree with him. Grif hands him the hot chocolate, and his expression doesn't
change. Everyone in this damn valley is needy and high maintenance.
“Okay, fine. Let’s go get Tucker, first, then,” says Grif, hoping that Caboose will forget it.
“Then we’ll talk about Blood Gulch.”
Of course Caboose forgets instantaneously; the man has the working memory of a broken
pinwheel. “Oh, yes! You and me, going to get Tucker! This will be so much fun!” Caboose
chirps. “We can play road trip games, and sing songs, and make a campfire!”
“And you can avoid dying and get your hand bitten off by a dog,” says Grif. “Whoo-hoo.
Drink your hot chocolate.”
“Thanks for coming!”
“Don’t mention it,” says Grif.
“Don’t let Simon get lonely,” says Caboose.
“I won’t,” says Grif.
“Okay!” says Caboose, beaming. “Oh man, Gruff, things are going to be great! Things are
going to be so much better from now on!”
“They sure are,” says Grif.
"Camp songs!"
"No camp songs."
"Roasting marshmallows!"
"That we can do."
"Remember to send Simon letters!"
"Okay," says Grif, and rolls his eyes, and stirs his chocolate.
Satisfied, Caboose takes a sip of his hot chocolate, immediately burns his tongue, drops the
chocolate all over the table, and then tries to tell Grif that Tucker did it.
Raising Children
Chapter Summary
It takes a village to raise a child.
Chapter Notes
yes that is a quote from MLK jr, btw, because my sense of humor is a garbage bin
With both the conversation with Sarge and the conversation with Caboose under his belt,
hesitantly, Grif feels pretty good about pitching this plan to the rest of Red Team, as they all
pile into the Red Base kitchen for the team meeting. This is how he should have known, ages
in advance, that nothing would go right.
It starts when he finishes:
“So that’s the plan,” says Grif, with as much of an air of “I don’t really give a fuck” despite
him detailing an upcoming plan to babysit Caboose for a five hundred mile road-trip.
“Theoretically we can go at any time. I’d ask if you have any questions, but I don’t really
care.”
“¿Qué tan rápido puedes irte ( How fast can you be gone )?” asks Lopez.
“How could you do this, Grif?!” Donut cries.
“¿Cuánto tiempo puede estar fuera ( How long can you be gone )?” Lopez asks.
“How could you betray Simmons like this?!” Donut wails.
“Agreed! This plan is awful!” says Sarge.
“Solo olvídate de volver ( Just forget to come back ),” Lopez says. “Por favor ( Please ).”
“I said I don’t care , and also I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Grif says. “And Sarge, you
thought this plan was the bee’s knees like, six hours ago!”
“I’ve acquired new and valuable info about this plan,” says Sarge.
“New and valuable—what? What could you possibly have learned?”
“First off, that everything you do is reprehensible and destined for failure,” Sarge says.
“That’s not new info,” Grif says.
“The new info is that you can’t do this, obviously !” Donut insists. “Everyone knows that this
is a death sentence for a relationship!”
Grif nearly does a double take. Instinctively, he glances at Simmons, who isn’t looking at him
and looks uselessly confused as usual, anyway. Grif asks, “Uh, what’re you talking about?
What’s a death sentence? For what?”
“Long distance relationship, silly!” says Donut. “For you and Simmons! You can't go to save
Caboose because then you'd be leaving Simmons behind!”
Grif freezes. Lopez's head, slowly, swivels to face Grif. His unrepentant, shit-eating grin
needs no translation.
"¿Cómo te gusta tu relación falsa ahora (How do you like your fake relationship now)?"
Lopez asks with glee.
“Wait,” says Grif. “The dating thing isn't—”
“If the sentence about to come out of your mouth is ‘the dating thing isn't important’,” Sarge
warns, “I absolutely will shoot you, right now, for both insubordination and general
despicable disregard for Simmons’s delicate feelings.”
“I don’t have feelings !” Simmons cries, like Sarge has accused him of having gonorrhea.
“Oh, please, Simmons, it’s too late for you,” says Sarge.
“How is this insubordination?!” Grif protests.
“Don’t worry, Sarge,” says Donut. “Why, just last week, Grif was so forceful about how his
relationship with Simmons was definitely more than just physical!”
“Can we stop talking about me like I'm not here,” says Simmons.
"Now hold on a moment—” Grif says.
“Forceful, was he?” says Sarge. His eyes have a glint in them that Grif only barely registers
as unusual, suspicious, and probably alarming, before he’s immediately distracted by Sarge
continuing: “Well, then, if Grif said so, then I expect him to keep his word! Despite the fact
that he’s literally never done so before, and that his word is worth less than a four-day-old rat
carcass rotting on the pavement, and that this involves expecting anything from a man
fundamentally incapable of meeting expectations—”
“Why do I bother with you clowns,” Grif says.
“—nevertheless! I hope that Simmons’s influence might have rubbed off on you! So I expect
you to keep your filthy, useless word nonetheless!”
“ What word?!” Grif cries. “My only word so far has been committing to a roadtrip with
Caboose!”
“False,” says Donut. “You’re committed to Simmons, right?”
“Let’s not, uh, throw around words like ‘committed’,” Simmons begins.
“No, you have to stand up for yourself!” Donut insists. “Demand more from life! Tell Grif to
give you what you need! Let him know how to please you!”
“PLEASE STOP WORDING THINGS THAT WAY,” says Simmons.
“What the boy is trying to say—and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but he’s saying the right
thing,” says Sarge, “is that helping that filthy Blue is all well and sound, but you can’t just
run off like some flighty lady and leave your better half behind!”
Grif very nearly puts his entire face in his hands. He should have known—no, scratch that, he
did know. He’s known that this stupid fake-dating con would come back to bite him,
somehow, in some way, because he’s Dexter Grif and the whole universe conspires to give a
noticeable absence of fucks about him and everything he touches. There really is a great plan
and order to the cosmos, and the proof of it is that the cosmos hate him, specifically. Grif’s
only consolation is that Simmons looks even more mortified than Grif feels, which isn’t even
that great of a consolation, because Simmons will make that exact same face over Grif’s dirty
socks.
“El arco del universo moral es largo ( The arc of the moral universe is long ),” Lopez
whispers, “pero se inclina hacia la justicia ( but it bends towards justice ).”
“Look,” says Grif, because he can rapidly feel this nonsense turning into A Thing and he
needs to make it stop before it does, “Simmons and I, uh, appreciate your concern for us? As
intrusive and not-your-business and rude as it might—okay, actually, what I mean to say is
you guys can fuck right off with your nosiness, thanks, Simmons and I are perfectly able to
make our own decisions—”
“That might be the biggest crock of lies that’s ever come out of your mouth, Private Grif,”
says Sarge. “And that is a high bar.”
“Is it too much to ask to be left alone to be emotionally incompetent in peace?!” Grif snaps
back.
Donut, for his part, rounds on Simmons: “Aren’t you pissed? He’s trying to run off with
Caboose!” Donut demands. “Are you going to let him speak for you like that?”
“Better him than you,” Simmons retorts waspishly.
“Él te tiene allí ( He's got you there ),” Lopez says. Donut slides Lopez a surprisingly
venomous glare, which Lopez returns with relish.
“But long-distance , Simmons!” Donut cries. “It’ll ruin everything ! Don’t you care?!”
“Aren’t you the one who thought I was just using Simmons for his hot bod?” Grif asks.
Sarge’s laser-vision swings around towards Grif as his hand grabs his shotgun.
“Which I’m NOT,” Grif clarifies quickly.
“My hot WHAT,” Simmons says.
Grif points at Donut. “His words, not mine!”
“I don’t recall you disagreeing,” Donut chirps.
“I. That’s. Well,” says Grif, and makes the mistake of looking at Simmons right at that
moment to see Simmons staring at him with a weird look on his face. Oh, christ, change the
subject, for the love of god. “Look, as long as someone goes with Caboose and prevents him
from dying, it doesn’t have to be me. It could be any of us. I dunno, if you really want me
and Simmons to stick together, then maybe Simmons could come with us?”
“Ooooh,” says Donut. “Couples roaaaaaad-trip!”
“Absolutely not,” says Sarge. “You think that I’m letting this adventure pass me by? I’m
going with Caboose."
"Sarge, you're disturbing the couples road-trip--"
"Romance always comes second to guts and glory and that’s final! Adventure awaits!" Sarge
cries. "The rest of you can fight for the remaining seat!”
“Then—” Grif screws up his face. “Then Caboose, you, me, and Simmons…?”
“Only three people on a Warthog,” Sarge says.
"We've sat multiple people per seat before!"
“Grif, use your brain for once. If you think I’m leaving my entire base unattended with just
Donut and Lopez, you’ve got another think coming," says Sarge. "No offense to you, Lopez.”
“Sin ofender ( No offense taken ),” Lopez says. “Puedo ser competente, pero sé que no podría
reinar en la gran capacidad de Donut para la destrucción sola ( I may be competent, but I
know I could not reign in Donut’s sheer capacity for destruction alone ).”
Grif is trying to compute all the permutations of Red Team, plus Caboose, in his head. “Okay,
then— you go alone with Caboose, and leave me and Simmons here—”
“And let Caboose sit in the shotgun seat to navigate?” Sarge asks. “So he can steer us straight
in the opposite direction of where we’re supposed to go? Are you trying to kill me, Private?”
“Then take Donut and let him navigate!”
“That still sounds like you’re trying to kill me,” says Sarge.
“Hey!” says Donut.
Grif groans. “Then take Simmons as a navigator!”
“And then you two will be separated, and we’ll be back where we started,” Sarge says.
Grif stares at Sarge, who stares back, delightedly unimpressed. Grif cannot believe that this is
happening to him. He got off his ass, pitched all this shit to Sarge, got Caboose in on it—
organized, like, three-hundred-percent more people on this mission than he’s used to, and
now he can’t get this thing off the ground because logistics ? Because Sarge refuses to move
his shouty red ass from the shotgun seat and they can’t figure out any other configuration that
accommodates them all? What the fuck, universe? What the actual fuck?
“Guys, seriously ,” Grif says, at loss of anything else to appeal to. “Caboose will die if we
don’t get our shit together and go with him.”
“As should be his grisly Blue fate!” Sarge says cheerfully. “It’s destiny!”
“Well, gee, Sarge, I guess that's true!" says Donut.
“Simplemente disfruto verte luchar ( I just enjoy seeing you struggle ),” Lopez says. "Te
mereces todo lo que obtienes y más, mentiroso con citas falsas (You deserve everything you
get and more, you fake-dating liar)."
“Unfortunately, Grif,” says Sarge, “despite your natural compulsion to ruin everything you
come into contact with, the rest of us are unfortunately and tragically well-informed to the
fact that you two are in a caring, committed relationship, and you both would never risk a
long-distance relationship if you were in your right minds. We're only keeping you up to
scratch! So in the end, this is is the natural course and order of things. A happy ending all
around!”
“And Caboose will walk to his certain death and probably explode into a million jillion
zillion pieces!” Donut says cheerfully.
“Truly a happy Red Army ending!” Sarge cheers.
Grif drags a hand down his face and avoids Simmons's eyes.
Asymptote Tango
Chapter Summary
It is, apparently, too much to ask that he have the opportunity to sit here in the
communal kitchen and whine and mope and complain and marinate in his own failures
and wreckage as a human being for another week.
Eventually, Donut and Sarge leave, probably off to tell Caboose about his impending death,
which Caboose will probably take entirely in stride, as he does with everything. Grif is left to
mope, and then steal one of Sarge's precious, coveted strawberry yoo-hoos in retalation, and
then mope over the yoo-hoo.
He doesn't know what he expected, to be entirely honest. That things might, actually, for
once, possibly, work out? He shouldn't have. Things turning out well is a joke. Especially, he
thinks, with his track record.
Or maybe this is what he deserves for having barely talked to Caboose in three months. You
stop talking to someone, you stop being good for that person's wellbeing, and you cease to
have a say in how their life turns out. (Isn't that what he used to say to himself when Mom
disappeared?)
He wonders if Church was buried. They'd dropped the body during the getaway from
Freelancer, but the body was just a hunk of robot bits. (Similar or dissimilar to the way that a
person is a hunk of meat?) They should have buried the bit of Church that was actually
Church--but what's there to bury when an AI gets ripped into code?
He wonders if anyone at Rat's Nest buried any of the soldiers from that one battle he's
interrupted. He hadn't ordered anyone to do it. If a Red Team soldier receives no orders, can
they think for themselves?
He knows nobody from his last outpost was buried. The ice was too hard to dig. The very
thought of burning their bodies, of having to smell bitter cooked meat mixed with the
sweetness of the spinal fluid, had turned his stomach. He'd shoved them in the ice to keep
them from rotting and forgotten to tell his rescuers to dig them back out.
He'd rather Kai rot in the sun than be frozen in the ice. But he doesn't want to make that call.
He doesn't even want to have an opinion on it. He doesn't even want to know. It's a scam, a
ploy to catch you with your underbelly soft and exposed. Better to quit while you're ahead-"I'm pretty sure we have real beer somewhere," says Simmons, like the insensitive
douchefuck that he is.
Grif, very nearly, sighs.
It is, apparently, too much to ask that he have the opportunity to sit here in the communal
kitchen and whine and mope and complain and marinate in his own failures and wreckage as
a human being for another week. It's not a tall order, he doesn't think. He really just needs a
quiet space, nothing to do, nobody around, and he's set to go. That's the opposite of high
maintenance.
But starting interpersonal shit with Simmons? With anyone? Getting snappy or angry or
nasty? That only leads to more shit. It's not that Grif doesn't have a backbone, okay; it's that
Grif knows when he's lost a battle before he starts. It just so happens that all the battles Grif
has lost before he's started is, uh, all of his battles.
He takes a swig of yoo-hoo like a can of beer, and gives Simmons his best dead-eyed stare.
It's not hard. "Strawberry yoo-hoos are the peak of manliness, Simmons," says Grif. "Pretty
sure it's better than the piss-water we've got in the basement, at any rate."
"They're still Sarge's."
"Ask me if I give a fuck," Grif mutters.
Grif immediately knows that this conversation is going to suck ass, because Simmons does
not ask Grif if he gives a fuck. Instead, he wanders into the kitchen, playing at cool he doesn't
have, skirting the table and Grif like they're going to bite.
There's a sudden memory in Grif's head: Grif sitting in a Warthog, a million years ago at Rat's
Nest, fiddling with the radio and halfway through a cigarette. He was happier with the
cigarette than he was the radio, because cigarettes and cigarette brands are the same all over:
in Honolulu, Texas, Seattle, distant colonies in the middle of the arctic wasteland, Blood
Gulch, Rat's Nest--later, eventually, Valhalla. Radio stations change. He should be able to
pick up Tucker trying to broadcast a "ladies wanted" advert around now, or listen to Church
shriek at Caboose about stop fucking touching the fucking microwave I swear to god I really
am going to shoot you this time, fuck! Sometimes stations in Honolulu, the ones that were
interested in "archiving radio history," would play old Perry and Price broadcasts, and Grif
always listened, because it was nice to listen to people talk about news from hundreds of
years ago. A whole reel of disasters from a time and place when he knows, with the benefit of
time, that everything, eventually, turned out okay.
But the Rat's Nest radio didn't play much of anything--no signal down in the tunnels, except
each other, and these Blues can actually do their job half a damn, and they bother to encrypt
their radio stations more than the bare minimum required for Sarge to stop feeling bad about
joining the group radio chat. So it was just Grif, tuning into different types of static, giving
and receiving no message and no broadcast, chewing on why he can't send a letter to Kai in
Blood Gulch because Blood Gulch isn't on the map.
And then Simmons had come into the carpool--just like he's coming into the kitchen now-and the rude, snooty dick swiped the cig right out his hand and stepped on it. Like he had any
right to be policing what Grif did or didn't do with his body. The right to destroy yourself is
the first and only inalienable right a human has in this world. Y'know how much those cost
around here? Grif had asked. How much does it cost to replace your lungs again? Simmons
had retorted.
Grif hadn't said anything. Hadn't really been in the mood to banter; he'd been in the mood to
sit there in the garage and whine and mope and complain and marinate in his own failures
and wreckage as a human being for another week.
And Simmons, then, too, and skirted around the Warthog and Grif like they'd been about to
bite, even when Grif told him what was on his mind, in the most direct way he knew how,
even when Grif told him And could you sit down? You're making me nervous. Simmons did
not sit down. He'd hovered and fretted and did his awkward shuffle with the hunched
shoulders.
And there was that other time, too, back at Blood Gulch, when Grif kept staring at Kai like
she was either a miracle or a monstrous, promiscuous bogeyman who'd crawled out from
under his bed, and he was continually just as surprised as anyone else when wild shit like
seven abortions came out of her mouth--back then, too, Simmons did a remarkable
impression of a nervous, noisy asymptote: always approaching asking what the deal is, what
the actual fuck is going on with this nonsense about his mom working at a circus when
everyone knows there's no circus in Hawaii, but never actually able to get the words out.
A million other times, when he thinks about it. A glancing meeting in the nighttime kitchen:
Are you okay? Sitting under Rat's Nest's halogen lights: Do I need to worry? Two-in-themorning bathroom tiles: You're bleeding all over the floor! In the rare patches of Blood
Gulch's shade: Do you want to talk about it?
The first thing Grif had ever been able to admit he'd liked about hanging out with Simmons
was that with him, Grif and Simmons only asked Do you want to talk about it when they're
very, very sure that the answer is No.
And here and now, with Grif staring Simmons over the top of this fucking strawberry yoohoo, they both know that if Simmons asked...
Simmons turns away and towards the kitchen sink full of plates. "Do we make the chore
wheel for nothing?" he mumbles. "I'm not supposed to be on dish duty, and yet, every time I
come in here, mysteriously none of the dishes have been done...!"
(Isn't it better for everyone to leave the answer in Schrodinger's box?)
"What a tragedy," says Grif. "You, mysteriously being left with the chore you would probably
do for a hobby if you could."
"Hilarious," says Simmons, flatly, but nothing else, just turns to the sink and rolls up his
sleeps and runs the water. No banter, no uppity comment, no--what was it that Donut called
it? No Bert-and-Ernie nonsense.
He scrubs at a dish with herky-jerky movements, like a puppet with piano wires for strings.
Tense like a hunted animal. Walking on eggshells, is the usual phrase, but Grif thinks more of
what his mother had said: Never turn your back on the ocean. Never rescue a drowning man.
The way a bright young woman with a scholarship for DII volleyball shouldn't think twice
about leaving a garbage island behind.
Nervous, noisy asymptotes continually approaches a given curve, but never meets it at a
terminal distance. Nervous, noisy asymptotes bring their piano-wire tension into the Rat's
Nest garage but won't sit in the car; asymptotes walk into the kitchen but won't sit at the
table. Don't they need to make up their fucking mind? Grif hates unnecessary work. Isn't this,
at the end of the day, a question of: will you? Or won't you?
Isn't it better to leave the answer in Schrodinger's box?
Simmons turns the water up higher. Simmons says, over the sound of the water: "It's true that
someone needs to go with Caboose."
"Thanks, Captain Obvious," says Grif.
"I'm a private, if you forgot."
"Even worse. You gotta up your stating-the-obvious game to get that promotion."
Again, Simmons doesn't rise to the bait. Grif is rapidly beginning to hate this. "I'm just
saying," Simmons mumbles, "it's, y'know. It's good. We'll figure it out. Caboose won't go
alone. Something will happen, and you can go with him--since it sounds like you, um, are
volunteering? Because..."
And he seems to realize that if he starts a sentence with because, he actually has to speculate
about why Grif, after receiving news of the death of his only family, suddenly disappears and
then reappears with a harebrained scheme to accompany a member of the opposing team on a
roadtrip, out loud, to Grif's face. Simmons promptly and visibly begins to panic. Grif speaks
over him:
"Caboose not going alone requires us to get our shit together," says Grif. "Considering that
we've been incapable of that for the last seven years? Tall order."
"Still," says Simmons, and peters out. "If you really..." he begins, and stops again.
Grif doesn't like this at all.
"Hey, Simmons," says Grif. "I've got an idea."
Simmons, of all out-of-character things, seems interested by this prospect.
"You're going to love it," Grif assures him.
Simmons's face immediately turns suspicious.
"No, really, I promise," says Grif. "Let's break up."
Schrödinger's Homosexuals
Chapter Summary
"FALSE ALLEGATIONS. REPUTATIONAL SLANDER. ALTERNATIVE FACTS."
Chapter Notes
for reference:
ch 11 for attempting to contact kai
ch 13 for simmons's (and his parents') denial tactics
ch 17 for simmons verbally tearing a person a new one right before they died
ch 28 for suspiciously unheterosexual activity from simmons before fake dating was
ever suggested by grif
ch 33 for simmons nearly straight up demanding to fake date grif
ch 39 for "what does being in love look like," "love is being left alone," and "love looks
like divorce"
ch 41 for 21 days
In the moment directly before Grif gets his ass kicked, Grif thinks that he deserves some
credit for taking initiative. After all, last time a relationship went topside, he’d let Shailene do
the dirty work.
She’d had to come to his apartment to break up with him, which somehow had struck him as
wrong--you’d think the dumpee should be the one to be hounding the dumper. She’d tried to
pick up the interrogation she’d started over text: What’s happening? What’s going on? Is it
Kai again? Can you talk to me? You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to, I can go, just tell
me something--anything, Dex, just let me know that you still--you haven’t given up on this? I
thought you had been!--that you are! That you... were?
He didn’t even let her through the doorway.
He stood there and stared at her, barely hearing her, and didn’t think about anything at all. He
didn’t even feel sorry. Didn’t even feel panicked or think about what he could respond.
Sometimes he made noises, but mostly to avoid talking. He just stood and waited for things
to be over. He wanted it to be over. He didn’t even know what he wanted to be over. And
when she’d talked herself out and reached the point of no words, it was just two of them,
staring at each other through the doorway, her on the outside in the sunlight and him in the
musty, grey-mold haze of his apartment with all the windows shut. He still hadn’t moved to
let her in the door.
Shailene Hashimoto, at the end of the day, was a wonderful girl, in the most mundane,
everyday sort of way, in the way that Sarge is, or Caboose, or even Donut: Shailene treated
everyone as best as she knew how, which was mostly comprised of her own experience of
how she would like to be treated. She, as a person who’d never liked being yelled at and was
more likely to be terrified than inspired by a show of anger, wouldn’t go so far as to push
anyone into making any decision not out of their own free will, in large part because she’d
had the good fortune of being surrounded by adults who’d eventually make a decision for her
if she dawdled too long, and that decision would end up being the best one for everyone
involved anyway.
She'd really meant it when she said that if Grif wasn't up for this right now, if he needed some
time to sort out his life, then they could take a break. She hadn't meant that as code for
breaking up; she really had meant a break that ends so they could pick it back up again later.
But Grif could never have believed that. Wasn't safe. Wasn't right. Wasn't the way of his
world. "Taking a break" meant that this was the end. Over and done with.
Shailene was a golden people-pleaser, born and bred. It'd been so easy. She'd done exactly
what he'd wanted, and left peaceably.
Considering that this is Grif's only experience to date with breaking up with people, he
assumed that breaking up with Simmons would go the same way.
Then the moment of self-congratulation and self-pity ends: "Let's break up" comes out of
Grif's mouth, and Simmons stops moving and lets all the dishes clatter into the sink. Still:
when Simmons turns around, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and hands still soapy and wet,
and looks Grif dead in the eye, Grif experiences a time-honored, traditional encounter partand-parcel to all long-term relationships: knowing, on sight, when your significant and
significantly-peeved other is about to roast you.
Here’s where Grif miscalculated:
One: Simmons, unlike Shailene, does not treat other people the best way he knows how.
Simmons is a garbage can who primarily acts to treat other people as will best suit himself,
and the only reason why he isn't resultingly repellent for it is because he's entirely ineffectual.
Two: When Grif tells Simmons that they should break up, he’s asking Simmons to agree with
him. And for all this egg-shell, broken-glass, asymptotic conversational nonsense, Simmons's
job description, in the department of agreeing or disagreeing with Dexter Grif, is clearly
delineated: Simmons is for bickering, insulting Grif’s life choices, getting made fun of right
back, lobbing minor temper tantrums as Grif looks on in apathy and amusement. Simmons is
not for backing up anything Grif does or thinks or suggests or is. Any compatibility they
might really, actually have? They don’t agree for that kind of compatibility to happen: they
have to fight for that sliver of similarity, the margin where the venn diagram overlaps, for it
to be anything real. Anything less than their best argument would be dishonest. Grif, whether
he knows it or not, depends on Simmons being unable to agree with Grif's life choices.
Three: Simmons only has one processable emotion in his entire body, and it's Anger.
"Okay, this really isn't that big of a deal," says Grif, before Simmons can say anything. "You
heard Sarge! There's no way to make this happen unless we break up! And if we don't make
it happen, Caboose dies! And, you know, the whole fake dating thing was really shooting us
in the foot there, because now it's had the opposite effect and Sarge is hounding us with all
these shitty couples jokes now--"
"I've been sitting here," Simmons interrupts, "for twenty one fucking days, wondering why
you're not talking to anyone and you're zoned out and why you've ignored literally everyone
in the entire base and done a complete one-eighty on the fake-dating thing, and now that
you've finally emerged from your disaster zone of a room, the first thing out of your mouth is
let's break up?"
"Fake dating was a bad idea and it's an even worse idea now!"
"I was sitting here," Simmons interrupts again, voice louder now, "wondering if you were
dying or if we should, I dunno, hold a funeral for your sister or something, try and get in
touch with her somehow, stewing over you turning into some attic gremlin--"
Grif freezes. "Stewing, as in you were worried--?"
"NO I WASN'T," says Simmons, "that's lies, I would never say such a--"
"You literally just said you were worr--"
"FALSE ALLEGATIONS. REPUTATIONAL SLANDER. ALTERNATIVE FACTS
ATTEMPTING TO DISTRACT FROM THE TRUTH," Simmons declares. "I'm telling you
that you don't get to ghost me without a single word from you, and then turn around and say
surprise! We're not doing the fake-dating anymore and you don't get a say! Because I'm
pretty sure that's not how fake-dating works! That's shitty business-dealing! Caboose was
better at this back at Rat's Nest than you are, and he hung our names from Blue Base's walls!"
"But you don't have to like, cause a real legitimate scene over this," Grif laughs weakly,
"you're only my fake boyfriend--"
"That's what I'm saying!" Simmons cries.
Grif gestures wildly at the empty common room. "There's nobody else here! You don't have
to act like you're losing your shit over the love of your life!"
"No, if other people were here, I'd be pretending to be in love with you, and I'd say something
like Oh yes Grif I love and support all your life decisions, especially the ones that require
space to be by yourself to figure your shit out! A real boyfriend would be just fine if we had
to break up because it's best for everyone, and a real boyfriend would throw a fit over a longdistance relationship because a real boyfriend wouldn't let that sort of weird in-between space
fly for his real relationship!"
"Your hypothetical real boyfriend sounds like a shitlord," says Grif.
"But unfortunately," Simmons continues, "I still need a pass to get Sarge off our backs at
convenient times, and I am not going to stop nagging at your dirty dishes and your unwashed
socks and slug-like life choices! I still live at this base with you, and I am still pretty firmly
entrenched in everything you do and say and all your shitty shortcomings as a human being!
I'm not here for love, I'm here because we're in this shithole called Red Team together
whether we like it or not."
Grif doesn't even open his mouth. Simmons jabs a finger at him, coming almost dangerously
close to poking his eye out.
"So unless you can think of a better reason to break up than there's only three seats on the
Warthog and I can't be fucked to think of obviously better alternative solutions, you're not
getting rid of me, because I'm not your boyfriend. I'm your fake boyfriend."
"...You can't just say that and not have a plan," says Grif, when he finds his voice. "We... If
we keep doing the fake-dating thing, we still actually gotta do something about Caboose.
There isn't another way, so..."
"Of course there is," says Simmons, like Grif is stupid not to know. “Honestly, Grif, it's so
obvious. We’ll fake-break up."
“Fake-break up,” Grif repeats.
“If we can fake-date, we can fake-break up. It’s completely logical,” says Simmons.
There's a silence.
"Isn't fake-breaking up," says Grif, "what I suggested to begin with...?"
"No, you said that we should break up the fake-dating," says Simmons. "Fake-breaking up is
pretending to break up the fake-dating, but we're actually still fake-dating, but we're actually
not dating at all because we're straight."
There's another silence. This time, something inside Grif begins either laughing, or shrieking,
or both.
"You're telling me," says Grif, "that we're--correct me if I'm wrong, I wanna get this right-that we, two dudes--"
"--with zero feelings for each other--" Simmons says.
"--yes, we, two dudes with zero feelings for each other, are faking the act of committed and
long-term dating, putting on the appearance of dating to everyone else, when in reality we're
not dating. But because of the Caboose thing, we have to at least put on the appearance of not
dating, so... instead of just doing away with the fake-dating thing altogether and admitting the
truth that we're not dating... we're going to fake breaking up our fake relationship, so that we
look like two dudes with zero feelings for each other, when in reality we're still dating--"
"--fake dating," says Simmons.
"--right, okay, we fake breaking up our fake relationship so we look like we're not fakedating, but actually we're still fake-dating, but double actually we're not dating at all."
"Yes," says Simmons.
"And this makes us straight," says Grif.
"Yes," says Simmons.
Grif thinks about this.
"This... makes sense?" says Grif.
"Yes, it does," says Simmons.
"...It does?" says Grif.
"Yes," says Simmons.
And it might be how fucking insane this is--or it might just be that Grif is tired and doesn't
think he can go on and then every time it turns out he totally, absolutely can, if he's got
Simmons around--or maybe he's just tired, in general--but he sighs and tries not to laugh and
says with the straightest face he can manage: "Simmons, you might be the stupidest person
I've ever met."
"Calling me stupid!" Simmons says, sounding offended. "I wasn't the one who tried to break
up with me! You almost threw away a whole month worth of fake-dating gambit because you
didn't realize you could fake-break up with me. It's obviously the clearest and most obvious
option on the table! Seriously, Grif!" he says, rolling his eyes. "Sometimes I don't even
understand how you function. Haven't you ever tried thinking logically?"
Grif bursts into laughter. Simmons can't get him to explain and can't even begin to fathom
what Grif might be laughing at. It's really the worst, because Grif kind of loves this stupid
man.
Unlimited Logic
Chapter Summary
“I just have an unstoppable compulsion to be as awful and disappointing and disgusting
as possible at all times, sir.”
Chapter Notes
for the 50th landmark of this slowburn romance piece of shit, i present to you: the otp
breaks up.
they weren’t even together.
The next order of business is, of course, to fake break up and go on their merry way to save
Caboose from himself. And once they’ve successfully fake-broken up, they can continue to
fake-date in secret by themselves, with no one around, which completely doesn’t defeat the
purpose of fake dating or flaunting a false relationship whatsoever.
This makes sense. This is the clearest and most straightforward method of dating. There are
no contradictions or logical fallacies here.
Obviously.
The issue then becomes how to actually go about fake-breaking up. Clearly, Simmons has to
break up with Grif rather than the other way around, otherwise Sarge will kill him for having
not put a hundred-and-ten-percent effort into making their relationship work--but other than
that, Grif doesn’t actually have an answer for what they should do. They had a talk about
what dating looks like and they had a talk about what being in love looks like, so now Grif
guesses they have to figure out what breaking up looks like. Right?
“Why bother? It’ll be easy. Just be yourself,” says Simmons.
“ Being myself is suddenly grounds for you to break up with me?” Grif says.
“Well, weren’t you the one who said that the whole beauty of fake-dating is that you don’t
actually have to change anything about the relationship?”
“Yeah, but—if all I have to do to make you break up with me is be myself , then why on earth
would you have ever dated me?”
“Because we’re not dating, we’re fake dating,” says Simmons.
“Oh, right,” says Grif. “Of course. Makes total sense.”
“You were the one who wanted to not tell Donut we were fake dating and fake-date in
secret,” Simmons reminds him. God damn, did Simmons have a long memory, sometimes.
“But like…” Grif chews on this. “Y’know, not like I’m worried about it or anything, but how
concerned should I be that you have such a ready-made plan about how to fake-break up with
me? Not that, y’know, I care or anything, just...”
“Why would you be concerned?” asks Simmons. “We’re not even dating. It’s fake dating,
Grif, keep up.”
“Ohhhhh. Right,” says Grif.
As one can see, in the face of their incredible logic and absolutely-no-feelings-involved
business dealership, Sarge stands no chance.
Over the next four days, Caboose packs a singular bag, and Grif destroys everything in Red
Base.
He leaves old clothes along every inch of the hallway, especially the grosses, smelliest,
weirdest, lumpiest socks. He cleans out all the tupperware in the fridge except for the last two
bites, just so he can say he didn’t finish it off when everyone else inevitably grills him for it.
He takes naps on the communal couch all day and plays old Star Trek episodes at top volume
all night. He ruins everyone’s toothbrushes in the bathroom. He “forgets” to take out of the
trash. He leaves used plates in weird places until the food residue has crusted to a yellow
resin. Utensils go missing. He does the laundry precisely once, to ruin the washing machine
to the point that Lopez shrieks. He picks his nose and flicks the boogers at Donut. He
rearranges all of Sarge’s tools in the middle of the night and half-assedly blames Simmons
with a shit-eating grin that convinces nobody.
It’s kind of gross how little he had to change from his real, every day behavior. How he had
to change even less from his behavior from the past few weeks of lurking in his room. Grif
tries not to think about that too hard.
By the time Grif escalates to flinging boxes of explosives into the rooftop launchers and
watching them explode, Simmons is ready to kill him.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” he hisses even before he’s gotten himself fully onto the
roof. “That’s our ammunition , Grif!”
“So what?” Grif says. “Who are we shooting with that ammunition?”
“You’re ruining my spreadsheets!”
“Seriously? Are you still doing those things? Nobody cares, Simmons. Sarge asked you to do
those to get you off his back.”
“They’re therapeutic!”
“That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard, honestly.”
“Lay off! I don’t insult your way of life!”
“You do, actually,” says Grif. “Routinely. Weekly. Daily. All the time, in fact.”
“What’s going on up there?” comes Sarge’s voice. “Who’s making reckless and dangerous
explosions without me and why didn’t they invite me?!”
“It’s Grif, sir,” says Simmons.
“Oh,” says Sarge, poking his helmeted head out of the roof trapdoor. “In that case, how dare
you be so reckless and dangerous with our precious ammunition, Private Grif?!”
“Sorry, sir,” says Grif. “I just have an unstoppable compulsion to be as awful and
disappointing and disgusting as possible at all times, sir.”
“Your self-awareness is admirable,” Sarge says, “but you could do one better and stop that,
good lord. You scared Donut half to death! I can barely hear my stories on the radio!”
“No can do, sir,” says Grif. “This is just the way I am: permanently annoying and good for
nothing. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ve had it,” says Simmons, picking up the obvious set-up line Grif had just given him.
“This is disgusting and I can’t handle it anymore!”
Sarge’s helmet swings around towards Simmons. “Uh, wait a minute, Private Simmons—”
says Sarge.
“Sorry, Simmons, this is just who I am,” says Grif.
“See? You won’t even explain!” Simmons cries. “It’s like we never talk anymore, Grif! What
happened to us?!”
Sarge says, “Hold on—”
“I continue to be an incorrigible disgusting blob of human waste,” Grif recites. “There is
nothing you can do to change that.”
“Er—” says Sarge.
“Tell him, Sarge,” says Grif. “I’m a waste of lazy, ugly space, and not only will I amount to
nothing, but I’ll only get worse . I’m not worth the effort.”
“I never—”
“Leave Sarge out of this,” Simmons snaps.
“Oh, sorry, I figured you might listen to him considering how you worship the air he
breathes,” says Grif. “Go on, tell him, Sarge, I’m a stinky rotting dirtbag.”
“If you would just talk to me,” Simmons pleads.
Grif can barely contain his grin. Damn, Simmons is actually doing all right. “Sorry, I’m
incapable of human communication, Simmons. Every word that’s ever come out of my
mouth has only been the coincidence of a million monkeys at the typewriters inside my
empty brain.”
“Grif, it’s not that hard to just put your dishes in the sink! Or like, not throw explosives off
the top of Red Base! I’m not asking you to tell me your life story!”
“Sorry, nobody home,” says Grif. “Only monkeys here.”
“You’re fucking impossible!” Simmons exclaims.
“That’s the spirit!” Grif says cheerfully.
“I don’t know how I put up with you!”
Any second now, Simmons is going to deliver the finisher: “I really don’t know either,” says
Grif. “How do you put up with me?”
“Oh, just shut it and come down from there,” says Simmons, as he usually does when he’s
done arguing and ready to just forgive and forget the whole thing.
And that’s when Grif and Simmons simultaneously realize: Simmons got too deep into the
method acting, and forgot to break up with Grif.
What ensues is a series of significant looks, à la Expressive Eyebrow Twitch Charades: what
the fuck from Grif and well why don’t you do the break-up from Simmons and I can’t or
Sarge will literally shoot me where I stand from Grif and oh fuck shit dammit from Simmons
and fucking do something! from Grif, because Sarge is right there, watching them
communicate via only eyebrows and seven years of bickering experience.
“Uh. I mean. I don’t know how I put up with you,” says Simmons woodenly. “I just. Can’t
take this anymore.”
Grif internally buries his head in his hands.
“I am just,” says Simmons. “Just. So upset with you… right now…?”
Grif internally buries his face into even more hands. Grows new mental hands just to bury his
mental face into.
“Uhhhhhh,” says Simmons, who’s clearly forgotten the lines to his own script.
“I can imagine you’d be upset,” Grif prompts, “considering that I’ve been rude, and
impossible, and…”
“Yes!” says Simmons. “You’ve been rude and impossible and frankly, Grif, I’ve had it!”
“Oh no, Simmons,” says Grif flatly. “You’re breaking my heart.”
“But we can still be friends!” Simmons adds quickly.
Grif could fucking kick him. For god’s sake, stop fucking pulling the punches! Just do the
deed!
“Now hang on,” says Sarge suddenly. “I--I know it ain’t none of my business, but--maybe
you two boys just need a breather, or--just cool off before you make a decision y’all might
regret—”
“Let Simmons make his own decisions, old man,” says Grif. “You’ve really had it with my
shit behavior, haven’t you, Simmons.”
“Yes. Right. I have indeed,” says Simmons, without expression. “I can’t do this anymore. I
desperately need to break up with you. Right now. Immediately. Because I can’t stand this.
And as a sad and heartbroken—”
Grif clears his throat.
“--as an unrepentant and merciless boyfriend who is dumping you without regret,” Simmons
amends, “I conveniently want nothing more than to spend some time away from you,
preferably with you going with Caboose and me staying at Red Base to keep watch.”
“Oh no,” says Grif. “I’m in such emotional turmoil. I did everything I possibly could to keep
this relationship going, and yet I was tragically still too repulsive as a human being to make
this relationship work so maybe please don’t kill me if there’s any eavesdroppers around with
a shotgun handy—”
There’s a sudden loud sob from the direction of Sarge’s helmet.
“Oh no,” says Grif. “Wow, fancy seeing you there, Sarge, I completely forgot you were there
this whole time and conveniently witnessed all that because I was too busy being heartlessly
dumped by Simmons. How are you today, Sarge.”
“Nothing! I’m fine!” Sarge sniffs. “I just--dammit, Grif, I told you to not fuck it up—”
“I didn’t! Simmons broke up with me !”
“I don’t care!” Sarge hollers. “Dammit! I’ll strangle you myself! A-As soon as I wipe all this
rainwater out of my eyes—”
“It’s not raining,” says Grif.
“And you’re wearing a helmet,” says Simmons.
“Don’t argue with me while completing each other’s sentences, you’re just makin’ it worse!”
Sarge wails, and flees down the roof trapdoor.
There’s a moment of silence, punctuated by loud banshee mourning noises and Donut yelling
something about cucumbers.
Grif and Simmons look at each other.
“Nailed it,” says Simmons.
“We sure the fuck did,” says Grif.
Letter Day, pt. 4
Chapter Summary
"No news is good news!"
Donut corners Grif by the Warthog outside Red Base within the hour. “Oh my god , Grif, are
you okay?” Donut cries. “I heard you got totally dumped!”
“Yup, that’s me,” says Grf, in a flat monotone. “I was brutally dumped and I’m incredibly
heartbroken even now. Simmons, the DnD-playing, fanfic-writing, angry, runty, nerdy
edgelord, is truly the old flame who got away and will haunt me for the rest of my days.”
“Oh, wow, really?” says Donut. “Honestly, that’s super surprising, because I always thought
that you two were closer to the spring-fling side of the spectru—”
“I am incredibly heartbroken and will never recover ,” says Grif firmly.
“Uh-huh, okay, you just don’t really look like you’re heartbrok—”
“I cry tears every minute of the day on the inside,” says Grif.
Donut appears delighted . “Wow, Grif, really? Tell me more about all your feelings! I think
this is the first time you’ve really opened up to me?! Grif can we paint our—”
“No,” says Grif.
“Awww,” says Donut. “But—”
“ No .”
“If you’re sure you’ll be okay! Because it sounds like Simmons really pounded it into you
when he broke up with you!”
“Yes, he obliterated my tender loving feelings for him into a million angsty pieces,” Grif says
without expression. “A million angsty pieces that I’m not sharing with you.”
“No, like, not just a regular pounding—Sarge said he said all these awful things about you!
Really nasty and dirty, but like the good kind of nasty and dirty, you know? Bordered into
bullying, he said. Things like ‘disappointing’ and ‘disgusting’ and ‘dirtbag’ and ‘waste of
space’—like, really ,” says Donut, “what kind of person says those kinds of things about
people they care about?”
Sarge comes into view around the corner of Red Base, spots Grif, stops dead in his tracks,
flails his hands, and disappears again.
“Really,” Grif tells Donut. “What kind of person would do that.”
Grif is conveniently packed and ready to go by the Warthog within hours of the break-up—
oh, sorry, the fake break-up, because they’re still secretly fake dating and everything makes
sense. It’s not a moment too soon, because a few minutes after that, Caboose comes out of
Blue Base with his duffel bag full of a singular washcloth and six toothbrushes.
“Morning, sunshine!” Donut calls.
Caboose waves noncommittally. “Is Gruff coming with me after all?”
“Yeah, I—is that all you’re bringing?” Grif asks.
“What else would I possibly need?” Caboose replies.
Grif sighs.
So Grif and Donut spend the next hour packing water, clothes, MREs, Caboose’s favorite
rubber duck, a tablet with dumb games for when Caboose inevitably gets bored, a few bags
of candy, and actual fucking toothpaste for Caboose to use with his six toothbrushes. Grif
draws the line when Donut wants to transfer all of Grif’s stuff into a different bag so Caboose
and Grif can have matching luggage. “I’m not his parent ,” Grif tells Donut.
Donut gives him a doubtful look.
By this time, Simmons and Lopez have poked their heads out of Red Base. “Are you guys
packing?” Simmons asks.
Donut immediately holds up his hands. “Give Grif some space!” he cries. “You can’t just
walk up here after you brutally crushed Grif’s heart into the dirt!”
“We’re still on the same team!” Simmons says.
“Yes! Well!” Donut huffs. “It’s a good thing that Grif and Sarge are going off with Caboose
for a while, because you two still being on the same team is going to get aaaaawkward . Like
breaking up with someone and not unfriending them on Facebook!”
“Oh yes, extremely awkward,” says Grif.
“Because crushing people’s feelings is a thing we did,” says Simmons.
“How will our former friendship ever recover,” says Grif.
“Our entire dynamic ruined,” says Simmons.
“I guess we can’t talk to each other ever again,” says Grif.
“The end of Red Team as we know it,” says Simmons.
“¿Por qué algo acerca de esta ruptura parece extraño ( Why does something about this breakup seem odd )?” says Lopez.
“Yeah, their whole dynamic is super off today, Lopez!” says Donut. “But that’s totally
understandable.”
“Es porque esos dos nunca salieron en primer lugar ( Nothing is off because those two were
never dating in the first place ),” says Lopez.
“Have some sympathy, Lopez!”
“Como de costumbre, tengo razón, y nadie sabe ( As usual, I’m right, and nobody knows ),”
says Lopez. “Mi único consuelo es mi intelecto claramente superior, que morirá en la
oscuridad, al igual que el resto de ustedes ( My only consolation is my clearly superior
intellect, which will die in obscurity, just like the rest of you ).”
“Seriously, Simmons, even Lopez is telling you to go away, now,” says Donut. “Go get
Sarge! Sarge is the one who still needs to put his stuff on the Warthog, anyway!”
“Sarge is busy eating an entire gallon of ice cream and watching sad rom-coms,” says
Simmons.
“Oh no !” Donut cries. “Did he get broken up with, too? Was it his secret spouse who we
never see but sends vague emails every so often asking him to fill in his credit card number
and CV?!”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not—” Simmons begins.
“Come on, Simmons! We have to save him from himself! Gently open him up with nice
words and praise!”
“I’m pretty sure that’s—”
“Giveyourheartbrokenexboyfriendhisspaceyouheathen,” Donut says.
“Wait—”
“Okay thanks for coming with me Simmons!” Donut says cheerfully, and grabs both Lopez’s
and Simmons’s arms and drags him away. Simmons gives Grif a helpless look at he
disappears back into Red Base. Lopez just looks like he’s wishing for death, as per usual.
Caboose looks at Grif suspiciously. “Are you… dying?” he asks.
Grif snorts. “No, it’s—” and then he thinks about that for a second, legitimately actually
thinks about having to explain to Caboose the whole thing where Simmons and Grif decided
to fake date, and then tried to fake date in secret, and then got outed by Donut and Lopez, and
then fake dated publicly, and then had a fake break up so they could go back to fake dating in
secret, and just gives that up as a bad job. “You know what? I’m not explaining that to you.
I’m fine. Let’s get this show on the road.”
“Well, if you’re sure you want to go so fast!” says Caboose. “Simon said you wanted to talk
to your sister. Did you do that yet? We can’t leave without talking to your sister!”
Grif doesn’t react. Doesn’t even look up.
But maybe Caboose can smell the way that Grif freezes, because he says, “It sounded like a
good idea. Isn’t it? Don’t you want to?”
“Nope,” says Grif.
“Really? But she’s your sister!”
“Can’t sent a letter to Blood Gulch. No internet. Not like there’s a post office.”
“Oh,” says Caboose. “That makes sense. I can’t send a letter to my sisters, either.”
“There’s internet connection on the moon, though,” says Grif. “That’s where your sisters are,
right? Earth’s moon?”
“I don’t have their email addresses or phone numbers,” says Caboose. “I forgot them all.”
“...Oh,” says Grif.
“But I’m sure they’re fine, though!” says Caboose brightly. “No news is good news!”
"Absolutely," says Grif, and leaves it at that.
Talk Story
Chapter Summary
Sometimes, despite himself, Grif has a sentiment.
Before Grif and Simmon shipped Kai off to Blue Base, Simmons asks why Grif is just as
shocked as everyone else whenever Kai (“Sister”) opens her mouth and something wild and
mildly terrifying like “seven abortions” comes out. But how Grif feels or thinks and literally
any detail about Grif’s life is none of Simmons’s nosey, stuck-up beeswax, so Grif say
something about Kai being her own creature and something something about a circus?
Whatever. Simmons had stopped asking. Not entirely hard to make Simmons stop asking
about anything unrelated to himself, to be honest.
“Wow, lay off the angry stringbean,” says Kai, chewing gum loudly and popping it over and
over, dutifully refusing to do anything to help transfer her belongings into the Red Base
bedrooms. Grif doesn’t even know where she got gum. “If you’re having fun when you talk
to him, then what’s, like, the problem .”
Grif shoves what little belongings she brought with her onto her bed. “For one: I’m not
having fun .”
Kai rolls her eyes. “Yeah, when you two were talking earlier? Looked like you were having
fun to me .”
“Wh--no, why would I be having fun ? Simmons is nosey and stuck-up and thinks he’s better
than literally everyone else and he’d sell you out to Sarge for even the promise of a brownie
point. It’s insane!”
“Hot,” says Kai.
“I don’t know where you picked this catchphrase up from, but you gotta stop saying that,”
Grif says.
She grins and pops her gum. Kai has this look in her eye that Grif hasn’t seen in way too
long. So long, in fact, that he doesn’t remember that it usually means Kai is about to make
her own entertainment, which means nothing good for anyone else. “Do I gotta stop saying
that in general, or just about Simmons? You got dibs or something? Oh, if not, then I call—”
“No, you can’t call dibs on Simmons,” Grif interrupts.
“Why not?!”
“Because he’s a bad idea,” Grif says.
“I love those,” Kai says.
Oh, Grif knows she does. He just didn’t know that she had enough introspection to make a
joke about it. “No, listen,” says Grif. “He’s not like, a regular bad idea. He’s The Bad Idea.
He’s the for-real kind. The angry kind. The…” Grif casts around for an idea, remembers the
incident in the middle of the night, and lies: “The kind that punches bathroom mirrors in the
middle of the night.”
“Hmmmm,” says Kai. “Hot.”
“No! Bad Kai! Not hot!”
“Don’t tell me what I do or don’t find hot,” Kai retorts. “This is oppression! Justice and
freedom for female sexuality, Dex!”
“It’s not freedom if you just wind up with the same misogynistic fuckboy who was
oppressing you in the first place!”
“Well if it’s not freedom, it’s called the pursuit of happiness , and it’s in the constitution,
bitch! I call dibs!”
“I said you can’t —”
“I totally can unless you called dibs first!”
“Fine! I did!” Grif cries. “I totally called dibs on Simmons first! So you’re not allowed! Now
leave him alone!”
Kai fistpumps the air. “YES! I fuckin’ CALLED it!”
“I—” Grif has the bad feeling he just got played. “What? No, you didn’t call anything, there’s
nothing to call—”
“I totally did, and I totally knew it,” Kai says, “and I’m totally gonna tell the Blues that I was
totally right that you’re hitting that.”
Grif feels faint. “H-Hitting...?”
“Tapping that ass,” says Kai. “The pasty flat freckled white-boy ass. Simmons’s ass.”
“ What ,” Grif says.
“Banging him like a screen door,” says Kai.
“I know what you mean, you don’t have to clarify—”
“Mowing that ass like grass and you’re the sexy lawn-mowing maintenance guy with the,
cough cough, large tool belt—”
“I get it!” Grif cries. “You can stop now, thanks!”
“Please tell me the curtains match the drapes,” says Kai. “If I can’t have him, I wanna at least
have an accurate fantasy for mastur—”
“I’M UNCOMFORTABLE,” says Grif, “and I take back my dibs—”
“No take-backs!” Kai says gleefully. God, Grif could fucking smack her.
Little siblings are the worst.
Grif gets the peculiar feeling that Kai hasn’t so much changed as she has become more
herself. Even though Grif doesn’t believe in having a “true self” or any such garbage, or that
nonsense about alcohol stealing your family members away like fairies replacing your
children with changelings—there’s something more whole about her, now. A little fuller.
More complete.
Kai and Grif had lived separate lives for a while, now, but. Y’know. Sometimes, despite
himself, Grif has a sentiment.
Only sometimes. And only a singular sentiment, thanks.
Grif is already transitioning from despair that Kai is here to channeling that into needing to
eat an entire bag of Fritos. He stomps out of Kai’s guest bedroom and into the kitchen.
Because honestly? Seriously? Kai came here to look for him?
He suspects that there’s a menage of elements involved. That can’t be entirely it. Honolulu is
absolutely a one-horse town; despite its reputation as a tourist trap, there’s surprisingly
nothing for locals to do once you’ve exhausted the surfing, mini-putts, and the shopping
malls that aren’t too expensive yet. Maybe that’s why she’s here? Jesus, if she wanted
entertainment, she could have just gone to the mainland or something. Hitched a ride to join
the circus. Or maybe she was just out of career options and thought she’d hook up with the
biggest job provider in the current industry. Maybe that was it.
The idea that she came here to find him ? Fuckin’ ridiculous.
Kai drifts into the kitchen after him and spits her gum into the trash bin. “So how’d you end
up here?” she asks.
“Drafted, dum-dum,” Grif says. He pulls out a smaller bag of chips and rips it open.
“No, like-- here here. You joined a billion years ago! You guys haven’t been here that long.”
“Uhhh,” says Grif. “Last outpost went kinda wonky.”
“Did you guys, like, lose or something?”
“Sure,” says Grif. “We lost.”
“Where do the guys go when they lose?”
Grif looks at her. “In... the ground.”
Kai squints. “...I thought this was capture the flag.”
Grif doesn’t know where to start with that. He shoves chips in his face and rummages for
more food. He’s not dealing with this, lord and jesus.
“Did you like…” Kai reaches for the chips he left on the table and he smacks her away.
“Ugh, fine, you’re so stingy . Did you bust out of that outpost like an action hero or what?”
“I took a nap,” says Grif. “In the closet. So I think they thought I was already dead.”
“Classic Dex,” says Kai.
Grif takes a moment to feel absolutely scalped alive, naked in public, curling up over the
alarm bells ringing that he’s done something terrible and shameful just by admitting to an
event in a public space, and Kai will never know or understand that it’s basically killed him
to say the three sentences that he did. Then he gets over it, because if he’s not gonna have an
emotion over the winter outpost, he’s not gonna have an emotion over having an emotion
over the winter outpost.
“Yep,” says Grif.
Kai has taken the moment to snag the remainder of his chips. He glares at her, but not very
hard, because he’s already unearthed a package of Twinkies.
“Well, it’s a good thing that stuff always gets better,” says Kai, like it’s a statement of fact.
The earth is round. The military sucks. Stuff always gets better.
Grif hunches his shoulders and doesn’t reply.
Grif doesn’t want to believe that that’s true, because frankly, believing that things always get
better would just complicated the nice, sheltered hole in the dirt he’s made for himself and his
soft underbelly. There’s nothing that swindles and kills you like hope, after all, and he’s had
enough of that in his life. But later, when Kai’s gone off to Blue Base and Grif is alone in his
bunk, he thinks about how she laughed at him as she strung together entire hours of sobriety.
How clear her eyes looked without the constant hangover.
He thinks about the whistling crack in the glass watchtower: a clean shot right through
Jackson’s head, who’d never even realized there were Elites around to pull the alarm for. Grif
had sat in the watchtower for days—weeks—anywhere to escape the blood he couldn’t get
off the walls. In the watchtower, everything was quiet. The snow kept falling. The air was
clear and cold. The little hole where the bullet had gone through perfectly round, with hardly
any cracks, and sometimes when the wind blew just right, it made a sound like music.
He’d fucking lived, unfortunately, because of a stupid closet and a nap, but more specifically,
because some Pelican came by and saw Grif hollering and shouting from the watchtower: I’m
still here! I’m still here! And he can’t even explain why he’d done that, either, when he had
no right to say or do anything when everyone else’s corpses were cold under the snow—just
some stupid reflex to stick around that all humans seem to have.
He looks over at Simmons, Kai, and Donut across the way in the shared dorm room. Donut’s
sound asleep with his facemask over his eyes, and Kai’s snoring loud as fuck, but Simmons is
still up, using a tiny reading light to scribble notes on some report for Sarge. It’s nearly
midnight. God, what a fucking nerd.
Simmons glances up and notices Grif looking at him. He covers his report papers defensively.
“What’re you looking at,” he whispers.
“A huge kiss-ass writing a report Sarge isn’t ever going to read,” Grif whispers back.
“You don’t know that,” Simmons hisses.
Grif rolls his eyes and settles facedown into his pillow. He turns the idea over in his head:
Things get better, if you’re still around to see it. He doesn’t know if he likes it. For now, it’s
easiest to just hold it in the almost-dark, like warming up a cold stone against his skin. Things
get better. I’m still here.
Simmons’s pencil keeps scratching. Eventually, there’s a flutter of paper as the report is put
away, and the light goes off.
Last Day
Chapter Summary
Grif's got a horrible thought.
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
It’s not a big deal that Sarge and Grif are going off to find Tucker, because the coordinates
aren’t even a full day of driving away and once they find him, they’re coming right back.
This explains why there is absolutely no sentimental reason why Grif sneaks away from the
disaster pile-up that is Sarge’s “luggage” (guns and guns and guns) to the back of Red Base,
where Simmons has also coincidentally wound up to escape Donut’s eyes.
“Something definitely went wrong,” says Simmons. “We were supposed to be fake-dating to
get Sarge off our back, and now he’s wailing about sad romcoms and why Kate Winslet
didn’t just put Leonard DiCaprio on the driftwood with her. And then we were supposed to be
getting Donut off our back, and now he’s telling me that if I so much as breathe at you again,
he’s going to put bees in my sheets.” Simmons pauses. “And ‘not in the fun way,’ according
to him.”
“Do we want to know what the fun way is,” Grif asks.
Simmons thinks about this. “Wasn’t there that thing Cleopatra did where—”
“We don’t want to know what the fun way is,” Grif says firmly.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be stuck at this base with just Donut,” Simmons sighs.
“Sucks to be you.”
“Who am I going to complain to about him?” Simmons whines. “Lopez? Lopez doesn’t even
understand English.”
“We’ve got a radio on the Warthog, so Sarge can call your lonely ass,” says Grif. “Caboose,
too.” He hesitates. “And I guess I’ll have to, because of course I will be sobbing from the
separation of our long-distance fake relationship, except also not sobbing because of our
fake-fake break-up.”
“No, it’s just a fake break-up.”
“It’s a fake break-up of our fake relationship, which makes it a fake-fake break-up.”
“Two negatives make a positive which implies we actually broke up,” says Simmons, “which
we didn’t . We’re only fake-broken up and are still fake dating.”
“Just by ourselves,” says Grif. “Where nobody else can see us.”
“Exactly,” says Simmons.
“And I’m going to go on this road trip, without you, and be by myself, but now I’ll be in fake
love, and be fake terribly sad to be separated, just entirely fake cut up on the inside, and we,
as the heart-wrenching fake lovers we are, will share a passionate fake goodbye kiss before
we part, that will be entirely straight because it’s all fake.”
“Incredibly sad for our fake romance,” says Simmons. “I'm also disinfecting your whole
room while you're fake gone, by the way.”
“That's not how the fake-dating script goes!”
Simmons crosses his arms. “I’ll fake date you however I want! And that includes digging out
every awful snack wrapper you’ve ever forgotten in the back of your drawers!”
“I hate this,” says Grif. “This fake relationship is awful. Take this back.”
“I'm cleaning your room! I’m doing you a favor!”
"This whole fake-relationship has been pointless and useless,” Grif complains. “Not only is
Sarge and Donut even more on our asses, but now you’re cleaning my room and won't even
fake-smooch me before I leave. Simmons, what if I tragically die while off on our adventure?
Are you going to bury me in a clean room?"
“You don’t get buried in your bedroom !”
“I want to be laid to rest how I lived, Simmons. When I’m tragically shot and killed on my
roadtrip, just lay me down in the grease puddle on my bedroom floor.”
Simmons bristles. "You're not going to die! You’re practically taking Caboose to the
convenience store!"
"You'll be fake heartbroken over our fake missed chance to express your fake love," Grif says
sadly.
"Nothing is going to happen to you!"
"We're going off to find Blues, Simmons, anything could happen! Sometimes the Blues even
shoot at us, did you think about that?"
"The Blues couldn't hit you if they tried!"
“The Blues ran me over with a tank.”
Simmons wrinkles his nose. “...I’ll just give you the rest of my organs.”
“And give away the rest of your flesh parts? I’m not a robot fucker, Simmons.”
“You’ll have to be if you die again,” Simmons retorts.
Grif nearly chokes. Simmons stiffens and goes red, like he can’t believe he managed to blurt
that out without stammering or overthinking it until he fucked it up—but he doesn’t take it
back.
“Grif!” Sarge’s voice yells from the front of Red Base. “Get back out here, coward! I don’t
know how you managed to hide your considerable flesh mass, but it’s time to go!”
“I’m coming!” Grif yells back.
Grif looks back at Simmons, who’s apparently seeming to internally combust from his own
smart-ass comment from ten seconds ago, and remembers his own smart-ass comment from
forty seconds ago: we, as the heart-wrenching fake lovers we are, will share a passionate
fake goodbye kiss before we part, haha, hilarious, except oh motherfuck. Shit. Shit.
This is absolutely the moment for the passionate goodbye kiss.
And Simmons is looking at him with something that, if Grif’s being honest, looks a lot like
anticipation.
And Grif’s got a horrible thought: If Grif tried to kiss him, it might actually work out.
The idea is so awful, so uniquely thrown in the face of every most awful conclusion that Grif
is always certain will come to pass, that Grif panics alone in his head for what feels like
hours crammed into the space of a second. If the end of the story isn’t the worst possible
conclusion, then what, exactly, is Grif supposed to do with himself? Believe in good things?
Hope for something better? Accept happiness at face value, as something he might actually
have ?
But what else is he supposed to do? Whatwith Grif and Simmons separating on the other end
of half a mile of dating and fake dating and fake-fake dating, the conclusion to this nonsense
looms nearly as unavoidably as how he used to think the worst would always come for
him. Grif's not going to wrap up this moment by just slapping Simmons on the back like a
dudebro and leaving. He's not going to blow it off with a shitty joke and leave Simmons
hanging.
And the most terrible, horrible, absolutely worst part about this is: He's not going to leave
Simmons hanging and drop this moment, because he doesn't want to.
“Don’t worry about Kai,” Grif blurts out.
Simmons jolts. “I—she—what?”
“That thing that Donut said, about Lopez killing her at Blood Gulch,” says Grif. “I was
thinking about it. No body, no death. She’s indestructible. Like a cockroach. Don't worry
about it.”
“...Oh,” says Simmons. He sounds entirely thrown.
“She can take care of herself,” Grif says. “And she turned out okay in the end.”
Simmons clears his throat. Then again, like he's trying to restart his own throat. “Well,
depending on a definition of okay, but…”
“She’s fine,” Grif says. “Don’t worry about it. And I was joking about dying, so don’t worry
about us, either. Sarge is bringing five hundred guns.”
“You’re also bringing Caboose,” says Simmons.
“We’re not on his team, so he won’t kill us.”
Simmons snorts. His odd pinched expression expression doesn’t fade.
“Grif!” Sarge hollers.
“I’m coming!” Grif shouts back. Then to Simmons: “We’ll be back before you know it,” says
Grif, and turns to go.
“Wait—” says Simmons, and grabs at Grif’s arm, but winds up with a hand around Grif’s
wrist.
Grif stops. Simmons leans forward, and hesitates again, his gaze darting from Grif’s eyes to
his lips back to his eyes.
“Don’t get run over by a tank,” Simmons says, at length.
Grif can feel Simmons’s thumb, rubbing worriedly over the flat top of his wrist, even through
the kevlar glove.
“Not planning on it,” says Grif. “We’ll probably be back in a week or something. No drama.”
“I’m never dramatic,” says Simmons, the man who’d dramatically grabbed Grif’s wrist like a
pining housewife watching her man go off to war.
“Whatever, nerd,” says Grif.
Simmons’s grip begins to slide away. Without thinking, Grif catches it in his own hand and
squeezes. Simmons freezes. Grif lets go before either of them can panic. He's already
practically spilled his entire guts to Simmons by talking about Kai, anyway.
“Later,” says Grif.
“Oh, um, uh,” says Simmons, but Grif's already walking away.
And—look. Listen. Sure, he'll admit, it’s not the best. Grif doesn’t really believe
in stuff going good. He definitely doesn't believe in things being great, that's for sure. But
that thing with Simmons—whatever that was—yeah, Grif will admit that was okay. Shit, it’s
really okay.
For once, Grif thinks that things might not just be okay someday, but that things might even
get better.
//end part 2
//next up, part 3: AND THEN EVERYTHING GOT WORSE
Chapter End Notes
heyyyy what's up. that's a wrap for part 2! i'm taking a two week break this time because
im enjoying fluff week way tf too much, so i'll be back on 04/17/18. im hylian-reptile on
tumblr, and im always there one way or another, hit me up lol. hope u enjoyed part 2,
see u in part 3!! :)
EDIT: your end-of-part reminder to take a break if you're binge-reading this!!
PART 3: AND THEN EVERYTHING GOT WORSE
Chapter Summary
“What? Me? Have unresolved?? Feelings??? For Grif????” Simmons exclaims.
Chapter Notes
“I hear it so often, ‘I could never be bulimic. I hate throwing up.’ Yeah? Me too.” Bulimics on Bulimia, “Binging and Purging to Stay Alive”
a/n: as a reminder there's a lot more talk about mental health and eating disorders in this
part!! stay cautious. as per usual there are no numbers mentioned, only behaviors.
Private Richard “Dick” Simmons, male, thirty, of the Reds and Blues, is staring out the
window, thinking about fellow private Dexter Grif, male, thirty-four, also of the Reds and
Blues. He is calculating the Hand of Merope’s trajectory to carry the Reds and Blues home.
He is rubbing a hand over his chest, absently, wondering at the odd rhythm of his own heart.
He is thinking about Grif dying.
The calculations aren’t very helpful in the technical sense, not remotely in the field of real
astrophysics or ship speed. He’s only got bare bones numbers, but lining them up clacks the
hard nub of the pencil against the back of his tablet through the paper, and it feels nice to
focus on it. He ultimately comes up with numbers that say, based on current information the
Hand of Merope crew gave them, that total journey time should be about two-hundred Earth
days. There’s a brief docking at the quarter and three-quarter-way marks, with a tentative
skim by a small, largely silent solar system at the midway hundred day mark. The
announcement from the crew said for them to not bank on docking at the midway point. After
the war, some planets never got back in contact with the UNSC’s haphazard infrastructure.
The tiny system of planets named Cadenza, Clef, Coda, Canon, Concerto, Cavatina, and
Chorus were a few of them.
The faster they get to Blood Gulch and all settle down, the better Simmons will feel. That’s
why he’s wound up, isn’t it? Because they’ve all somehow decided that Blood Gulch, the
shithole that they started in that made them all feel like they wanted to either crawl out of
their skin or just die, is home. A place they want to go back to.
Maybe them getting dragged around by Carolina made them stupid and nostalgic. Things
have been wild ever since Sidewinder. Or things were wild before that, but they didn’t feel
very wild until the Meta almost dragged Grif off a cliff.
Eventually, Simmons flips the paper over, and starts writing down other numbers:
measurements, weights, little numerical judgments of amounts. Then he scratches them out.
Then he rewrites them, and then scratches them out. Maybe he should walk it off—whatever
‘it’ is—but he’s been down the road of exercising every time he feels jittery, and it didn’t end
that well. He’s also been down the calories road, and that didn’t end well, either. He’s tired of
thinking about food all the time. He’s tired of all of those roads.
He leans his head back and stares at the ceiling. Two hundred days on this fucking ship going
back to Blood Gulch.
New arena. New habits. New routines. New eating places. New food availability. New types
of food. New schedules. It’ll start off okay, Simmons knows. He’ll go along with the crowd,
mostly, when it comes to decisions about what to eat and where. Then the paranoia will kick
in, and he’ll try to MacGyver some dumb idea, wind up scoping out single-stalled
bathrooms...
Two hundred days to fuck up his eating habits again.
Back in the day, when food was just a series of numbers, everything made sense, because
everything makes more sense when you can measure it, because numbers are good facts and
solid arguments, safe and in the right. Everything would be okay if you just did the math.
There’s no room for error when you can calculate the value of a person to the decimal point.
By the time he looks up, Grif’s wandered into the waiting room, holding two bags of caramel
popcorn and already chewing through one. Sarge doesn’t move from his old-man-in-armchair
snoring pose, so the smell of food during the long wait doesn’t wake him up, apparently.
“Where’d you get that?” Simmons asks in a low voice, not really interested.
“There’s a bunch of kiosks a couple hallways down. Charge an arm and a leg, though.
Tucker’s probably fighting with Wash over how expensive it is now.” Grif flops down next to
Simmons. The popcorn smells freshly made, melted sugar glaze crusting on the paper bag.
“Want some?”
Simmons has the funny feeling that Grif bought it for Simmons, because Grif is one of those
people who needs food around at all times to feel okay and low-key thinks that everyone else
is the same way. He means it well, but if Simmons eats those—well, he’s not entirely sure
what’ll happen. Every encounter’s a roulette, isn’t it? Will he eat it like a normal person?
Stare at it until he works himself into nausea with fear? Down the whole thing in half a
second and then excuse himself to throw it up? Eat a few, panic, walk in circles for hours,
irritable and angry? He hates finger-foods that can be eaten mindlessly.
Simmons wrinkles his nose. “Give it to someone else. Sarge, maybe.”
Grif shrugs. Tucks it under his arm. “Come on, Wash says they gave him our room
assignments. Also, please tell me you’re not doing math.”
Simmons flips the paper over and glares. “I wanted to see how long the trip would take.”
“Ask a crew member, dude. Jesus, sometimes I forget how much of a math-loving nerd you
are. I bet you sat in the front of class and actually took notes.”
“Did—I—did you not take notes? In class ?”
“I’m not a kissass, dude. Read Sparknotes, bullshit everything, leave your notebook at home.
English class is the way to go.”
Simmons makes a disgusted noise. “English class is bullshit. Math is superior. What’s the
point of writing a stupid essay? Talking about things? Saying words ?”
“Yeah, tell ‘em, Simmons. Who needs words, anyway,” says Grif. “Now help me wake up
Sarge and pick up all this luggage, we gotta go before Wash gets pissed.”
Simmons rips up his piece of paper into the tiniest pieces he can manage and dumps them in
the trash.
If he ever has to tell Grif that he still thinks about the moment Grif slipped out of his hands
on Sidewinder, the moment he thought Grif was dead, the dings and scrapes on Grif’s armor
after a firefight under Carolina’s orders… if he ever has to tell Grif that he still thinks about
the moments before Grif splits off from the group, where Simmons can’t see that he’s alive…
he resolves to tell Grif in a series of equations, somehow.
Identify. Prove. Simplify. Solve for unknown value of the funny lurch Simmons’s heart
makes when he sees Grif makes it out of every firefight alive. For an unknown value along a
standard bell curve, rescale the standard deviation of how much Simmons appreciates Grif
being alive at all.
QED: Math is better than writing. In writing, you can’t be right. You can only tell the truth.
“Figures you’d get an extra bag for your boyfriend,” says Tucker grumpily, when he sees Grif
holding two bags of popcorn. “Look at them, Church. Disgusting.”
Church doesn’t respond because nobody knows where Carolina is on this ship. Tucker
realizes this half a second too late. “If you think I’m sharing these with anyone, I don’t know
who you think I am,” says Grif. “These are both for me.”
“Okay, okay, settle down,” says Wash, gesturing vaguely to their luggage bags scattered
across a relatively uncrowded corner of what looks like a ship food court. (Of course it’s
easiest to assemble a large number of people in a place with food.) Tucker is entertaining
Caboose with what looks like a Bop-It; Simmons sits on a luggage bag; Sarge is still half
asleep and goes to lie down on another bench with some muttering about shoulder joints; Grif
collapses on the floor. Carolina is nowhere to be found, as usual.
Wash says, “This is a big ship, lots of other passengers, we have to be considerate to other
people here—”
“Are you my goddamn mother,” says Sarge.
Wash’s stare is unimpressed. “Fine. I trust you’ll all behave yourselves, then. Due to saving
costs, we’re doubling up on rooms. I’ve already signed you up with the ship’s crew.”
“What?” Tucker says. “We don’t get to pick? Who made you the boss?”
“I became the boss when you all couldn’t order a pizza without arguing over it for four hours
and then breaking the landline,” Wash says.
“Tucker did it,” says Caboose.
Wash clears his throat. “The roommate assignments are—”
“Can I be with Church,” says Caboose.
“No, because Church is with Carolina,” says Wash.
“Can I be with Carolina then,” says Caboose.
“She needs her space,” says Wash, eventually. “You’re with Tucker, Caboose.”
“ What? ” Tucker complains, as if this was not an obvious and inevitable conclusion.
“Sarge and I will share a room,” says Wash, determinedly. “Lopez can be packed away, we
don’t need a bed for him, so he stays with Sarge. Grif and Simmons are roommates, of
course.”
Tucker waggles his eyebrows. “Roommates. Of course. Roommates. Spicy.”
“Oh my god, they’re roommates,” Caboose says.
“Tucker,” Wash warns.
Sarge lifts a finger. “Aha! But as expected from your allegiance to Blue Team, you’re
incorrect in your roommate pairings!”
“You can’t be incorrect for roommate pairings,” says Wash flatly.
“You can’t put Grif and Simmons together,” says Sarge.
“Wait,” says Simmons, figuring out where Sarge is going with this, just as Grif says, “Sarge,
hang on—”
“No! This is awful! A true crisis inflicted upon us by the Blues! Another scheme to inflict
pain and violence upon our team members in the most subtle ways! We have to clear this up
immediately—”
“Sarge shut up —” Grif hisses.
Sarge announces: “What kind of dastardly, heartless, cruel, manipulative son of a bitch would
pair together ex-boyfriends in a room like that!”
“WHAT,” Tucker hollers at the top of his lungs.
“What’s wrong with you, Agent Washington?!” Sarge continues. “Putting together people
who used to date in a closed space like that for the entirety of this trip, where obviously Grif
will be left to ruminate in the wreckage of his failed love life as he pines after the femme
fatale who got away, which is technically Simmons but then again Grif can’t be expected to
have standards—”
“They... broke up?” Wash asks.
“THEY DATED?!” Tucker wails.
“SARGE SHUT THE FUCK UP RIGHT NOW,” Grif says.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY BROKE UP?! THEY WEREN’T EVEN DATING!”
“They’re… not dating?” asks Wash.
Tucker rounds on Wash. “ What ? Did you think they were dating the whole time ?”
“I… But… Of course they’re dating, they’re so obviously…” Wash sputters. “Is this a test?
Have you seen them?”
“OH BOY it’s time for us to leave!” says Simmons loudly.
“Ah yes right definitely how about those room assignments,” Grif says.
“If you just give us the key,” Simmons wheedles, “we can go start putting away our stuff, get
out of your hair…”
“Not until Agent Washingscrub fixes these room assignments!” Sarge says.
“It’ll be fine!” Grif cries. “Seriously! Us having dated once isn’t going to be an issue and
both of us are over it! We’ve been on the same team ever since and nobody cared!”
“I don’t trust you! I know you’re still harboring some old flame, and you’ll probably
hopelessly propose to Simmons in the middle of the night and fuck everything up!” Sarge
declares. “Grif and Simmons should be on opposite sides of the ship, have Lopez and Wash
with Grif and Caboose with Simmons!”
“Sir,” Simmons begins, “that would leave you without a room; might I suggest...”
“Of course I’ll have a room,” says Sarge. “In this new and improved roommate plan, I get a
spacious and luxurious four-bedroom suite all to mysel—”
“No,” says Wash.
Tucker grabs Simmons’s face. Simmons shrieks. “WHEN WAS THIS,” he demands. “DID
YOU GO ON DATES. DID YOU BONE. DID YOU TOUCH HIS DICK. PLEASE TELL
ME YOU HELD HANDS WHILE YOU SLEPT TOGETHER—”
“Oh! That’s what we’re shouting about!” says Caboose. “Ah, yes, in that case, yes, Gruff and
Simon slept together. I know so because I saw it.”
“Caboose saw you WHAT,” Tucker says.
Sarge claps his hands over Caboose ears. “Look what you two did!” Sarge yells at Grif. “You
ruined him! Destroyed his innocence! The horror of it is imprinted on his questionable and
failing memory!”
“We didn’t do anything!” Grif says angrily. “He’s misremembering! Or he’s remembering
something else, fuck, I don’t know!”
“Is this about that time by the tree?” says Simmons.
“You fucked by a tree ? Outdoors? Which one of you kinky fuckers suggested that?” Tucker
says.
“No! We took a nap by a tree!” says Simmons. He can feel his face heating up to that awful,
unattractive shade of his own armor.
Tucker seems disappointed, which pisses Simmons off for some reason. “That’s it? Just a
nap?”
“It wasn’t just a nap!” says Simmons defensively. “Grif was tired so I told him to take a nap
and he laid down and then I told him to put his head on my stomach so he could have a
pillow and then we fell asleep listening to each other breathe and almost touching hands and
also that was a long time ago before I broke up with Grif so obviously I’m entirely over it
and never think about it in excruciating detail!”
There’s a silence. Vaguely, Wash’s face takes on an air of panic.
“I told the crew what the roommate pairings were already, and we’re not supposed to swap
rooms or anything, but…” Wash scrubs a hand down his face. “Shit, I’m so sorry, if I’d
known that you two obviously were still carrying torches with such unresolved issues, I…”
“What? Me? Have unresolved?? Feelings??? For Grif????” Simmons exclaims. “What. What
are you talking about. I would never. I have no such thing. That’s—what—ridiculous—”
“Simmons shut up,” Grif says. “Wash, just give us the room key. ”
“NO,” Sarge wails.
“Wait,” says Wash, “maybe I can talk to the crew about—”
Grif snatches the keycard out of Wash’s hands. “Okay great thanks see you later!"
And then Grif and Simmons grab their bags and dash off into the depths of the Hand of
Merope.
Chalkboard Skitter
Chapter Summary
"I’ve already marked my territory with barbecue sauce.”
Chapter Notes
"Eating disorders, in particular bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa have the highest
mortality rates of all psychiatric disorders. Cardiovascular complications contribute to
a significant portion of this risk. The hearts of patients with eating disorders may be
atrophied, most commonly due to reduced blood volume and negative energy balance.
[...] Close monitoring is recommended due to an increased risk of arrhythmias, fast
heart rates, congestive heart failure, and sudden cardiac death." -"Bulimia and
Cardiovascular Risk: What does the research show?” from eatingdisorderhope dot com
The rooms are arranged as such: Carolina and Epsilon on the room to the farthest left, Wash
and Sarge to their right, Grif and Simmons to their right, and Caboose and Tucker to the
farthest right, one after another, lined up along the side of the hallway. There’s no windows in
Simmons's and Grif's room, but there is a tablet with a slideshow of junk like flowers and
advertisements for restaurants. Simmons’s bed is along rightmost wall; Grif’s bed is along the
leftmost wall; the far wall opposite the door to the hallway contains a sliding door to a
bathroom, the first time either one of them wouldn’t have to use a communal bathroom in
years, and it sort of pisses Simmons off, because it's the kind of private bathroom that
Simmons knows he's going to abuse.
The first thing Grif and Simmons do when they move into their tiny ship cabin, left of
Sarge’s and right of Caboose’s, is unpack a dozen issues of National Geographic. They tie it
up with a mangled wire from a busted Lopez model and slap a napkin signed “For Caboose”
on the front, and then they dump it in front of Caboose’s door and skedaddle.
“Mission accomplished,” Grif announces, and shuts the door. "Nat Geo magazines
successfully delivered to Caboose."
“Yeah, only an entire year later,” Simmons says, and immediately stops dead in the middle of
their room. Grif is stuck half in the doorway, unless he wants to push Simmons out of the
way to get around him. “Ohhh, Grif, no, you don’t. No. Nope. Nuh-uh.”
Grif is trying to sidle around Simmons towards his bed, presumably where he can collapse.
“What? Is this about the shoes thing?”
Simmons rounds on him and gesticulates at the two open suitcases in the middle of the room.
“This! This shit! You just opened the suitcase in the middle of the room , where people are
supposed to be able to walk , and now all your shit is everywhere!”
“I didn’t see you complaining when we were tearing them apart to find shitty giraffe
magazines for Caboose.”
“That was a dire emergency. If we didn’t get those magazines out for Caboose then, we’d
forget again, and then it’d never get off our hands. I’m talking about you ,” Simmons says,
pointing at Grif, “who is going to make me clean the clothes, by myself, because you’d rather
leave our clothes on the floor like a wearable rug than clean it yourself.”
“Oh, wow, you know me so well,” says Grif, still trying to inch around Simmons. “So are
you going to do it, or should we do the banter where I convince you to do my chores for me
first?”
“This trip is two-thirds of a year! That’s a really, really long time to just leave your clothes on
the floor and smell-check them for cleanliness!”
“So we’re doing the one where I convince you to do my chores for me, then,” says Grif.
Simmons opens his mouth to snap back, outraged, and Grif snickers. Simmons is abruptly
aware that Grif has been trying to get past Simmons this whole time, which means that Grif
is, perhaps, just inside Simmons’s personal space, and Simmons’s heart jolts and he
immediately withdraws his own hands as close to himself as he can, like he’s afraid where
they might go if he’d let them.
Grif slides right past him and beelines it for his bed like nothing happened. Simmons abruptly
feels like smacking him. His heart doesn’t slow down.
“Really? Really , Grif? You’re not even going to do the bit where you pretend to clean but
really you’re just fiddling with your clothes and shoving them under the bed?” Simmons
asks.
“Oh, you’re right,” says Grif, and plunges his hand into his own messy luggage bag and pulls
out a stained maroon shirt. “Okay, I fiddled with it and now I’ve got the napping shirt. Need
the napping shirt if I’m going to nap.”
“Is that—is the ‘napping shirt’ my shirt ?”
“You forgot it at Valhalla. Finders keepers,” says Grif, and begins pulling off his hoodie.
And then his shirt.
And then his pants.
(Thank god Grif is wearing boxers underneath.)
And hell's bells Simmons fucking hates this man, this fucking douchebag changing into his
pajamas like it’s nothing right in front of Simmons, so Simmons turns right around and starts
shoving things into his suitcase as angrily and harshly as he can, because fucking Grif ,
Simmons swears that he’s a menace, a threat to Simmons’s health and happiness, and
Simmons can’t say anything because Simmons and Grif have shared a room before, have
shared a room for years , technically, back at Blood Gulch, and Simmons knows that Grif did
and does sleep in less than a shirt and boxers, which is what he’s doing now, and Simmons
has no right to complain about anything because Grif’s only getting changed and Simmons is
trying to not be that weirdo who stares too long at other guys in the locker room, even if
Simmons is already that weirdo who hates changing in front of other people and will use the
private bathroom to change every single time, and basically in conclusion FUCK GRIF and
fuck his shitty napping shirt , too, that he just took like it was his to take, like he could even
fit a shirt that Simmons wears without stretching it to hell and high water, it’s a waste of a
good shirt and also Simmons will die if it’s too short to cover his whole stomach because
then Simmons will just stare at the little strip of skin between Grif's shirt and boxers like a
stupid pigeon bashing its head against the food dispenser and it’s times like this that
Simmons comes face to face with the fact that he doesn’t necessarily hate seeing the little bit
of belly fat that hangs over Grif’s boxers, but that he’s envious , in some brainless twisted
way, of the fact that Grif doesn’t seem to care all that much and it’s not a big deal and that for
some reason no matter how much Simmons knows nobody cares (theoretically) if someone
has some chub, he can never bring himself to actually have some himself, could never forgive
himself even when he thinks and hopes that the shirt will be too short so Simmons can stare
at Grif’s stomach all day and think about how soft the skin might be there, think about
running his hand up that shirt, just as a thought experiment, like a well-worn record to put in
the CD-player right before you fall asleep, thinking about a time when he’s not stuck in a
room with a person he’s dating but also not dating but also not not dating on a ship headed to
a home that’s home but not home and not not home with a yet-unknown eating arena with
unknown routines and unknown rules and unknown habits that he hasn’t even formed yet but
he is incredibly, incredibly sure that they’re all going to be bad, and that he’s going to spend a
significant portion of this trip with his head in a toilet while he thinks about Blood Gulch and
the desert heat, like if he combines enough shitty experiences all into one memory then he
can somehow wrap all the way back around to a positive, because that is definitely,
absolutely, truly how math works. Simmons is a thirty years old. It’s been twenty-one years
since he started purging.
“If nothing’s happening, then I’m napping,” says Grif, pulling the shirt over his head. “And
also napping when things are happening, too. Wake me up for dinner, though.”
Lines of Grif and Simmons’s merged skin, paint on Grif’s chest smudged over, disappear
under Simmons’s own shirt. The shirt’s a little tight, but it doesn’t show any stomach and
Grif doesn’t seem to really notice. Grif doesn’t seem to notice anything, ever, the blind,
unperceptive dipshit.
“You need to get your own fucking shirt,” Simmons snaps.
“I’m pretty sure you don’t want this one anymore. I’ve already marked my territory with
barbecue sauce.”
Simmons makes a disgusted noise.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Seriously, don’t forget to wake me up for dinner. Night.”
Simmons sits on the bed. Crosses his arms. Grif rolls himself onto his bed and the shirt rides
up on his stomach, and Simmons sees Grif’s eye flick towards him and away before Grif
pulls the blankets over himself.
“Whatever,” says Simmons. Then: "...Night."
Grif doesn't say anything else. Simmons sits on his bed and fumes at stupid fucking Grif, who
never shows a single fucking emotion on his damn face, and begins to wait, because there's
really not that much else to do on this fucking ship. But it's fine. Waiting is fine. Simmons
has spent most of his life waiting for terrible things to be over. Simmons knows, and Grif
knows, that the magic of being Grif and Simmons is that whenever you think, “Oh, they
absolutely can’t go on like this,” it turns out they definitely, totally can.
Simmons waits for the ship to arrive at Blood Gulch, for Grif to wake up, for dinner, for the
purging to begin again.
Assignment Home
Chapter Summary
"That's what we mean by home."
Chapter Notes
the tag for this chapter is: “depictions of bullying yourself over how you should eat."
Normal eaters generally adhere to six simple steps:
They eat when they are hungry.
They eat what will satisfy them.
They stop eating when full.
They face feelings directly rather than detouring them through over or under eating.
They express their emotions directly rather than stuffing down on food.
They don’t beat themselves up if they overeat, undereat, or gain a couple of pounds but
rather take it in stride as the normal ebb and flow of life.
Recovery Warriors, “What Is Normal Eating And How Do You Get It?”
Tucker slams on the room door. “HEY EX-LOVEBIRDS,” Tucker hollers through the wall.
“COME TO DINNER!”
Simmons peeks out from behind his tablet. Grif groans. “ Please tell me he won’t call us that
for the whole trip,” Grif mumbles.
“It could be worse,” says Simmons.
“You’re just saying that because this is your fault.”
“How is this my fault?!” Simmons protests.
Grif rolls over and shoots him a glare from over his blankets. “It was your idea, dumbshit!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Simmons.
“Like that time you said we should fake date to prove we’re straight—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“—or that other time you said we should get married and run away from Rat’s Nest—”
“That’s out of context and you know it!”
“Jesus,” says Grif, rolling himself and his sizable stomach out of bed. “Okay, whatever, fakeboyfriend.”
Simmons abruptly has to turn away and bury his face in organizing his barely-unpacked
toiletries. Not that he’s going to be using them anytime soon, he just, y’know, has to do
something right now. Immediately. Preferably something that requires him not looking at
Grif.
“You coming to dinner?” Grif asks.
The one time Grif can be out the door faster than Simmons is for food, of course. Simmons
hesitates, and even that, he knows, gives him away. Grif doesn’t look away, just stands there
and waits for an answer in a way he never does about anything else, like Grif can see right
through him.
Simmons hates that. One day, Grif’s going to actually see him for what he’s worth, and
then… well.
“Yeah. Fine,” he says brusquely. “I’ll come.”
Grif just pulls on a hoodie without a word.
“Dinner” on this giant transport ship is a food court: a giant atrium full of passengers milling
about and different food vendors selling anything from burgers to sushi to salads to entire
twenty-inch pizzas. Of course the ship ticket didn’t come with in-flight meals. They go out
and get their dinners and come back to a rendez-vous point.
Sarge is a no-show, apparently sleeping right through the event. (Old man got tired,
apparently.) Lopez doesn’t eat food. It’s Simmons, Grif, Tucker, Caboose, and Wash,
although Caboose and Wash could be considered a singular unit. Wash doesn’t let go of
Caboose all evening, like the instant Wash lets go of his forearm, Caboose will immediately
run headlong into the nearest vat of cooking oil. (He might.)
They sit down. Simmons surveys their trays like they’ve brought loaded weapons to a
Mexican standoff:
Wash has a burger with guacamole and a side salad, and is in the process of removing the
bun. Caboose has a grilled cheese and fries with an ungodly amount of ketchup and a side of
broccoli that Wash probably made him get. Tucker bought a single large soda for dinner and
slurps loudly whenever Wash tells him that’s not a real dinner. Grif has a pizza bagel, a
panini, a large slice of meat-lovers pizza, a soda, and a large sundae, which means that he has
two pizza courses and two sandwiches between his three entrees.
Simmons gets black coffee with two shots of espresso. It’s nearly ten at night. He didn’t think
of his battle plan for what he’s going to eat and how he’s going to stop fucking this up and
inevitably slide into his shitty habits, and he’s not going to go pick a fight with food right
now. He’ll eat later. He swears. He just needs to be better prepared so he doesn’t mess up.
“When is Church coming?” Caboose asks.
Wash hesitates in the process of throwing away his hamburger bun. Then he chucks it in the
trash, with a very even and measured movement that, for some reason, makes Simmons think
of him raising his gun, visor trained on Donut. Then Agent Washington sits back down,
knocks his salad fork into his own water glass, and gives Tucker a flat look when Tucker
snorts into his soda.
“I don’t know, Caboose,” says Wash.
“Should we wait for him?” Caboose asks.
Grif, Simmons, and Tucker look back at Wash.
“Let’s just eat and see what happens,” says Wash.
Tucker snorts again. Rolls his eyes. Puts his soda down hard and props his feet up on
(Church’s) empty chair and glowers off into the distance. Wash clears his throat. “Not to
change the subject,” Wash says, “but where, uh, are we going?”
“Weren’t you the one who got the tickets?” Simmons asks.
“Sure, I got tickets to some coordinates, but…”
“Oh, great,” Grif mutters.
“Oho, dude, you’ve been arranging this whole trip and you didn’t even know where we’re
going?” Tucker says. “Seriously?”
“You said you were going home and nothing else,” Wash says defensively. “And you were
really intent on it, so…”
“Yeah, but you just came with us, no questions asked!”
Wash doesn’t seem very ruffled by this. “Have I missed something here? I was under the
impression you all met at your first station. Were you living together before you became
simtroopers?”
Grif chokes on his pizza bagel in laughter. Simmons smacks him on the back so he doesn’t
choke and die. “Hell, no. If I’d had to live with any of these guys before, I’d’ve shot myself,”
says Tucker.
Simmons opens his mouth to tell Tucker to pick a different phrase that didn’t include dying,
but he has no idea how to word it in a way that doesn’t immediately out himself as a sensitive
pansy, so he doesn’t say anything. He glances at Grif. Grif doesn’t seem to have noticed
Tucker said anything at all in favor of folding his pizza in half like a sandwich and putting so
much in his mouth that Simmons wonders if he’s just straight-up deepthroating it. Grif is still
an amalgamation of the worst eating habits of all time, of course.
“Naw, we’re going back to our first station. That's what we mean by home,” says Tucker.
“Blood Gulch Outpost Alpha.”
“Outpost One, for some of us,” says Simmons.
“Suck it, Red, Alpha base is better and bigger.”
“Hey chicka bum bum,” says Caboose.
“Stop filling in my entendres, Caboose, it gives me hives.”
Wash chews through his hamburger patty slowly, thinking about whatever ex-villainous
Freelancers think about. Watching Wash eat is one of the things Simmons hates most about
Wash, because Wash is one of those people who chews slowly, but not so slowly that it’s
suspicious; he enjoys his food; he eats when he’s hungry and he stops exactly when he’s full,
like it’s no big deal. And he does it every time. And he never messes it up.
Between Tucker and his soda dinner, and Caboose’s massive muscles and tiny kiddie meal,
and Wash’s clean-eating, tastefully-arranged, no-sweat methods of eating well and
simultaneously not giving a genuine second thought towards what he eats at all, Simmons
sometimes feels like he’s in the twilight zone around Blue Team.
Grif is smearing ice cream on the crusts of his panini. At least Grif has the courtesy to be
familiar in his atrocious eating habits. But even then, Simmons catches Grif eyeing his
coffee, and then eyeing Tucker’s soda dinner, trying to judge what’s odd and what’s not, and
Simmons takes a bitter sip and scrunches his nose.
“Blood Gulch Outpost Alpha is that box canyon, isn’t it,” says Wash thoughtfully.
“Ugh,” says Grif, and takes a long drink of his own soda.
Simmons smacks him again. “Don’t say that!”
“What? It’s true! We’re all thinking it! First thing that comes to your mind when you think of
Blood Gulch, Simmons, really, be honest.”
The first thing that comes to mind is the bathroom and how there wasn’t a single-stalled
bathroom anywhere in the whole damn canyon. A lot of staring at the toilet, wondering if he
could get away with purging when the whole base echoed like a tin can. But regardless of the
garbage in his head that happens before, during, or after a meal, the one thing he might be
more scared of than anything in the world is other people finding out about him purging, so
he’d never, so to speak, pulled the trigger.
The second thing that comes to mind is Sarge holding a shotgun over the dinner table,
demanding that Grif not take seconds and yes Simmons had to finish his plate and no Donut
couldn’t re-stir-fry the MRE in olive oil and crushed pink Himalayan rock salt, and
Simmons’s thought was that Maudsley never worked, not in the way that therapists thought it
should. And it hadn’t. Big surprise. Parents never manage to force their kids into what they
want in the end.
The third thing he remembers is being bored and staring up at the sun that never set and
wishing the Blues would come to shoot him, or that he could find some food to throw up, just
to have something to do and be away from here for a little while. Then he thinks about how
Grif got crushed by a tank and he’d been weirdly relieved that at least something had
happened, and how all the blood on the walls hadn’t bothered him at all, back then. He’s very
sure that the blood hadn’t been quite so bright red when he’d seen it the first time, red like on
fresh snow, but the base walls had been dull concrete. He doesn’t know why it looks that way
in his memory now.
“Ugh,” says Simmons, eventually.
Grif points at Simmons. “See? See? Blood Gulch is an actual shithole, guys. Ugh is exactly
the right word for it.”
Wash looks at Tucker, who shrugs. “Yeah, I’m not arguing with that, dude. It was pretty ugh.”
“Okay, hold up,” says Wash. “Does anyone actually want to go back to Blood Gulch?”
Tucker looks at Grif, who looks at Simmons, who looks at Caboose, who visibly tunes back
into the conversation at just that moment and blinks. “What? What’re we talking about? Is
Church here?”
Simmons sighs.
“...No,” says Wash. “Not yet. I guess.”
“When is Church coming?”
“I don’t know,” says Wash flatly. “Eat your broccoli, Caboose.”
Caboose doesn’t seem to mind this answer. Tucker polishes off his soda and crumples the
paper cup. Simmons sips his coffee and watches Grif watching him drink coffee for dinner.
Single Stands
Chapter Summary
He looks at the bathroom for a good, long while.
Chapter Notes
“Some problems can be solved with money. Some problems can be solved with time.
Then there’s real problems.” -Proverb of unknown origin
Simmons can’t live on coffee forever.
Contrary to popular suspicion, Simmons doesn’t want to live on coffee. (It’s not fun, take it
from him.) He’s keenly aware that time’s running out: he can only go so long before he
cracks and eats something he’ll regret and then purges it; but on the flip side, just running in
blind and eating whatever for dinner will probably lead him to eat something he’ll regret and
then purge it.
By the time Grif and Simmons wind up walking back in their room, Grif’s fallen into
complete silence while Simmons shirls coffee in the paper cup, like he can divine the solution
to the situation out of bitter rehydrated bean pellets. Tea-reading is a thing, isn’t it? Magical
voodoo living in your food, all the way from the earliest ages.
Simmons pulls out the room keys. Unlocks the door. Grif still doesn’t have much to say.
Inside, Grif dumps his hoodie, only to hear a knocking on the wall. “Oh, Caboose, c’mon,
please don’t do this,” Grif says.
“It’s true!” Caboose’s muffled voice yells from the other side of the wall. “Gruff and Simon
share a wall with us! Sharing is so much caring and now I can knock to talk to Gruff and
Simon whenever I want!”
“I’m returning this wall to the wall store,” Grif says.
“No! Gruff! You’ll hurt its feelings!”
“Oh jesus, he better not do this the whole trip,” Simmons mutters. “This room is already tiny,
with no windows—do we even have a trash can in here?”
“Uhhh, I think in the bathroom? Maybe?”
Simmons pokes his head into the bathroom. “Oh, huh. Yeah, we do.” A little tiny one, like in
a hotel.
He tosses the coffee cup into the trash.
Looks around.
There’s a shower.
A sink.
A shower mat.
A toilet.
A lock on the door.
He looks at the bathroom for a good, long while.
The single-stalled bathrooms he’s come across in his life tend to look different. From the
junior high bathroom, third floor West building, to the high school bathroom, behind the
squash courts, to the college bathroom, in the basement, to the Rat’s Nest bathroom, behind
the armory—they’re all technically different. They’re nothing alike to anyone else. But they
feel the same to him, even now that he can picture them.
Single stalled bathrooms are not places you leave. They’re places you go away from for little
moments of fantasy, before you have to come back to your real life, which involves staring at
the inside of a toilet bowl for an hour.
And this bathroom? He knows if he ran the shower and got the fluids levels right, Grif would
never know. Or would never have to hear, at any rate—
“Don’t you dare break this wall down, Caboose,” Grif warns through the wall, while
Caboose chatters on about something Simmons can’t parse out. And it hits Simmons all at
once:
He would give anything to not have to purge again.
He never wants to do that again. He’s tired. He’s sick of it. He wants to be done, honestly and
truly. He wants to relax with Grif and not worry about what he’s eating and worry about
Caboose asking about Church, instead; he wants to do literally anything else with his life
than looking at the toilet bowl in the back of this room on the Hand of Merope. He wants
that. Everything’s been fucked up since Grif left on his stupid road trip a billion years ago at
Valhalla and it’s just getting crazier by the day, but at least it wasn’t being stuck in a stupid
fucking bathroom.
Simmons closes the door. Goes back to the main room. Lies himself on his bed.
“Simmons, tell Caboose to stop eavesdropping on everything we do through the wall, it’s
freaking me out,” Grif complains.
“Caboose, go away! Grif and I are having special best friend time!” Simmons shouts.
“Oh!” Caboose says. “Sorry! I didn’t know! Okay I will go away goodbye sorry for
interrupting!”
Grif gives him a suspicious look. “‘Special best friend time’? ...What’s that supposed to
mean?”
“I don’t fucking know, Caboose is the one who’s hung up on best friends,” says Simmons.
Grif thinks about that. “Yeah, that’s true. That’s entirely fair.” Grif pulls off his hoodie and
dumps it on the floor, and Simmons lets him do it, because he’s sharing a room with Grif and
it’s kind of great and it’s be even greater if he didn’t fuck up this trip by winding up down the
rabbit hole again, in a really annoying way, so he swears up and down, cross his heart and
hope to die, etching this promise into this moment where Grif cracks his back and rubs his
eyes across the room, that this time, for sure , he’s going to get this right.
He’s not going to let this happen again.
He’s going to stop purging.
Rat's Maze
Chapter Summary
Black, of course, and caffeinated as hell.
Chapter Notes
[The eating disorder voices] continued to fight in my head. I couldn’t remember a time
they weren’t there. I was so used to it; the battle in my brain. Sometimes I thought I was
crazy. If people only knew how my mind was continuously busy, thinking, rationalizing
my thinking and behavior, wondering, doubting, believing, I believed they would
question my sanity. The problem was—I was quite sane, quite together, and theatrically
normal to keep my secrets hidden. -Melissa F. Brown, Stories of Recovery: THE
VOICES I HEARD, Eating Disorders Resource Catalogue
this chapter has a lot of depictions of simmons's particularly disordered
behaviors/patterns in an attempt to figure out what his baseline is and what he's working
with. it also has a lot of depictions of particular patterns of disordered thinking that, if
you've been around the ED recovery circle, you'll see are... destructive.
but destructive of the insidious sort. the sort that you might not think are destructive, if
you're not being careful. so read with caution, as per usual. and read knowing that
literally everything simmons thinks here is some flavor of bullshit, as is fairly par for the
course of the last 100k of this story.
for more thoughts/warnings/analysis on depictions of EDs in this story, see this tumblr
post: http://hylian-reptile.tumblr.com/post/173914318961
Simmons starts off his new resolution to not purge by immediately purging.
But he can explain.
See, it starts with breakfast, which nobody from the Reds and Blues wakes up to eat except
for Sarge. Simmons goes out to go find something suitable to eat with him, since breakfast
used to be a thing he ate at Blood Gulch (even if he hated it), but it turns out that Sarge has
MREs packed away in Lopez’s… ass… and all of a sudden Simmons is not in the mood for
breakfast. One, because Lopez’s ass; two, MREs taste boring; three, Simmons has always
hated MREs for all the weird starch and sugar and preservatives in there; four, Simmons
usually ends up hungrier and hangrier after eating an MRE than before, and he doesn’t know
why. So he goes out to the food court, and comes back with coffee.
Black, of course, and caffeinated as hell.
He spends the morning researching the benefits of breakfast using the ship’s wifi, and trying
to decide if he should eat it or not. He’s read all these articles and studies before--the one that
claims rats developed metabolic syndrome on a diet of only dinner in comparison to a diet of
only breakfast; the one that claims humans were only meant to eat at night; the one that
emphasizes waking the mtabolism up after sleep; the one that encourages staying in a fasted
state. Nobody agrees. He knew this.
Ten o’clock hits, and he repeats this process with the concept of mid-morning snacks--or
even afternoon, or evening, or midnight snacks. What’s the benefits? What are the
drawbacks? Some people say hunger is good, a healthy stress upon the body in the same vein
of exercise when applied in mild (MILD) doses; others say that frequent feeding at regular,
steady intervals staves off the sort of hunger that primes overeating and later purging. At
some point, Simmons begins to wish he could live on Ensure, and never have to bother with
eating ever again, and this would solve the whole damn argument, wouldn’t it?
By now; By now, he hasn’t eaten in too long, and he’s beginning to fantasize about
something salty and rich. It feels like he’s thirsty, but water does nothing. He’s running out of
time.
Grif wakes up at eleven in the morning and Simmons is knee-deep in figuring out guidelines.
He knows he can’t count calories without losing his shit; he hasn’t weighed himself
voluntarily since Basic and hasn’t weighed himself involuntarily since Rat’s Nest, and by god
he’s not starting again, that junk was horrible last time. But he also knows that just eating
whatever you want is bullshit and a scam--right? right?--so he’s got to find some middle
ground--honestly, whoever heard of doing something as fucking stupid as eating what you
want whenever you get hungry?
Grif rolls over in bed and immediately begins to pirate old TV shows for the long trip to
Blood Gulch. He eats a zebra cake for breakfast at one PM and wahshes it down with some
unidentified soda that he badgers Simmons into buying for him at the vending machine down
the hall. Meanwhile, Simmons wonders about the effect of artificial sweeteners from diet
soda on insulin and blood sugar, and abstains from buying a diet coke for himself.
Simmons sucks it up and goes with Sarge and Caboose to get lunch. Caboose orders a peanut
butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich. Sarge gets spaghetti and complains that the food
court doesn’t serve red noodles. He puts sriracha on his spaghetti. Simmons is left adrift with
nobody to emulate.
He orders exactly what Wash had the night before: hamburger, no bun, side of fries and a
salad. He doesn’t remember the dressing, panics, and throws away the generic Caesar
dressing. Then he throws away the fries, since he’s at it. And then the ketchup.
It’s around this time that Simmons realizes that he may have made some kind of mistake.
He spends all afternoon snappish at Caboose’s mild remarks and, when he stalks away from
them, lurking through the Hand of Merope’s general hallways alone, avoiding Grif’s texts and
ignoring people in the halls. He’s convinced that if he goes back to the food court, he’ll fuck
up and do something stupid out of a moment of weakness. He intended to avoid purging in
the first place, and if he eats something he’ll regret--which he certainly will if he tries to
make a food decision now--then the odds are that he’ll end up purging are almost a guarantee.
He should have made a decision before he got this hungry, fuck .
At some point, he makes his way down to the floor below the general food court and
hallways full of cruise-liner bedrooms, and finds what looks like a rec center. They’ve got a
whole bunch of activities that Simmons doesn’t care about because his brain immediately
laser-focuses in on the gym, which he stares at for about an hour, thinking about how he’s not
allowed to exercise when he hasn’t eaten anything and how he’s also not allowed to exercise
right after eating as a means of negating calories, because he went down both roads and
neither were fun.
He’s antsy. He can’t stand still. He paces the whole hour he stares at the gym. Then he buys
another cup of coffee with two shots of espresso.
Grif texts him about if he’s coming with to get dinner. The thought of sitting there at a table
full of food while everyone has a good time is so awful that he immediately declines. Then
he, almost on autopilot, for some reason he can’t explain, walks into the food court, orders
some unknown quantity of food, eats the whole thing at a corner table by himself, goes back
to Grif and Simmons’s room while Grif is out for dinner, and throws all of it up.
He’s not jittery after that. So that’s a plus, he supposes.
In the easy, smooth-sailing thinking of post-purge fog, Simmons goes over the day’s
mistakes. Everything he’s done before, but enacted out in a new situation and environment.
He didn’t go in with a plan. He didn’t go in prepared. He’s got to get his logic nailed down
before tomorrow, come up with some sort of baseline called “healthy” and “normal,” and
then fake it until he makes it.
And then, on the same mechanical autopilot that took him into the food court in the first
place, he cleans out the bathroom toilet, takes a shower to try to reduce the swelling of his
jaw and throat and the redness of his eyes, chugs a liter of water to replace his fluids, throws
on new clothes, and crawls into bed to wait for Grif.
Tomorrow, he’s not going to fuck this up. Tomorrow, he’s going to get this right.
It’s the second day.
Ninety-eight days to Chorus remain.
Prissy Simmons
Chapter Summary
Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine.
Chapter Notes
“[Vanessa Richard, a registered dietitian and nutritionist at Louisiana State University’s
student health center], agrees that you should “be armed with resources to help [a
person with an eating disorder] get to professional help on campus or in the
community” and offer to accompany her, but warns that you should “be prepared for
defensiveness or denial. [However,] doing something is better than doing nothing, even
if your friendship is on the rocks.”
With this in mind, Richard recommends that you first show your friend that you are there
for her. “Your goal is to say, ‘I love you,’ ‘It hurts me to see you suffer’ and, ‘I’m here to
support you and help you get the help you need,’” Richard says. “Sit down with [your
friend] privately at a neutral time and share your concerns with [her].” -Iris Goldsztajn,
HerCampus, ”What to Do When Your Friend Has an Eating Disorder”
i dont know how many times i have to keep warning for shit like this but simmons is
supremely back on his bullshit and also said some nasty shit about gay men again so
hold on to your pearls
What keeps Simmons up at night, staring at the ceiling, isn’t the feeling of Grif slipping out
of his hands off the cliff of Sidewinder. What keeps him up is the fact that he’d had gloves
on, and hadn’t been able to feel Grif slipping away at all. He’s understood Grif was falling
out his fingers, as a conceptual event that he could see with his eyes and hear with his ears;
but the feel of it, the knowledge of it in his gut, hadn’t gotten through at all. His eyes could
see Grif about to fall, but in his hands , it was like the one connection he’d had to Grif was
there one second, and the next he was gone.
It’s not right. You should be able to feel a person dying, press every moment into your skin,
imprint every beat of their heart into yours for preservation, save everything you can for
when they’re gone. Dying should be as slow as possible. Ideally, dying should be the length
of a lifetime: the maximum amount of time to intertwine everything you can of yourself with
someone you—
—Uh.
Was he talking about Grif? Actually, this is a hypothetical person that Simmons is referring
to. Someone who’s, uh, cleaner. And more motivated. And less perceptive.
Simmons crumples up the packaging of his breakfast sandwich and drains the last of his
coffee. It’s 6:30 AM, the barista looks even more tired that Simmons, and other passengers
are beginning to filter into the hallway outside the cafe’s windows. Wash and Sarge are
probably both up—Donut might be if the douche had bothered to come alone. The barista
visibly pulls himself together at the sight of new customers, like he’s forgotten Simmons has
been there for the last hour and a half.
Outside the cafe window, people drift through the Hand of Merope’s hallways in twos and
threes, mostly. Elder couples, sometimes young and energetic twenty-something couples,
friends carrying to-go orders for other friends. Simmons scrubs at his face. Ugh, he’s gotta
shave before he goes to bed.
Yeah, he’ll go to bed, skip breakfast and lunch. He didn’t stay up all night exercising at the
twenty-four hour gym, and he also didn’t stay up all night snacking and immediately purging
it, so he’s going to count today’s all-nighter as a… win? Yes, it’s a win. He stayed up all night
researching the benefits and drawbacks of carbohydrates, but it’s fine, it’s okay, restaurants
and food outlets aren’t open at night so he wouldn’t fuck up and eat something he wasn’t
supposed to. He’s going to go back to his room, get rid of this breakfast sandwich while Grif
is still sleeping, shave, and then go to bed.
Things could be worse, he reminds himself. It’s not bad if it could be worse.
Simmons wakes up at three in the afternoon to the sound of Grif turning off the shower.
He feels hungover. (That would be the loss of fluids, which Simmons is well aware of.
Replacing fluids sometimes gets more convoluted than just drinking water, but maybe that’s
just his brain overcomplicating things.) Really and truly, the thing he doesn’t want to deal
with right now is a naked Grif; he doesn’t deserve having to deal with that the instant he
wakes up. (He should probably drink water.)
But he remembered to shave, so it could be worse. Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine.
With effort, Simmons drags his tablet closer to check the time and finds his battle plan for
today—he can’t remember what he’d decided for his plan of attack, didn’t even remember
that he’d made one.
The note winds up being a meal plan.
Okay, he remembers writing this. He’d had red, puffy eyes and gunk in his throat, sitting on
the floor of the bathroom from fatigue after yesterday’s—no, this morning’s purge, and he’d
written up a meal plan and saved it as a text document titled:
EATING FOR DUMMIES, IN WHICH THE DUMMY IS YOUR STUPID ASS WHO
APPARENTLY CAN’T DO IT WITHOUT FUCKING IT UP
—and then a detailed list of instructions that required an exact bedtime, wake-up time (which
Simmons has overshot by nine hours), a precisely-regimented meal set-up down to the
ounces served and plate served on and times to eat at and how long eating should take.
Simmons had been inches away from detailing how many bites he should cut each meal up
into, he remembers, and only held off because that required actually testing out the meal plan
to see what was a reasonable number.
At the time, this idea seemed totally reasonable: obviously he hasn’t had any luck with halfassed guidelines or a general blanket recommendation to “stop throwing up, diptshit,” so the
only option is to force it. Make it happen, and leave nothing to change; the tiniest crack is the
crack in which his own shitty habits will come through, inevitably, because “shitty habits” is
just about shorthand for his entire self at this point.
On the other hand, this note looks like anorexia in disguise to his semi-better-rested eyes, and
he’ll be fucked if he turns into some anorexic twink with glitter and visible ribs.
Furthermore, he thinks, with no small amount of irritation (and at only a minute after he
woke up! He’s getting an early start on ruining his day, today)— furthermore , you’d think
that getting his shit together and stopping that whole purging nonsense would mean that he
achieves eating like a normal person. This? Is not eating like a normal person. (Whatever
“eating like a normal person” means. Theoretically this meal plan was supposed to define
that, but it mostly seems neurotic. And when Simmons calls something neurotic, it’s really
neurotic.)
The bathroom door opens. Simmons's heart does a funny rhythm, like a few beats
skipped. He locks the tablet and shoves it under the blankets and rolls over to face away.
“Dude, I know you’re awake,” says Grif.
Simmons wonders if he can ask if Grif has clothes on so he knows if it’s safe to turn around,
or if that would be too telling. “Yeah, I’m up,” he says, and nothing else.
“What’s up with you? Don’t you have, like, software downloaded into your robot bits to
wake you up at ass o’clock?”
There’s the sound of clothes, but not enough that Simmons suspects he’s getting dressed
altogether. (Did Grif actually listen to him and put on clothes on the bathroom this time?)
He’s not risking it. He’s told Grif so many times to change somewhere else, but no , Grif has
a moral principle against giving a single fuck.
“I was up last night,” Simmons says shortly.
“Yeah? Doing what?”
“Something productive,” Simmons lies.
“Uh-huh,” says Grif’s voice. “If this was Rat’s Nest, I’d accuse you of having a secret
boyfriend—”
“We’ve already done that joke!”
“—but by process of elimination, you’d have to be fucking Wash.”
Simmons makes a disgusted noise. Grif snorts.
“Let’s go get some grub, dude, I’m starving,” Grif says.
Without looking back over his shoulder, without a moment’s hesitation, Simmons says, “No,
I’m not hungry.” He doesn’t even think about it. He’s not even sure if he is hungry or not; it’s
not a question he’s asked himself since junior high, at least not in any serious capacity. It’s a
reflex.
“Yeah, but I eat all the time when I’m not hungry, who gives a fuck,” says Grif. Simmons
tenses with a sudden wave of fury and jealousy. “It’s like three PM, you know nobody else
from our group is going to be around to eat with me.”
“Get take-out, then.”
“Hey, good idea,” says Grif. “Thanks for enabling my disgusting slovenly ways, as I
inevitably get a three-pound burrito with a side of nachos and leave crumbs all over the
floor.”
“Grif, I swear to god if you do that, I will make you vacuum the place yourself—” Simmons
begins, sitting up and twisting to face him, and he’s not sure what he expected to see, but it
wasn’t Grif in a plain t-shirt, hands fiddling with a wallet full of credits, looking, somehow,
guilty and rearranging the wallet like it might give him plausible deniability of his guilt.
“You’ll just end up vacuuming the place yourself,” he mutters, and in an even more fauxcasual voice: “Should I like, pick up a salad for you or what?”
Just fucking say it , Simmons wants to hiss. Get it over with. ‘Hey Simmons, why do you eat
like a freak? What’s wrong with you?' Because if Grif would just do it, it’d be the end of
Simmons altogether, but at least it’d be the end.
(No, Simmons, don’t be an asshole, he’s only trying to help.)
(He’d ruin the salad if he ordered it. He’d fuck it up, order some ingredient Simmons can’t
eat or some sort of wrong dressing or get a portion size that’s too big or small or something .
It certainly wouldn’t adhere to the plan Simmons wrote last night—this morning—if he’s still
following that plan in the first place.)
(The fuck does Grif care, anyway? What part of fake dating did he not understand?)
“I’ll get a salad if I want a salad,” Simmons says tartly.
“Well, uh,” says Grif, still looking at his wallet, “what if you get hungry later…?”
For a second, there’s nothing but cold silence. Simmons’s eyes narrow. Grif glances at him
and immediately looks away. The second stretches into a moment, into ages. Grif fidgets.
Simmons seethes.
How dare Grif treat him like some kind of invalid.
Grif says, “Okay, well, you, uh, you do you. Whatever. I’m heading out.” And in a lower
voice: “Forget it.”
Simmons is still sitting there, glaring, when Grif slides the room door shut.
Then Simmons deletes the meal plan.
Old Houses
Chapter Summary
Simmons doesn’t lose his temper.
Chapter Notes
“As a former drug addict, I went through this 'last hurrah' thing with heroin, coke,
crack, and meth (numerous times each. I spent years 'getting it out of my system'.) You
cannot cure an addiction by doing the thing you are addicted to. It takes a lot of work,
and a lot of help and support.”
-Reddit response by Chiliflake to a Reddit post by bulimia_throwaway, “I think my
dieting has turned into bulimia. I don't know what to do.”
(https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/28yk55/i_think_my_dieting_has_turned_int
o_bulimia_i_dont/)
The Hand of Merope is a large ship, with large rec rooms full of TVs and games, food courts,
a pool, viewing decks, sit-down restaurants, various secretive holding cargos, faculty rooms
for technicians and staff members that passengers are restricted from entering. It reminds
Simmons of a cruiseliner, except that Simmons has never been on a cruiseliner, so what
would he really know about them?
Wash had predicted that the Reds and Blues would overrun the entire liner, possibly
involving Caboose and some teamkilling event, and terrorize every passenger with their frat
boy bullshit, and spent a good thirty minutes before the cruise lecturing them all about public
safety and being respectful adults, as if the Reds and Blues aren’t all well past twenty-five
years old at minimum, and as if Sarge himself wasn’t well past fifty -five. He made it sound
like any contact between civilians and the human catastrophes known as the Reds and Blues
would instantly cause combustion, or mass death, or the entire cruiseliner to rip in half and
kill everyone on board and strand the Reds and Blues on a semi-abandoned planet with no
way out.
The actual outcome is somehow even worse.
At the end of the hallway that contains all their rooms, there’s a tiny enclave with four
armchairs and a vending machine and a coffee table. Someone brings down a bunch of other
plastic chairs. They fight over who gets the armchairs and, when they discover that one of the
chairs has an uneven leg, they fight over who gets the pillows that went on the armchair.
Sarge claims the table as Red property and starts yelling whenever any Blue puts their feet on
it.
And then all the Reds and Blues just hang out there.
Constantly.
There’s a whole floor worth of rec rooms just a five minute walk and a staircase away, with
ping pong tables and foosball tables and human chessboards and bowling alleys and movie
theatres and even a place to try curling, and Blue Team went up there a couple times to try it
out, before Tucker declared it “boring” and came right back down and put his feet on Sarge’s
table and Sarge tried to pull his shotgun out of his luggage and Wash yelled at Sarge for
having brought an entire shotgun onto a commercial space cruiseliner, what were you
thinking ? Meanwhile Caboose slurped on a smoothie and said he would like to sit on an
armchair, now, please and thank you, he has spent his time waiting on the plastic chair
patiently, and then they all played odd-man-out rock-paper-scissors for about twenty-minutes
straight (“best out of a hundred and twenty-seven”) so they could determine who had to give
up their chair for Caboose. Grif lost, and then claimed he was too lazy to get out of his chair
and it was nothing against Caboose, he was just physically incapable of mustering up the
energy to move, and Wash volunteered to give up his chair at the same time Sarge said
Caboose could have his chair, and then they had to go another a hundred and twenty-seven
rounds of rock-paper-scissor to find out if Wash or Sarge got to give their chair to Caboose.
Grif and Tucker took bets. Sarge won because he extended the game to a hundred and sixtythree, gave his chair to Caboose, and then kicked Grif out of his chair to steal it anyway.
Tucker leaves so much trash in the hallway corner that nobody else who rooms in that
hallway dares come near it, which means that it’s always available for the Reds and Blues
specifically to use. This is the main reason that Simmons spends less and less time in the
pseudo-Gulch corner: he's afraid he's going to eat a pizza slice Tucker left around, and then
he'll have to eat five other slices because his brain says he has to, and then he'll have to spend
half an hour choking it back up.
“Absolutely fucking stupid,” says Grif once, at around one in the morning, munching through
a taco on the floor, flipping through a magazine on “health and fitness,” for some ungodly
reason. “The amount of bullshit in that they’re doing every single day when there’s like, a
whole ship full of better things to do? Unbelievable.”
“Like I see you doing anything else but hanging out in that same corner,” says Simmons.
“Yeah, but that’s because that’s my brand , Simmons. Sitting around, eating, sleeping, not
coming out of my room for twenty-one days at a time. That’s my thing . My character staple
. The whole world would fall apart if I couldn’t be depended on to dig my heels in and be as
un-fun and stupid as humanly possible.”
Sometimes Grif says things about himself that Simmons really wonders how to respond to,
because his usual MO for the last however-many-years he’s known Grif has been to agree
wholeheartedly, and then add in a few complaints for good measure. Nowadays, he thinks
about soft snow under his hands and the empty grey skyline right after Grif fell over the edge,
and that one moment when he wished he could have said something better than Don’t let go ,
something that was maybe little more… truthful. (Simmons only seems to realize how
truthful he isn’t when there aren’t any more opportunities to do anything about it. That’s
normal, though, right?)
“Man, I can’t wait to get off this dumb ship,” says Grif.
“So we can hang out and do all the same annoying bullshit at Blood Gulch,” says Simmons.
“Yeah, exactly.”
“So we can do the same things we always do,” says Simmons.
“Yep.”
“The same things that drive us up the wall,” says Simmons.
“Mmhm.”
“And continue to do the same things that we wish we could quit,” says Simmons.
Grif licks his fingers and flips a page of his magazine. Glances up and then down, guilty.
“You know it.”
Simmons crosses his arms. “Well, if we hate it that much, you’d think we wouldn’t go back
to Blood Gulch. Or that we wouldn’t do the same things here on this ship! That we could go
out and go to, I dunno, the movie theatre that’s literally a hundred yards away! We could go
do something else!"
“That takes effort, though,” says Grif.
“Of course it takes effort!” Simmons cries. “Most things in life require effort, Grif! Anything
worth doing is rough and you have to do it anyway!”
“You sound like a self-help book,” says Grif, rolling his eyes. “What’s worth doing if
everything’s just going to fall apart anyway?”
Simmons doesn’t lose his temper. He doesn’t get angry or pissed because it’s Grif and he
doesn’t want to say things he doesn’t mean, which is why he snaps, “For fatasses like you ,
maybe!” and bolts off his bed and this time he leaves the room instead of Grif, to go out in
the hallway at one in the morning, probably to find some food to inhale and throw up again.
He’ll solve this in the morning. He’ll do it right tomorrow. One last time, he promises, and
then never again.
Seventeenth day. Eighty-three days to Chorus remain.
Good Stories
Chapter Notes
"To a normal person I realize it just sounds insane, but [bulimia is] my excuse, my way
of accepting the fact that I am here and I am alive. I do this in order to let myself exist."
-Bulimics on Bulimia, page 42
The oddest thing about it all is that by the twentieth day—
(Simmons misses Grif.)
Which is infuriating by itself because it's Grif, and it should be illegal to miss someone so
lazy and fat and useless; it should be double illegal to miss someone that Simmons is literally
rooming with; it should be triple illegal to miss someone even more now that they’re living in
the same space because Simmons is supposed to dislike someone who’s sharing his space, it’s
practically the guidebook that you start to dislike someone more when they’re sharing a room
with you; it should piss Simmons off that Grif can’t pick up his clothes and leaves the
toothpaste uncapped and wipes grease on his own laundry and never does laundry, just dumps
it in a laundry basket and waits for either Simmons or Wash to take it away and do his
fucking chores for him like he’s a spoiled child; but the problem is that Simmons already
knew that Grif was like that, has generally lived more or less in the same space as Grif for
nearly ten years, now, and he’s picked up every little thing that Grif does, the way he licks his
fingers like a gross heathen when he flips book pages or sometimes doesn’t wash his hair
even when he takes a shower, the way he breathes heavily at random times, how he
complains and complains about having to be clean but somehow, for some reason, he’d
actually listened to what Simmons asked and took all the food out of the room. No crumbs,
no leftover plates, no trash, he hasn’t even kept his weird little stash of food that Grif often
kept under his bunk in Blood Gulch and Valhalla; Simmons threw all food out of the room on
the second day and for some reason Grif actually kept the food out, for once in his life, which
is only to Grif’s benefit, honestly, because the likelihood is that Simmons will steal Grif’s
food and moreso than the rudeness, Simmons hates that he’ll go for so long without eating,
not feeling hungry per se but constantly thinking about food, about taste, wanting to chew
gum, feeling thirsty when he’s already drank four liters of water, feeling restless and buzzy
and foggy and irritable until he just blinks and whoops, someone else’s food is gone, like his
body did a manual override on his brain and eliminated all thought until he’d inhaled
someone else’s food, and then he’s left with the aftermath having to explain why he stole
someone else’s pizza (and cheese and bread are both so hard to throw up, to boot). He knows
that about himself and he used to sneak food from his roommate in college, who’d always
bought pizza and takeout and bargain-bin pastries from the day-old section at the
supermarket, and was one of those people who was comfortably overweight and thought
about food not at all; his rooommate used to go fourteen hours straight without eating a bite
and then suddenly remember that he had to eat, and then down an entire pizza by himself, and
Simmons had to sit in his bed and seethe because how dare this douchebag eat without
consequence and not care and not bother and not worry about it when there’s so many ways
you can go wrong, so many swords hanging over your head; there’s nothing inherently wrong
with pizza except for the fact that just the thought of it makes something in him fixate like it’s
a gun pointed to his head, a pure fight or flight instinct that becomes normal on the battlefield
later but was a regular occurrence at mealtimes ever since Simmons was eleven, can’t
remember a time when mealtimes were safe, when they weren’t a struggle and a project and
an ordeal to be prepped for and endured, white-knuckled through with everything he had and
has, up until the point when he wanted to actually be something other than someone who
fights with food and then suddenly everything falls apart and he’s skipping class every day,
throwing up half a cup of broccoli because he can’t stand the way it stretches his stomach, he
hates eating eggs because they actually make him feel less hungry and he’s not sure what
he’d do without the feeling of desperate, desperate longing for something to eat; if he’s
already full then why does he still feel bored and restless and wound up? The truth of the
matter is that there’s nothing separating most other eaters from disordered eaters than the
level of obsession; a person who forgets to eat and loses weight on accident is someone who
doesn’t think about food; an eating disordered person thinks about nothing but food; their
whole life and and goal and purpose and worth revolves around food; it’s the reason they
wake up in the morning, the reason they talk to you, the reason why they read books or go for
walks or laugh or smile, because reading books passes the time until you can or can’t eat and
going for walks burns calories and laughing and smiling is the methods of avoiding other
people confronting what you did or didn’t eat so you can go even longer and stronger, every
single dirty trick in the book at all times during the day, every single fiber of your being
pinpointed to a single shining goal with the dedication of an athlete or religious zealot, with
an insistence that this dedication is yours up until the point that you realize that you can’t
stop, that the thoughts are not yours, that they insist and insist and insist and insist until you
break down and throw your food in the trash, go for a run, binge on a gallon of ice cream,
throw it all up; insist and insist and insist because it doesn't really matter what you're doing
with food as long as it's with food and nothing, no one else, like a bad boyfriend who doesn't
care if the relationship is sour or sweet so long as you never leave; insist and insist and insist
and insist to the extent that group therapy is a dangerous endeavor, that those who’ve lived
with their eating disorders for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years say, with caution, to those who
are still yet new to the eating disorder in their head that the thoughts never really go away,
lest that they discourage these young rookies to the arena of mental health from continuing
their lives altogether, which is easy to do both alive and dead; the purpose of obsession is
nothing less but to flatten oneself, to be reduced to nothing but your purpose and your
obsession, a reduction of self and thought, not for any fear or stress or control or magical
pseudoscience psychotherapy nonsense but simply because it’s a habit, a ridiculous echo of
one spring break when Simmons was nine and he came down with the flu, so severely and so
seriously that he was reduced to eating nothing but clear broth for about twelve days straight,
and by the end of it he was thin as a rail and ravenously hungry, so hungry that when he was
well enough to eat he downed a whole stack of pancakes and then then another plate of fries
and when he was done his stomach hurt with the sheer volume of everything he’d packed into
his nine-year-old body and he was still hungry, and it was awful, because what if he felt this
way forever, it was one of the most awful and terrible ideas he’d ever thought in his young
life but he didn’t even know what it was because hunger tends to be that way, soft and
insistent, quiet and unnoticed, never going away, and he couldn't even put words to it so he
couldn't ask and nobody could simply just tell him "you're hungry just eat more" because so
many people think of hunger as the emptiness of a your stomach, not the screeching of nails
on the inside of your skull when your body desires to replace the fat stores that it's lost.
Something in his head was screaming and he didn’t know how to make it stop, things hurt in
a small little space in the back of his head that slowly but surely insisted something here is
wrong and the inside of his stomach hurt because he’d made the mistake of drinking orange
juice to go with it, and if everything hurts and everything is wrong then maybe he can just get
rid of it and he can be rid of what’s wrong with him with it. He didn’t often drink in college
because he’d been warned about addiction; he’d never smoked pot, mostly because he’d
never had any friends who did; he’d never done hard drugs because he knew that would kill
him; he’d been warned about the usual suspects but nobody had warned him about food,
nobody had warned that sometimes young boys and men wind up with eating disorders too;
they’d said that eating disorders were for stupid girls who wanted to lose weight; they hadn’t
said that after four days of starving, you won’t want to eat; they hadn’t said that the thought
of never purging again would make your heart shriek, that something in you will be insistent
that you will die if you don’t purge right this second; they hadn’t said that everything in your
head is loud and the answer is on your plate, your whole days down to your fork and knife,
every moment of every day of every week of every month of every year down to how well
you do or don’t eat. They’d said that your body would disintegrate, but anyone willing to go
down that road wouldn’t care—that was normal-person talk, normal-person assumptions
about how much you did or didn’t care about your physical self. Nobody willing to go down
that road cares like a normal person about their body. A body is only worth anything if it’ll do
what you tell it to—otherwise, there’s no reason not to throw it in the toilet, again and again
and again. They should have led with: your mind will begin to die; that’s the reason Simmons
first became afraid, that one day he realized that the essence of what he considered himself
was beginning to erode, the little staples of what held him together rusting and falling away
like a bad caricature of himself, all the little strengths he'd dredged up over the years of
learning how to talk to other people and managing his time and writing down to-dos in his
agenda got thrown out the fucking window because how well can you really focus when half
your head is purged down the toilet and the other half of your head is thinking about the next
time you'll have to purge? A therapist later asked in college where he learned that you can
make yourself throw up with your fingers down your throat and he wasn’t sure, it felt like a
knowledge that he’d been born with, that he came out of the womb knowing that you can
excavate the wrong bits of your head out of your stomach and into the toilet if you used your
fingers the right way, and the therapist wrote him down as having family issues and a
childhood case of anxiety, which obviously wasn’t wrong and Simmons wasn’t the person to
deny having family issues and he wasn’t one to deny being nervous and anxious but what the
fuck did that have to do with anything? He wanted to stop throwing up, he wanted to get his
head out of the toilet, he wanted to stop spending a whole hour choking up every meal
because his gag reflex was so fucked up that he couldn’t get anything up without torturing his
poor epiglottis, nearly shoving his fingers down his windpipe just to make his body
cooperate, and then again two hours later, and then again two hours after that, and then again
an hour after that, before he threw in the towel and just went to sleep having gone to none of
his college classes and done none of his homework and dreading all the emails and reports
and books and coding that he had to do tomorrow that he had truly and surely meant to do
today before all this fuckery had happened, and he doesn’t even know why it happened; but
surely, the therapist promised, if you unravel all the memories that you have of your
childhood dinner table, then you will understand the root of all your emotional issues? You
will understand the source of your anxiety and the source of your deep-seated trauma that
fuels your eating disorder? You will understand why you choose to hurt yourself by selfsoothing with food and then immediately depriving yourself of it? (But Simmons is
sometimes convinced that the opposite is true, that eating is the self-harm and that the
purging is the self-soothe; he never listens to what his body wants and needs so well as when
he’s bent over the toilet, trying to make its digestive system work in reverse; he never
hydrates so thoroughly as when after a purge; he never, otherwise, empties his brain so
thoroughly of its worries and nerves; purging is, by far, the healthiest thing that he’s done for
himself in a long, long time.) But back in those days, when he was beginning to try and put
together some method of dealing with this stupid, stupid bad habit, he figured that it was
worth a shot, and he dutifully followed his therapist's instructions and thought a lot about
how his mother didn't notice anything so long as it didn't bother her and his father wouldn't
hear anything Simmons had to say, they just argued argued argued all day long until his
mother decided she'd had enough and divorced her husband in her heart and resolved to never
speak to him again, and from then on it was Simmons's job to be quiet and stay put and cause
no fuss, so as not to disturb both his parents' official retirement from parentage, despite the
fact that they all still lived in the same house and despite the fact that Simmon was thirteen
and terrified of middle school and just about most of everything and everyone else. Good,
good, this is progress, said the therapist, but still did not tell Simmons how to just do the god
damn thing that he wanted to do, which was to stop purging, and every time he asked, the
therapist said that there were still emotional issues to resolve, every single emotional issue to
resolve, which seemed like generally a whole lifetime of work considering that most human
beings are Emotional Issues To Resolve; and it's in this way that Simmons did actually
continue to diligently attempt recovery and therapy all the way up to the point that he flunked
straight out of college, without telling his parents or a single friend, so that it came as a
huge surprise to just about all of them when Simmons declared that he was leaving college to
join the army, where Simmons hoped that perhaps the supremely regimented life of the
military might strait-jacket his entire self into being less inherently abhorrent and a total
trash-fire mess; that the high expectations and clear goals and obvious chain of command
might be exactly what he needed to wring all this nonsense and bullshit and filth out of his
human self by sheer brute force. He needed to be held together, like an open wound under the
tight grip of a compression vest, except that, obviously, had worked out not at all, clearly,
considering the whole simtrooper program and fake war and fake army and fake career. His
parents didn't care and, with his father's continuing silence after the public fall of Project
Freelancer, Simmons has decided that he doesn't care very much either, and that his mother is
certainly allowed to drink herself into an early frosty grave if she'd like, and his father can die
in his workaholic ditch too. Three separate human beings related by blood, not so much ships
passing in the night so much as they were parallel lines combusting and disintegrating and
caring not a single whit about each other (or at least now that Simmons has spent so much
time away from them and has let out of sight become out of mind), and frankly Simmons is
entirely okay with his dredged-up ability to tell his parents fuck you because he'd rather die
than admit to being anything less than perfectly healthy and happy to either one of his
parents, and with the rate that this eating disorder has fucked up his heart, he very well
might. Is a beautiful soul-search for the source of your mental illness what you want to hear?
That he had some sort of emotional sad story, that there was a narrative origin, that there's a
story with a neat end to it? Stories are a series of little levers. Characters work one way,
scenes work another way, reader's suspension of disbelief in yet another, and everything
wrapped up in a two-act, three-act, six-act structure. Tied up neat. The girl confronts her
tragic sexual history; the girl resolves her tragic flawed parents' marriage; the girl exorcises
the ghost of her mental illness like a toxic friend; the girl tearfully admits that once a
boyfriend called her fat and her biological, womanly need for validation has haunted her ever
since, et cetera, et cetera. Pull the levers. Watch the conflict; be entertained. Walk away
satisfied, when all the little levers have produced your happy ending. Expected. Controlled.
Acceptable. It's all very... Freudian. A story told to concerned men in power, who wonder
why their women are acting out of line. Is a story what you want to hear? It's what we could
tell you, if you'd like. Sad emotions. A corrupted identity. A bad sense of body image. Oh no,
I'm so fat, and I think that way because Victoria's Secret models have a bad case of
photoshop. Thank you, thank you, the scales have fallen from my eyes and I see the light!
You fucking idiot. I'll tell you how it happened. Once, a long time ago, at the young age of
nine, Richard Simmons came down with a flu, became unreasonably hungry after eating very
little through the duration of his illness, and thereafter avoided eating dinner. The
psychoanalyst says he avoided it because his family wasn't there, that the feelings of
loneliness were too raw to confront the dinner table; the other psychoanalyst says that he
avoided the dinner table because his family was there, and they were highly judgmental and
terrifying; the psychiatrist says it was because of childhood anxiety disorder, manifesting
after school when he had no other work to do; the geneticist says that there were pre-existing
anxiety and eating disorders in the family, of course the dinner table is a battlefield, while the
behaviorist says that pre-existing anxiety and eating disorders in the family behavior is an
obviously learned behavior; the nutritionist says the meals were carb-heavy and nutritionless,
prone to spiking insulin and stress close to bedtime; another says it's self-harm; another says
it's a self-soothe; another says it's a ritual; another says it's an addiction; another says it's a
method of control; another says it's a method of denying control; another says it's an attempt
to bring the number of meals down to two; a safe and even number, a manifestation of
number-connected OCD; another says it's an attempt to cling to childhood; another says it's a
bid for adulthood and responsibility. A series of points, dots on a graph—you can make
whatever story you'd like. Between that time, Richard's eating patterns go from orderly to
disorderly. Unclear how many meals he has; unclear when he last ate; unclear what foods he
prefers; unclear if he's hungry or full or tired or stressed; he doesn't purge at set times; he
doesn't weigh himself at set times; he doesn't exercise at set times; within two years, every
hours of the day is a Russian roulette—at three pm, he'll throw up a cup of milk; at four pm,
he'll down three bags of chips; at five pm, he'll run himself to exhaustion; at six pm; he'll
resolve to never eat anything again; for the next two days, he'll do exactly that; for the three
days after that, he eats nothing but yogurt and soft foods, because he can't bear to chew
anything for fear of being unable to stop eating, for fear of being unable to stop himself from
purging it; the hour after that, his soft foods have turned to ice cream, and everything comes
back up; he stares at his breakfast the next morning and salivates and counts every calorie,
every carb, every fat gram to the decimal point and genuinely tries to eat a full plate of eggs
and winds up eating nothing, the very idea of putting food in his mouth making him sick to
his stomach; he could not explain the patterns he has if he tried; it goes on every hour of
every day of every month of every year from the time he is nine to the time he is thirty-three.
And that’s the exciting bit, because as it turns out, the brief periods where he actually lost
weight were even more boring: He woke up, he ate less than he should, he went to sleep and
did it again. On those days, he didn’t think about his family or his grades or his friends or
reading books or TV shows or science fiction or coding or math or literally anything. When
he watched TV, or did his homework, or went to sleep, or texted a friend, everything was “not
eating” or “eating.” There’s nothing complex about obsession. That’s the point of it. When
presented with voids, one either grows new flesh and self, or shovels in anything else they
can find. Movies, books, shopping, gambling, money, pills, words, applause, perfection, a rat
race to feel less of how much you aren’t. His body was his temple, and he would not stand to
let his temple collapse. If it must stand on a mountain of trash and hatred and ironclad
obsession, it’s still better than collapse into the abyss; destruction is not the end, but the
means to survival; he'll live, if only for a little while longer. Just a little while longer. Just a
little while longer. Something is always better than nothing. Just a little while longer. In every
school, in every state, on every planet, with every group of friends, at every stage of his life,
stringing each tomorrow together with the trash of yesterday—and you want to make a story
out of it? Some sort of consistent narrative? What narrative could possibly, possibly span so
much of his life? where is the exposition? where is the rising action? where is the climax?
where is the denouement? where? where? where is the end of the story? when will the story
end? when will the story end? No—sympathy for the devil will earn you no favors. Do not
ask how the illness was born; it only matters how you kill it. And Simmons was so sure, so
sure that if he just planned out his meals and micromanaged every aspect of his eating
(obsession) to ensure that nothing would go wrong, that he would never fuck up again
(obsession obsession) that this would be called recovery (obsession obsession obsession), that
this would somehow lead him out of this fucking hole that he's found himself in, a hole he
was trying to prevent himself from falling into and somehow wound up instead turboboosting himself directly into the darkest heart of it and he doesn't know where he went
wrong, he doesn't understand why he can't cure an obsession with more obsession, or why he
can't continue to live his life believing that there is something inherently wrong with him,
from how much or how little he eats to the shows he watches to the clothes he wears to the
way he smiles to the friends he makes to the major he chose to the college he attended
reaching right down to some unchanging steel core of himself that was innately disgusting
and inherently oozing, filthy, repulsive, a message that came from everywhere and nowhere,
not from his Psychotherapeutic Relationship With His Dad or whatever the fuck but simply
as a background radiation of every single action he's ever done in his entire life that's been
met with a sneer or a stony silence; a constant subliminal rejection of everything he's ever
liked or wanted, right down to his body and the other bodies that he sometimes thinks about
when he's supposed to be jacking off to busty female women who are definitely not men.
This belief of internal wrongness has only one other competitor in its strength and this is the
belief that if Simmons tries hard enough, that if he does it right and does it like Sarge asks
and eats a certain way and talks a certain way and makes certain friends then maybe, one day,
he’ll be okay, that he can eradicate the things that are so wrong and ugly about himself, and
he must hold onto this belief because the alternative—to accept himself in all his human
flaws and shortcomings and nonsensicality—is unthinkable; he could never forgive himself
for being himself and could never fathom even the idea of it; he's punched in the fucking gut
with the overwhelming conviction that he'd somehow done everything wrong, that somehow
there was a better way to be, one that wasn’t a mess and a disaster and a fuck-up, and the
beginnings of the thought that he'd done it all wrong because he was wrong, and one day he
will escape his own skin and become someone he can stand to look at in the mirror, someone
that he wouldn’t mind going up to Grif and giving him a flirty smile and asking him if he’d
like to go catch a movie sometime; except that that’s not who Simmons is, he knows that’s
not who he is (and Grif probably wouldn't like him very much if that was who he was), and
like most people Simmons wants to be seen as who he is, which he believes to be
unexceptional, inconsequential, of no real specialty and certainly not worth having any real
friends, which is fine because Grif isn’t his real friend and Grif isn’t even a decent person that
anyone else would approve of, certainly not a boyfriend he could take home to his family and
brag about with any modicum of pride or self-respect; every single one of the Blood Gulchers
is nothing less than absolute fucking loser garbage and it’s where Simmons belongs, and to
some extent he is quite happy in his useless, endless spiral of binge purge binge purge binge
purge neither gaining nor losing and only slowing eroding from the inside out spending
unending unceasing days in the dayless careerless useless Blood Gulch because it is truthful
to who he is. Blood Gulch is where he belongs, where they all belong; Grif and Simmons
deserve each other in the worst way; Grif can watch him die and die and Grif will do nothing,
say nothing, just let him fall apart under his nose which is precisely how Simmons likes it,
Simmons soaks up Grif's apathy and cynicism and inability to give a shit like a plant denied
sunshine to the extent that Simmons wonders what it'd be like to be in Grif's head, to give not
a singular shit about anyone or anything or himself, to have nothing worth fighting for and
therefore nothing to lose, and Simmons hates that humans aren't magnets and that opposites
don't attract because maybe they fucking should, and Simmons hates that because how dare
people in this world not be as hyperfocused on the most insane and stupid bullshit as
Simmons? How dare Grif throw all of Simmons's efforts in the trash, completely invalidate
everything that Simmons has lost his health and sanity for, simply step sideways and escape
the binary altogether? What is Simmons trying to do if not to pull himself out of his
disgusting purging hole, to walk a highwire above the waiting filth that is himself, how dare
Grif not give a singular shit about any of that and have it work out for him? (Does it, though?)
More than Simmons hates Grif's apathy working, Simmons hates that Grif protects his own
skin like a yellow-bellied coward right up until the moment that the Meta shows up and it's
time to hook a Warthog to the Meta's chest and drag him off a cliff, Simmons hates that now
Simmons has to worry about Grif getting dragged off the ice, that Simmons can't even trust
Grif to take care of himself and look after himself, which is just about the time that it punches
Simmons in the chest that if there's one thing on this earth that Simmons really wants it's not
to take care of Grif but to have Grif actually take care of himself, to be lazy and uncaring if he
wants to be, not because he has to be, be lazy if and only if it's an act of kindness to yourself,
and that at the very least he values his own life and doesn't go walking off into danger,
doesn't get the dead look in his eyes sometimes and zone out of the conversation until
Simmons nudges him back in. Simmons wakes up on the morning of the twentieth day
thinking that Grif's died in the middle of the night somehow and that Simmons will have to
divorce himself from being GrifandSimmons, the singular entity, and have to figure out who
else to crack jokes with and who else to stand awkwardly with and who else to understand
him and his shitty, nerdy sense of humor. The nights that Simmons thinks Grif has died are
actually so much worse than the nights that Simmons feels his heart beat the worst sort of
rhythm, all out of order and out of sync, two decades worth of purging and esophagus erosion
and electrolyte loss making his cyborg heart stutter and stammer like a blushing virgin; he
goes to sleep convinced that he won't wake up at all and that he'll have a heart attack in the
middle of the night and Grif will have to see his dead body in the morning and he thinks of
telling Grif that he shouldn't worry and he shouldn't panic and just tell him I did this to
myself and it's been coming for a long time and it's mostly fine, except for all the things that
Simmons figures he should have done with his life and also all the things that Simmons
actually wanted to do with his life, which was mostly write a really great DnD campaign to
play with Caboose and also see if Grif's lips are as soft as they look, which is a pretty fucking
sad list when he thinks about it but it's all he's really got when he cuts out all the nonsense
that he was told that he was supposed to want; once twelve years of education and being told
what to be and what to want is eliminated, all that's really left is Blood Gulch and a vague
desire to stay with Red Team and a stronger desire to avoid going home at all costs, so he's
going back to Blood Gulch where there's nothing to do and nowhere to go and no one to be
and Blood Gulch exactly the sort of place for dead-end losers with no value and no passion in
their lives whatsoever. And when he wakes up every morning and he hasn't died in his sleep,
he has a feeling of waking up and leaving behind the alternate universe where he didn't wake
up, that this other universe is so close that he can feel the heat cooling of his own dead body,
lying in his own bed alongside him like an uncomfortable bedfellow, and as his lungs pump
air and his heart pumps blood and as he pushes himself through the air thick and liquid with
his own soupy corpse, he swears: never again. Never again is he going to purge. Never, ever
again. (He usually lasts about eight hours after that.) Never purging again is lovely to say, a
beautiful promise, three nice words that pale in the actual experience of what is required to
love a person in their entirety, both yourself and another; to forgive a person in their entirety,
unconditionally, both yourself and another. (More than anything in the world, more than Grif,
more than Grif dying, Simmons hates that there has been and there will be no magical
moment that will save Simmons from being himself or his purging; there’s only inability to
forgive yourself and a series of bad habits. Simmons hates that once upon a time, there could
have been a story to go along with Simmons's eating disorder, and like any good story,
there would have been comedy, missing fathers, comedy, existential despair, comedy, too
much alcohol, a healthy amount of voyeurism, identifiable reasons, cause and effect.
Everything wrapped into a nice scientific bundle, if you just ignored all the data points you
didn’t like. After all, cherry-picking isn’t bad science, it’s good storytelling! But that was a
possibility of some time long ago—back in the good old days, when Simmons thought he
could quit and that every person is only the sum of rationality. Back in the good old days,
when Simmons still tried to believe truths about himself like some worn, old god. Back in the
good old days, when he still believed the great creation myths of mental illness.)
Bad habits and good stories don’t make very good friends, but Simmons hates them less than
he hates Grif. Love is a word. Words are the stuff of good stories.
(Simmons still misses Grif.)
Eighty days to Chorus remain.
Giant Baby
Chapter Summary
The twenty-first day is when everything actually gets worse.
Chapter Notes
SUMMARY OF IMPORTANT FINDINGS, Broussard (2005):
- Many [bulimics] thought their behaviours were “normal” or weren’t a big deal, but that
they were afraid others would think otherwise.
- Participants thought they were often perceived as being “gross,” “disgusting,” “sick,”
“repulsive” or that there was something mentally “wrong” with them.
- After vomiting, “rather than guilt, [many] actually felt “relief” or “good.” [...] The
participants faced a huge internal struggle, and attempts to rationalize the irrational but
overwhelming desire to binge and purge.
[...]
SUMMARY OF IMPORTANT FINDINGS, Pettersen et al. (2008):
- Though often seen as being “manipulative,” patients are often just trying to preserve
their dignity and concealing their bingeing and purging is a way to accomplish this.
- Participants hid their behaviour for fear of shame, stigma, and negative sanctions
- Individuals who were less ashamed of bingeing and purging, and did not put as much
daily effort into hiding it “may be judged as better off” (because mentally it is less
exhausting).
Severity of bulimia is then not only related to psychiatric status, frequency of symptoms,
or objective somatic conditions. Severity is equally a question about emotional
fragmentation between shame and dignity, as well as whether the distance between the
overt and the covert hampers daily life functioning.
- "THE “DOUBLE LIFE” OF BULIMIA NERVOSA: PATIENTS’ PERSPECTIVES,"
from the excellent blog "The Science of EDs," written by Tetyana (really cannot
recommend this article enough!)
The twenty-first day is when everything actually gets worse.
Tucker stops Simmons in the hallway as Simmons slinks back to his room like a guilty child.
“Where the hell have you been?” Tucker demands. “Caboose is crawling up the damn walls
on this ship, and I’m pretty sure that you were supposed to have custody of him last
Wednesday.”
“Uhhhh,” says Simmons, who is not very sure when Wednesday was.
“Also—what are you wearing?” Tucker asks.
Simmons glances over his shoulder down the empty hallway. Sarge, Grif, and Wash are
sitting around the Blood Gulch Corner at the end of the hallway, too far to be within earshot.
Grif’s got his back turned. Simmons clears his throat.
“Gym clothes,” he says.
He’s got nothing to be ashamed of, he reminds himself; he’s done nothing wrong or
unacceptable. Plenty of people go to the gym. Sometimes the people who go to the gym
includes Simmons, and it’s not supposed to be unusual. Going to the gym is healthy.
“What the hell are you wearing gym clothes for?” Tucker says.
“For going to the gym,” Simmons replies testily.
“Ugh,” says Tucker. “The fuck is up with you weird overachieving vegan health nuts? Wash
was saying that I should go to the gym the other day like it’s actually a thing I’m supposed to
do? Like I was supposed to have a training schedule or something?”
“Uh, yes? You’re supposed to?” says Simmons. “You’re... in the military?”
Tucker waves it away. “Church never made me train,” he says, and then hesitates.
“Whatever,” he says, even though Simmons hadn’t said anything. “Seriously, dude, you’ve
been like a ghost or something. It’s weirding me out.”
Simmons bristles. “Then don’t go looking for me in the first place,” he snaps. “Caboose is
your team’s giant baby anyway.”
“Dude, really? Are you really going there? Are you seriously—”
“I’m gonna shower,” Simmons declares, and beats a hasty retreat to his and Grif’s room and
closes the door behind him.
Grif’s things are not all over their shared room like Simmons would expect them to be.
Grif and Grif’s things are all over the Blood Gulch Corner—pizza boxes, sticky wrappers,
weird books with no real rhyme or reason to them. Grif takes naps in the Blood Gulch
Corner, imprinting his ass to one of the few chairs with cushions and snoring away at 8 AM,
12 PM, 4 PM, 10PM, any time of day unholy and unsacred. He gives not a single shit about
schedule or structure.
Simmons’s and Grif’s room is closer to just Simmons’s room, then. And sometimes Grif
sleeps in the other bed.
It’s a timeless, windowless place. There’s no CO’s telling him to get up or clean it, nobody to
impress with his timeliness or cleanliness, like at Blood Gulch or Rat’s Nest. There’s no sun
rising or setting at Valhalla. Grif’s helmet is set up in the corner displaying the time which,
despite the passing numbers, still seems to tell Simmons nothing at all.
But he can’t come out until he’s got this shit under lock. He hates being at outings with other
people and desperately needing to purge. He also hates being late to appointments because he
had to purge. He’d rather get everything under control first, then he’ll come out, and
everything will be fine and better because he’s gone through the effort of recovering first—
“Simmons!” Sarge hollers through the door. “Quit being nasty to Caboose! You’re hurting his
feelings! Specifically his and nobody else’s and definitely not mine, because I’ve surgically
removed my amygdala and therefore feel nothing but the unceasing urge to kill all Blues!”
“You can’t draw a line down the middle of the room and expect me to never cross it!” Wash’s
voice says. “The door to get out is on your side!”
“That’s the point! A cunning trap to force you under siege! Private Simmons, I command you
to get out here and eradicate them with me!”
Simmons holds his breath.
“Simmons, I know you’re in there!” Sarge yells.
“He’s probably taking a nap,” says Grif’s voice. “Leave him alone.”
“Napping? Simmons would never do such a slovenly, disgusting show of hedonism!”
“I have seen proof with my own eyes that he takes naps,” Grif says flatly. “In fact, we took a
nap together onc—”
“THIS IS A BREACH OF PRIVACY AND I REFUSE TO LISTEN TO YOUR DEPRAVED
KINKS.”
Simmons slinks away to actually take a shower.
He spends four hours drawing up meal plans. He’s not giving in. He’s going to make
recovery happen. He’s going to make it work.
Actually, he draws up a lot of different plans—various rules, foods to avoids, schedules,
sleeping times—but all of them seem hollow and ridiculous. He thinks a bit about Grif asking
once, a million years ago, Why are we here? and the fact of the matter is that he can’t really
find a good reason to go to sleep early and wake up early and to eat certain meals at certain
times of day, except to be neurotic, which of course is Simmons’s specialty, except for the
fact that his particular brand of neurotic once led him to count every singular calorie that
went into his mouth for about two years straight and he doesn’t want to flirt with that devil
again, thanks. He doesn’t even know why he’d done it anymore—maybe for the love of
having numbers add up to a nice sum, but that doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. (He
wonders what on earth he’s going to do with himself when he gets to Blood Gulch.)
The one solid reason he’s got under his belt is that he hates throwing up (and he hates
exercising, too), and he’d like to stop doing it; but he’s also no idiot and he’s not going to
stop purging if he keeps being unable to feed himself without ruining everything with trash
and junk food. There’s got to be some kind of secret, he thinks, that enables everyone else to
pull off the act of eating so effortlessly; and as soon as he finds it—
“Psst.”
Simmons looks up from his tablet. (It’s currently open to a series of studies on intermittent
fasting.) He squints. In the windowless, solitary room, he’s forgotten to turn on the lights.
“Psst,” comes through the wall.
“Caboose, what are you doing,” Simmons says.
“I am getting your attention gently so as not to startle you,” says Caboose.
“Through the wall ? Is that supposed to not startle me?”
“You didn’t answer the door,” says Caboose. “Psst.”
“I’m busy, Caboose.”
“Doing what?” asks Caboose. “Aren’t we on this very nice ship with lots of little machines
and big windows to look at space?”
There is nothing to do. It’s driving Simmons up the wall.
Simmons groans and whines and glares down at the tablet, which now has a good sum of at
least five hundred or so websites for fitness, diet, and nutrition logged on its history, and
swears to god that Caboose better not bring any food in here. “Use the door,” he tells
Caboose, who cheers, and there’s a scrambling on the other side of the wall. Simmons,
reluctantly, opens the door to let Caboose in.
The first thing Caboose does is turn on the light (ugh). The first thing Caboose has the nerve
to say is: “Oh wow! You don’t look different at all!”
Story of Simmons’s life; nothing ever changes for better or for worse. Still, though: “What
d’you mean, ‘I don’t look different’?” Simmons asks suspiciously.
“Well!” says Caboose, and plops himself down on the floor. “So we heard the extremely sad
story from Sarge about you becoming Official Best Friends with Griff but then you
unfriended each other? Very loudly and sadly and there was a lot of crying and also Griff’s
feelings got obliterated into the dirt if Griff, who is a walking bag of asbestos, which is a
funny word that I think he was trying to say ‘as-besties’ or something. And then Agent
Washingscrub paired you two together because he is a dumb Blue who doesn’t know
anything about the Reds who are cool hooligans, unless us young Blue hooligans who don’t
let Sarge watch Wheel of Fortune all day long, except I do because I like Wheel of Fortune so
I don’t see—”
“Caboose,” Simmons interrupts.
“Yes! Right, yes, Pirate Captain Sarge is convinced that Grif is spending all his days crying
onto your shoulder about he is single and ready to mingle and also something about pringles?
And therefore this obviously means that Grif probably made a ring out of a ring-pop—mm,
delicious—and proposed to you in the middle of the night, which made you two have a fight
because Simon is an upstanding young man who would never catch asbestos-besties from
Griff, and therefore Sarge is not worried that you are going to make Griff un-single and unready to mingle and pringle, but he does think that you two therefore had a giant fight about
it and therefore have stopped talking to each other, and this is why you and Griff are never in
the same room and never look at each other and never talk to each other and never mention
each other and never acknowledge each other and never respond to anyone else when we
mention the other—”
“Wait,” says Simmons. “They think Grif and I had a fight ?”
“No! Sergeant Sarge thinks that Grif proposed in the middle of the night and made everything
awkward! I—you—gah! Simon! I just explained this!”
“That’s ridiculous,” says Simmons hotly. “I’m perfectly fine—I mean we’re perfectly fine.
Nothing happened!”
“Okay,” says Caboose.
“I’m serious! I talk to Grif all the time! More than I’d like, even!” Simmons says, super
duper truthfully and not at all dishonestly.
“Okay,” says Caboose.
“And it’s none of their business what we’re doing! They can buzz off!”
“Okay,” says Caboose.
“Except that there’s nothing to buzz off about because there’s nothing happening between me
and Grif!”
“Okay,” says Caboose. “Does this mean we can go talk to Griff now?”
“No,” Simmons snaps, and is relieved when all he gets in return for his ill temper is one of
Caboose’s oblivious looks.
“Then can we go see Church?”
“No.”
Caboose thinks. “Then do you at least want to come play Go Fish with u—”
“ No ,” Simmons says.
Caboose looks at him with a mixture of confusion, shock, and hurt. “Just—go find someone
else. I’m busy,” says Simmons.
Caboose, at length, does so. Simmons holds his breath the whole way through, like if he
moves, Caboose might see, just from looking at him, like how a cat can see ghosts in the
corners of rooms, all the things wrong with him.
You don’t look different at all, he’d said.
Verbal Garbage
Chapter Summary
"Grif, stop brownnosing," Simmons interrupts. "That's my job."
"Hey! Simmons!"
Simmons freezes on his way down the hallway. He's got a "grocery list" of allowed foods he's
attempting for his meal plan; except his grocery store is the fucking food court of this
cruiseliner full of fried and processed foods, and he'll have to go scour the good, viable
options like a recon mission for a war. It's been twenty-three days on this ship, and although
he suspects that some therapist will tell him that it's a positive sign that he hasn't immediately
overanalyzed the nutritional value of every scrap of food on this ship the instant he got on it,
he's also of the opinion that his alternative (to eat the junk food available and then throw it
back up) didn't consist of Simmons having the time of his life and, in fact, was a load of
garbage. (But he's getting better now. He's got a plan, he's getting better, he promises, he
swears.)
"Simmons. There you are," says Wash, striding down the hall towards him, dragging Grif
behind him. Oh fuck, shit, goddamn.
"Uhhhhh no sorry not interested in joining the dirty Blues," says Simmons, "not today, praise
Red Team and have a nice day--"
Wash gives him a frown. Grif looks like he deeply does not want to be here, which makes
two of them. "What? Why do you Reds always think that I'm here to recruit you? There are
no Red and Blue teams, anyway."
"Sounds like the kind of thing a losing team would say," says Grif.
"Blue team, if there is a defined line between Blue and Red Team--if there is," Wash says,
"Blue Team is winning by every possible metric--but I'm not debating this with you--"
"No, no, tell us about these metrics," says Grif. "Precisely what units are you using to
measure your dick sizes? Millimeters? Nanometers?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Grif," Simmons scoffs. "Blue Team wouldn't measure their dicks when
they could measure the amount of dramatic sad bullshit they can generate in a week."
"Tucker wins always all the time," says Grif. "He is in a constant state of mourning the
Sahara Desert of his dry, dry love life."
"First of all," Wash begins.
"Caboose wins this week because he had to room with Tucker and put up with his
Tuckerness," says Simmons.
"Absolutely correct. Agreed, seconded, confirmed," says Grif. "In comparison to having
gotten an AI robo-sploded in your brain, labelled crazy, and then nearly murderered by your
former teammates, Caboose having put up with Tucker's stupid fleshlight and sleeping naked
is by far the higher tragedy."
Simmons and Grif look at Wash expectantly.
"Are you done," says Wash.
"Now that you ask, no," says Grif. "See, Red Team knows the real metric of having a cool
team, which includes having a great color scheme, minimum one member with a Southern
accent, lots of great food--"
"Grif, stop brownnosing," Simmons interrupts. "That's my job."
"Oh, sorry, ma'am, go right ahead."
"Right--Red Team is far superior because it contains more robots per teammate--"
"Considering the Alpha--" says Wash.
Grif makes a buzzer noise.
"Church is a ghost, actually," says Simmons.
"It's a scientific fact," says Grif. "Disqualify this evidence and strike it from the record."
"Disqualified and stricken," says Simmons. "Furthermore, Red Team contains no dead or
dying members--"
"Thanks for nothing in Donut's case, by the way," says Grif.
"--and absolutely zero recorded instances of overdramatic, plot-relevant death scenes."
"Okay, for the record," says Wash, "I saw you two when Grif got pulled over the edge at
Sidewinder."
"I didn't die," says Grif.
"Also not plot-relevant," says Simmons.
"You said death scenes," says Wash. "Not deaths themselves. That thing on Sidewiner? Was a
death scene."
"I--what? I didn't say--"
"You actually did," says Grif.
"Fuck," Simmons whispers, then: "Wait! No! I said overdramatic death scene! Nowhere in
that scene was any dramatics, let alone overdramatics!"
"WHAT," says Wash. "I saw you! With my own two eyes! I saw you hold his hand and have
some cheesy line about not letting go like you were in a romcom!"
"Dude, what romcoms end with one of them falling off a cliff?" Grif asks.
"Freelancer romcoms," says Simmons.
"I hate this conversation," says Wash.
"Oh, buddy, that makes three of us," says Grif. "You're the one who said I had to come with
you or you'd let Caboose replace all my pixie stix with salt."
"No, listen," says Simmons. "Actually, a minimal amount of fucks were given about Grif
dying. Definitely nobody froze and stared out at the ocean and had an existential crisis about
all the things that we never manage to say during life due to a fear of intimacy and being
known for your flaws."
"Yeah," says Grif and then, "Wait, what?"
"LOOK," says Wash. "Stop talking for ONE GODDAMN MINUTE."
"Red Team is also better at spouting metric fuckton of verbal garbage," says Grif
immediately.
"Suck our wordcount, Blues," says Simmons.
"Please do not say that around Tucker, I don't need to listen to his stupid sound effect," says
Grif.
"Yeah, that's fair," says Simmons.
"I am trying to apologize," says Wash, "for having stuck you two together in the same room!"
Simmons glances at Grif. He only catches Grif looking away, too quickly to be casual.
"What was that," says Wash.
"What was what?" says Simmons.
"What was that whole... significant look," says Wash.
"Nothing," says Simmons.
"Wash looks at Grif. Grif looks at Simmons. Simmons looks at Grif. Grif looks at Wash.
"Yeah, no, dude," says Grif. "Everything's totally dandy."
"Oh god I'm so sorry," says Wash. "I'm very serious, Grif, Tucker said you wouldn't do
anything stupid and Sarge said you would and, you know, he's Sarge, I didn't exactly expect
him to be right--anyway, you can take my room if you need to--"
"And room with Sarge?" Grif says. "Fuck no, dude, I'd rather room with my no-homo
dudebro pal who isn't not dating me."
"And also didn't not break up with him," Simmons adds.
"You're saying words and they make sense separately but somehow I understand none of
them," says Wash.
"Almost like you should mind your own fucking business," says Grif.
"Personal privacy: a revolutionary technique exclusive to Reds," says Simmons.
"And most decent fucking people in the fucking universe," says Grif.
"I--"
"Cool, great talk, let's never do this again," says Grif, and slouches away back towards their
room.
Wash watches him go, and in the settling dust, Simmons speeds away to the food court
without hesitation.
Most of Simmons wants to just go back and keep talking to Grif. But he knows better.
Simmons has a job and responsibility to take care of, and he's got to do it alone.
Two Way
Chapter Notes
In the past couple of months, I've lost several very, very good and trusted friends bc of
how frustrated they became with my eating problems and refusal to "see reason" in their
eyes. I've been angry and bitter about it for a while now, and was just wondering- for
how many other people has this been a problem? - forum thread "How many friends
have you lost because of your ED?" original post by MPA user ricchan
"Somehow, I get the impression that they're doing just fine," Wash's voice tells Sarge through
the wall.
"Simmons endures Grif's endless hankering for his fax-machine ass with bravery and manful
silence," says Sarge.
"I hope to god you're joking about the fax machine."
Sarge cackles.
On the twenty-fourth day:
"Hey," says Grif, as they pass each other in the hallway.
Simmons clears his throat to get the post-purge phlegm out of his voice. "Hey," he says.
And that's all they say to each other for three days.
Intervention Circumvention
Chapter Summary
"Nothing anyone in this room does to change anything actually ever fucking works."
Chapter Notes
"I've never known anyone with a legitimate ED who recovered after [in-patient]."
-MPA thread “What’s inpatient like?”, response by MPA user ___No___
(for the record, in-patient has gotten a lot better as new understanding about EDs come
to light!! a lot of them can be positive experiences. but take a look at this thread for a
wide range of different experiences from different people who've been in and out of inpatient, some of them who'd intended to recover, and others who were forced into IP
before they were ready to commit to recovery.)
On the thirtieth day, Simmons sneaks out of the room at two in the morning to find some
industrial-strength soap to get the vomit stains off the toilet. He pokes his head out of the
doorway. The hallway is empty. The Blood Gulch Corner is unoccupied, the chairs askew and
littered with trash. The hallway lights are dim, but not off. Grif is nowhere in sight. Coast is
clear.
He takes three steps into the hallway, Caboose’s giant hand grabs him by the shirt and pulls
him clear off his feet, and Simmons shrieks as Caboose’s bedroom door slams behind him.
“This,” Tucker declares, “is an intervention.”
Simmons squints in the glare of the single lightbulb. He’s sitting in a metal chair in a dark
room, side by side with Grif, surrounded by just about everyone crammed into Caboose’s and
Tucker’s bedroom, sans Carolina and Lopez. The room lights are off. Caboose is swinging a
lone lightbulb from the ceiling with what looks like a fishing pole.
“Am I doing this right,” Caboose asks.
“Having the single lightbulb is for an interrogation , you dumbfucks,” Grif says lazily.
“Yeah, that thing!” says Tucker.
“You said this was an intervention .”
“Yeah, that thing!”
“That’s not the same fucking thing, Tucker!”
“Can I turn the lights back on,” says Wash.
“Don’t you dare , Washington,” Sarge growls. “I will throw your glowstick in the trash if you
do!”
“Glowsticks are not for an intervention or an interrogation,” says Wash, sounding like his
soul has recently vacated his body to dissociate on the astral plane where Lopez’s sense of
humor resides.
“Jot that down, Simmons!” says Sarge. “The Blues suffer a weakness in the integrity of their
glowstick usage that seriously jeopardizes the integrity of their interrogation techniques! We
can win the war this wa—”
“There is no war,” says Wash in the same monotone.
“Do I get a glowstick,” says Grif.
“No glowsticks for the interrogatees!”
“Intervention,” Caboose says.
“The interventees, then!”
“You brought glowsticks?” Tucker says. “Damn, hit me up with one of those!”
“No glowsticks for Blues!”
Simmons squints. “That just means that the only people left in this room who aren’t
interventees and aren’t Blues are... yourself and Caboose.”
“Absolutely correct, Private Simmons!” Sarge snaps three glowsticks in quick succession and
hands them all off to Caboose.
“Ooh, pixie stix,” says Caboose, takes them, drops the lightbulb, which shatters and plunges
the room into darkness. “Tucker did it.”
Wash flicks on the lights. Everyone groans in the sudden light. “DON’T YOU DARE,” Sarge
hollers.
“You have to share your glowsticks, then! We can’t hold an interrogation with—”
“Intervention,” Caboose says.
“--yes, okay, we can’t hold an intervention with all the lights off!”
Sarge grumbles and mumbles and rumbles.
“Sarge,” says Wash sternly, and holds out his hand for the glowsticks.
“Fine!” Sarge wails, clutching his glowsticks like an old woman clutching her pearls. “Turn
on the light, then! You awful Blues with your awful interrogation techniques! Put a man to
shame!”
The lights come on. Simmons winces in the light. He can’t tell if it’s better or worse to see all
the Blood Gulchers standing around him and Grif, like they’re cornered animals facing down
a firing squad.
“Okay, okay,” says Tucker. “Where were we?”
“This is an intervention,” says Grif dully.
“Fuck yeah it is! Let’s get right back to it—”
“I’m pretty sure it never started,” says Grif.
“Shut up, Red. Simmons,” says Tucker, and looks right at him. “You know what this is
about.”
Simmons nearly has a panic attack on the spot.
Simmons is a thirty year old man who most certainly does not have an eating disorder. But if
he did have an eating disorder, and if that eating disorder had started when he was, oh, say,
nine or so--which is of course just a random number that has no relation to Simmons
whatsoever, it’s definitely not the age he started purging or anything--but if he had an eating
disorder that had started that young, he would be very, very aware of a wonderful and fun
experience called in-patient treatment.
In-patient is one thing when you’ve checked yourself in, though. That’s a decision a person
makes to surrender themselves to the help, care, and consultation of others, knowing that they
are no longer able to help themselves. It’s a reaching out. An acceptance.
It’s entirely another when you’re forced.
It’s not the patient’s choice. They haven’t yet said the words, yes, I have an eating disorder,
and yes, I want to stop what it’s done to my life --usually the sentence looks more like yes, I
have an eating disorder, and I think it’s made my life better in every way. They’re still in the
honeymoon phase. They still believe that the only people who say a person is too skinny are
the people who have a few pounds to lose themselves. The disorder hasn’t yet begun to
devour them back. Hasn’t yet begun to make them cold and sunken and bored and lonely,
paranoid and obsessive and watching their grades slip and their social life disintegrate,
exhausted and exhausted and exhausted and exhausted but really, truly, mostly bored.
Still--some people think it’s a badge of honor to have been forced by their parents into inpatient. For whatever reason, in-patient treatment is the holy grail of Validation: I was so
Officially Sick that they strapped me to a bed, put a tube down my throat, and pumped threethousand calories straight into my stomach. It is the point at which a person is declared an
Emergency with a capital E, the goal that so many dumbass girls on the internet strive to
achieve. Emergency room bands are worn with pride around bony wrists. You are, of course,
only forced into in-patient treatment when bony and wasted. Bulimics never make the cut.
And then they pump you full of food and fat and sugar until you’re considered weight
restored and “recovered,” at which point you’re no longer a sickly, fascinating, skeletal
spectacle for others to cringe and goggle at, which means that nobody cares about you
anymore, and you’re booted from in-patient to, usually, immediately vow to lose all that
weight all over again and return to in-patient.
Simmons, as a teenager, used to tear off the calorie counts on Ensure packages and down
them like shots, quick and fast before his courage failed him. He couldn’t purge all the
calories in liquids. He was losing too much weight. He needed to keep down something. He’d
run for hours afterwards, trying to burn the calories off from some wild, nervous compulsion,
but he didn’t lose more weight. He had some nightmares about in-patient feeding tubes, and
some about nurses forcing him to eat strange foods; but far and away, he had the most
nightmares about some doctor looking him in the eyes and saying, There is something wrong
with you , and having it be unavoidably, irrevocably true.
A person can only be forced into in-patient treatment below the age of eighteen. Simmons
knows that. He hasn’t been eligible to be forced into an in-patient program for twelve years.
And there’s no reason why he would be worried in the first place, because men don’t get
eating disorders, and bulimics at normal weights don’t get treatment, and Simmons isn’t
bulimic anyway.
Still, though. Simmons grew older than eighteen, but he never grew out of being afraid of
being.
“There’s nothing wrong,” Simmons croaks.
“Bullshit!” says Tucker, scowling. “You know there’s something wrong. You just don’t want
to admit it!”
“Let’s be fair,” says Grif. “That applies to about ninety-percent of our lives.”
“Yeah, well! This time, we’re fucking fixing it! I can’t stand this shit!”
“I said there’s nothing wrong!” says Simmons. Even he can’t tell if his voice is shaking from
anger or fear.
“The fuck you always skulking off by yourself for, then?” says Tucker. “Going off by your
lonesome, hanging out at the gym? You never hang out with us anymore!”
“I just--want to be alone,” says Simmons, desperately.
Grif scuffs his feet on the floor and looks away. “Lay off him, Tucker. Geez.”
“You too! You’re complicit in this!”
“I’m not complicit ,” Grif snaps. Snarls, even. Tucker takes a step back. Grif has a terrible,
disgusted look on his face that Simmons has never seen--inferred, maybe, through body
language and covered by a helmet, but never on his actual face. “I’m fucking aware I
shouldn’t stick my nose in other people’s problems. Or solve them for other people, either.”
“Yeah, sure, if it’s just your problem,” says Tucker. “But you two are fucking oozing your
stupid unresolved sexual tension and marriage problems—”
Simmons chokes. Grif makes a wheezing noise like he's been punched in the gut. "Wait,
okay," says Grif. "What the fuck are you talking about--"
“You heard me!” says Tucker. “That’s what this intervention is for! You two, ruining
everyone else’s lives, by being so loudly and obnoxiously gay all the god damn time! You’re
making it my problem!”
“Oh. Oh!” says Simmons, wheezing. Holy shit, he feels so relieved. “ That’s what this is
about!”
“Yes, you asshole, that’s what this is about. You still carrying a torch and probably a semiboner for Grif, is what this is about. The fuck did you think this was about?”
Simmons glances at Grif, whose eyes are flat and narrowed.
“And obviously this is a Simmons problem, which is why I started with him—”
“Excuse you,” says Sarge.
“Here we go,” Wash mutters.
“As per usual, the Blues don’t understand the inner intricacies of our incredible teamwork,
held together by my masterful and careful leadership,” Sarge announces. “Anyone can see
that this is a Grif problem! It’s Grif who’s still carrying a torch for Simmons! And in fact,
because Grif is a useless son of a bitch who cannot be expected to improve or grow or change
in any meaningful way past his inherent state of repulsiveness—”
“Thanks,” says Grif, without expression.
“--it’s not that Grif having a torch for Simmons is the problem, it’s that Grif did something
about it! And I know that Grif did something about it because Simmons also knows that Grif
is a useless son of a bitch who cannot be expected to improve or grow or change in any
meaningful way past his inherent state of repulsiveness. Therefore, the conclusion is that
something terrible has happened! And that I have predicted the future! Grif really did propose
in the middle of the night—”
“Nothing happened,” says Wash. “Both of you are overreacting. They’re both fine.”
“I thought we were interventioning because we miss Simmons,” says Caboose.
“We’re interventioning because Grif proposed,” Sarge says.
“We’re interventioning because Simmons is hopelessly in love!” Tucker cries.
“We’re interventioning because we all make bad life decisions and also have nothing better to
do,” says Wash.
There’s a pause.
“Do you guys,” says Grif, “not know what you’re holding an intervention for?”
“No,” says Tucker, just as Sarge says “Yes,” just as Wash says, “Oh goddammit.”
“Jesus christ,” says Simmons, and stands up.
“Wait! No!” says Caboose. “We haven’t even done the interventioning yet!”
“There’s nothing to intervention about,” Simmons snaps. “Everything is fine. Mind your own
business.”
“Like an intervention would even help,” Grif scoffs.
Something about that pings Simmons the wrong way. He gives Grif a hard, vicious stare.
“Excuse you?”
“It’s true,” says Grif. “Nothing anyone in this room does to change anything actually ever
fucking works. The fact that they’re trying isn’t just stupid, it’s hypocritical—”
“ Excuse you ?” Tucker says.
“You’re on a ship to fucking Blood Gulch ,” Grif says, looking at Tucker like he’s stupid.
“Tucker, we hate that place. Everyone hates that place. And yet here we are, on a one-way
liner to the shittiest place in the universe because we can’t even think of anywhere else to be.
If you think that our relationship’s needing an intervention, I got some news for you about
what literally every single one of us is doing on this ship.”
“Leave Blood Gulch out of this,” says Tucker. “I didn’t see you objecting when we got
onboard.”
“Yeah? It’s against my policy to expend energy helping lost cases. Against my policy to
expend energy, period.”
“And because it’s a ‘lost case’,” says Simmons scathingly, “you’re just going to lie down and
let it happen, are you?”
“I sure the fuck am,” says Grif.
“Fucking typical—” says Simmons.
“--and,” Grif interrupts, “ I’m not telling other people how to live their lives. Y’all wanna
fuck yourself over? Go ahead. Be my guest. I’m not jumping in after some dumbshits
determined to drown.”
“The fuck is—” Tucker begins, just as Simmons says, louder and nastier, “The fuck is your
problem, Grif?”
“Nothing,” says Grif. “I have zero problems. What’s your problem?”
“Wh—” says Wash.
“I also have zero problems,” says Simmons.
“Great,” says Grif, with a mocking ring to his voice that Simmons hasn’t heard since the first
year of Blood Gulch. “Just great. Good to know. Nobody has any problems and everything is
fine, and we all love Blood Gulch, and there’s no reason to have an intervention.”
“But if there was a problem, I’d try and fucking fix it .”
“Um,” says Caboose.
“The hell do you have against admitting you fucked up?” Grif asks. “We’re on a shitty ship to
a shitty place, if we just called it what it was—”
“I fucked up?” Simmons echoes, seething. “ I fucked up?”
Grif holds up his hands. Stands up. “Oh, fucking hell. Never mind. I’m out.”
Sarge begins, “Sit back—”
“Shut up,” says Grif, without an ounce of humor. “I am not having this conversation. I’m
keeping my nose firmly in my own beeswax, I’m not getting involved, and I’m not solving
anyone else’s problems for them only for them, because newsflash, assholes , trying to stage
a stupid—” Grif shoves the chair away with a metal screech “--corny-ass intervention doesn’t
solve anything. Nothing solves anything. Leave me the fuck alone.” And Grif strolls out like
he owns the damn place.
“Yeah?! Well, good!” Simmons yells after him. “Because there’s nothing wrong, and also I’m
responsible adult who tries to actually fix my own shit!”
As the door slides shut, Simmons sees him turn left--not in the direction of their bedroom. It’s
still three in the morning. Simmons has no idea where Grif intends to sleep for the night.
Simmons stands up himself, furious.
"Simmons--" Sarge begins.
"Shut up," Simmons echoes without thinking, slams the door button to reopen the door, and
walks out himself.
“WOULD SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON,” Tucker
says, as the door closes behind him.
Drama Central
Chapter Summary
“To love an addict is to run out of tears.”
-Sandy Swensen, author of The Joey Song: a Mother’s Story of Her Son’s Addiction
And just like that, Grif and Simmons are Officially Fighting.
Except they're not fighting. Because there's nothing to be fighting about. Because eating
disorders are not Simmons's problem, and therefore Grif has nothing to be exasperated by.
Kind of like how they're not dating. They're fake dating. In secret. While also not speaking to
each other, because of a fight they're not having.
It's very high level logic. Simmons wouldn't expect you to understand.
"All those words make sense apart but I don't understand them together," says Caboose.
They're sitting in the Blood Gulch Corner, while the rest of them have gone out to lunch by
themselves. Simmons was lucky to snag Caboose alone, and that Caboose is so easily bribed
with unhealthy carbs, and is also too stupid to notice if Simmons drinks water between every
bite of fried rice and fidgets through the whole meal.
"That's fine," says Simmons. "Words don't mean anything anyway. Numbers are much more
reliable. There's a reason why so many sciences reduce everything to numbers! They mean
the same thing to everyone. It's an equalizer. They don't lie to you."
"Numbers lie to me all the time," says Caboose. "Sometimes something is only five when it's
actually five tons, and that's somehow supposed to be heavy? And sometimes it looks like a
'vi' or a 'mid' and those are words but also numbers?"
"Those are Roman numerals, Caboose, they're just different ways of writing numbers.
They're all the same values."
"Ah, yeah, I don't really understand that," says Caboose. "What value?"
"Well, if I have, like, the number five, I can say something like I have five apples, or five
fingers, or five thousand problems with Grif. Just, like, hypothetically. Random example."
"Yes, see, that doesn't tell me anything," Caboose complains. "You said you have five million
problems with Gruf, but that doesn't tell me what the problems are?"
"That's not the point of numbers! They just tell you how many, not what."
"So it doesn't tell me anything about your five billion problems with Gruf," says Caboose
flatly.
"It tells you how many," Simmons repeats.
"So it doesn't tell me anything about your five trillion problems with Gruf," says Caboose,
even more flatly.
Simmons groans loudly. "Oh, never mind, Caboose--I don't even know why I'm talking to
you about this."
"Me neither!" says Caboose. "I didn't even know you were talking to people! You went away
for a whole month and barely talked to me at all! Like you went on a vacation without telling
anyone and it was a secret vacation all by yourself without anyone else! Which seems a little
pointless, because if you go on vacation alone, who are you going to have the beach episode
with? Oh! Are you talking to me because your vacation is over?"
Simmons looks at the pair of fried rice cartons that he and Caboose had just split for lunch.
Fried rice was always easy to get back up. "No," says Simmons, and dumps both cartons in
the trash irritably. He can never win, with food. Something is always wrong. He always ruins
it. And when something is wrong, even if there's nothing wrong, you can bet your ass that
Simmons is going to spend the next three weeks fixating on it, unless he purges it or
exercises it away. He's being forward thinking. He's actually doing his future self a favor,
see? You'll feel better if you just get it over with, he tells himself, when he's locked away in
the single-stalled bathroom and staring the toilet down, wanting to be anywhere but this
fucking bathroom. Just get it over with and fix it tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow,
and tomorrow.
"Caboose! There you are!" Sarge's voice hollers, followed by the rest of Sarge banging up the
hallway. Simmons wonders when someone normal who rented a cabin on this floor is going
to file a noise complaint about them. Then Sarge takes one look at Simmons and says,
"Caboose is loitering with the other half of Drama Central, I see! To be expected from
Caboose's regrettably Blue upbringing; so tragically attracted to dramatic sons of bitches you
can't keep his girlfriend problems out of everyone else's perfectly-coiffed Red-Teamregulation hair."
"Excuse me?" says Simmons. "Hold on--what is Drama Central?"
"You are, numbnuts!" Sarge declares. "Well, the lesser half of it. The greater half is--ugh-Grif. Won't shut up about his burning unrequited supergay manlust for you! Keeps saying
heartbroken pining nonsense like 'Fuck Simmons' and 'What do I care' and 'that guy can fuck
off'. I'm in a Jane Austen novel because of you! Can't go three seconds anymore without
Grif doing something soppily romantic, like glaring at me every time I mention your name
and refusing to speak about you! A goshdarn disgrace, both of you! A real inconvenience to
everyone! Some of us have emotions to repress, have you ever thought of that?"
"Wh--excuse you, sir, but I repress my emotions like everyone else!" Simmons cries.
"I don't?" Caboose says.
"That's alright, Caboose, we forgive you," says Sarge. And then back to Simmons:
"Goddammit, Simmons. Do you know whose fault this is?"
Simmons suddenly has a visceral flashback to the moment he'd left Caboose's room
yesterday, not thinking, hearing his own voice telling Sarge, of all people, to shut up. He'd
fucking said that. The fact of it makes his teeth hurt. His throat hurts. His chest hurts. (That
last one is probably stomach acid eating his esophagus due to constant induced vomiting,
though. Whoops.)
"Um," says Simmons. He knows, in theory, the words he wants to say, and has said them
before ("I'm sorry, sir, won't happen again, sir!"). But thinking about it for too long makes
something shriek with shame, so it's better to just not think about it. "Um, Sarge--"
"IT'S GRIF," Sarge hollers. "EVERYTHING IS GRIF'S FAULT, ALWAYS. I could never, of
course, blame you for dumping Grif back in Valhalla, because dating Grif is
terrible, dreadful, awful, appalling, horrific, horrifying, horrible, horrendous, atrocious,
abominable, deplorable, egregious, abhorrent, frightful, hideous, ghastly, grim, dire,
unspeakable, gruesome, monstrous, sickening, heinous, vile fate I wouldn't bestow upon my
worst enemy--" Sarge sniffs loudly "--and I'll respect your decision even though you know
how much I want grandkids--!"
"WHAT," Simmons says. "I--you--SARGE?? NO??? I DIDN'T KNOW????? And--and Grif
and I are both men, so I don't understand h-how that would h-h-happen in the first place???
Even if we were dating?????"
"It's all Grif's fault, as usual," says Sarge, wiping away a manly tear that looks suspiciously
like motor oil. Simmons has a suddenly flashback to Sarge loudly proclaiming that he'd
replaced all his tear ducts with gasoline and the blood of his enemies. "Grif's ruining
everything! You might be one half of Drama Central, but obviously I understand--all you've
done is stand there with your incredibly flat white cyborg ass and somehow bewitch Grif's
animalistic desires! You were an innocent victim in this! Grif's the one causing a ruckus! And
there is definitely, absolutely nothing that you've done to possibly contribute to the current
situation whatsoever, and we were wrong to have nabbed you for that intervention, because
obviously you didn't deserve it at all!"
Simmons locks up. Say you're sorry for what you said yesterday, says one half of Simmons.
"Right, Private?" says Sarge, looking blandly incurious about Simmons's actual response.
And it's precisely that disinterest that makes Simmons, not for the first time, have the
compulsion to tell Sarge everything, because he thinks that Sarge might just not respond at all
but still hear. But this time isn't like the other times he's wanted to infodump on Sarge; it isn't
the vague ideation of getting his secrets off his chest while simultaneously knowing he never
will; this time it's a clear checklist of exactly how it would go down: one, admit; two; endure
excruciating humiliation of having admitted to being "sick"; three, realize Sarge does not and
cannot understand; four, realize Sarge will not and cannot help; five, suffer the everlasting
consequences of having Sarge weirdly eyeball everything Simmons eats from there on out.
How is he supposed to think talking to anyone else about this is worth that? He'll confess
when he's fucking dead. Take him back to Rat's Nest and that singular moment right before
the firing squad raised their guns, when Simmons had had the stupid thought of saying Hey
Grif I love you--as a joke, of course--just so he could do the first step of admitting without
having to suffer any of the disaster that followed. Naturally, by now he's lost his nerve. But if
he can't admit, then he should say sorry, at a bare minimum. He's got to say sorry, at the very
least-"Right," says Simmons. "Everything is Grif's fault."
"Darn straight," says Sarge. "Come back and get your Drama Central uncentralized, Private!
And Caboose! Washingscrub is breaking out in hives without you! Come back before he
hyperventilates."
“Ah, yes, please do not let Washington turn into a beehive.”
”I’ll be there,” says Simmons, for the first time in weeks. “Just give me a second.”
He’ll be more relaxed when he’s thrown up the rice, anyway.
Stereo Telephone
Chapter Summary
The instant Simmons comes into view, Grif makes eye contact with him, stands up, and
leaves the food court.
Chapter Notes
"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." -Joe Klass, Twelve Steps to
Freedom
Gag reflex is overused. He's abused it too much, too frequently. He's a little surprised it
actually held out this long.
"Overused" doesn't mean he can't make himself purge if he tries hard enough, though. It just
takes a lot of coaxing, like starting a skittish car. And also around an hour and a half of his
day. And also an unceasing fear of binge cycles and eating without strict and unreasonable
dietary guidelines twenty-four-seven and ceases only for the forty minutes directly after he's
purged, but, like, y'know. Whatever.
Simmons washes his hands in the sink, slowly, with the punch-drunk movements of the postpurge haze. He spits in the sink. Too much phlegm in his throat. Spits again. Pats his face as
he cleans his skin with freezing cold water, to reduce the chipmunk cheeks, and cleans out the
underside of his nails for the skin he accidentally scraped from his epiglottis.
When he looks up, color catches his eye. He leans in to the bathroom mirror. Scowls. Lifts
the eyelid of his right eye, the organic eye, revealing the little red dot of blood cells that had
burst in the sclera from the effort of the purge
He lets the eyelid drop. Scowls again. His entire chest hurts, and he can't tell if it's the funny
rhythm of his heart or just stupid fucking Anxiety, with the capital A and the shitty trademark
symbol.
Well, if he ever wanted an omen to tell him to stop fucking up his heart with stomach acid
and electrolyte imbalance, here it was. He'll certainly stop now. Here's his wake-up call. He's
going to turn it around.
He cups water in his hands and drinks straight from the sink, as much as he can, trying to
replace the fluids he's lost. And now he's officially completed the purge, he thinks to himself;
he's drank water, and everyone knows that if you throw up, and then drink water, and then
throw up again, you're just asking for a heart attack. Simmons squeezes his eyes shut. Blinks
them open. Scrubs more water and spits again. Tilts his head this way and that, and
eventually reassured himself that only the barest edges of the burst blood cells are visible if
he tilts his head straight up and looks down. He'll be fine. Nobody will notice.
He didn't purge water from the bottom of his stomach, so he's still got lines he won't cross
yet. He's pretty sure the last few times blood cells broke in his eye from purging, it made a
bigger spot, anyway. He exits the bathroom with the curious blankness that always follows a
purge with not a single thought in his head overthinking what he'd just done. He doesn't have
to if he's going to recover, right?
It occurs to Simmons only thirty minutes later, when he's left the bathroom altogether, how
few of Grif's toiletries actually exist in the bathroom, either.
The instant Simmons comes into view, Grif makes eye contact with him, stands up, and
leaves the food court.
Tucker hollers after him, "You're just gonna leave half your pizza? Not even a goodbye?!
You're gonna hear from my divorce lawyer, you piece of—aw, fuck," says Tucker, seeing
Simmons for the first time. "I should have figured."
Simmons doesn't reply at first, too busy glaring a hole in the back of Grif's head. A nearby
family of four gives Simmons a warily concerned look. Simmons feels like he should be
terrified that Grif was willing to leave pizza just to escape Simmons, but on the other hand...
Simmons looks at the remains of Grif's pizza with disdain. Picks it up, chucks it in the trash.
"Hey! I was gonna eat that!" Tucker cries.
"That's disgusting and unsanitary," says Simmons, as if Simmons doesn't have a weird
impulse to clean out scraps of food that other people have left behind, for fear that they'll
ping Simmons in the back of his brain over and over like a chair with an uneven leg. Except
that the entire table is littered with food, because the residents of that table were Tucker,
Caboose, Wash, and Grif, and the only person of the Reds and Blues who can eat neatly at a
dinner table is Sarge, which really says something considering how he demands all his steaks
be cut entirely raw.
Irritably, Simmons resolves to pull the plug on overanalyzing the contents of anyone's dishes,
or the ways they eat. He's just not going to do it. He literally threw up thirty minutes ago; let
him enjoy his post-purge peace for once. Simmons sits in Grif's empty chair. "Oh no," says
Simmons sourly, "was I interrupting Grif's lunch?"
Tucker eyes him. "Obviously! Dude ran like you were the Meta!”
"Can't imagine why," says Simmons, in the same nasty tone of voice that makes even
Simmons want to crawl under a rock, and then adds: "considering that we're not fighting."
Literally everyone at the table rolls their eyes. Even Caboose, which earns a disbelieving
stare from Simmons.
“Grif said almost the exact same thing not forty minutes ago," Wash tells Simmons.
"You two are a fucking class act," says Tucker. "Ugh, ugh ugh ugh, this is going to be so
awkward all the time now, isn't it? Fuck the Red and Blue Team divide. All our social
interactions are going to be divided into 'with Grif' or 'with Simmons'."
"With Grif with Simmons," says Caboose cheerfully under his breath. "With Simmons with
Grif. Yes, usually.“
"It won't be that bad," says Wash. "You're overreacting. Don't Grif and Simmons fight all the
time, anyway?"
"Not like this, dude! I don't know what the fuck is going on anymore!"
"Hello? Earth to Blue Team?" Simmons says. "I'm right here, listening to you speculate about
my love life?"
Everyone groans again.
"That's also what Grif said!" Tucker cries. "Why didn't you just get married like the universe
wanted you to?! I had a bet with Church and now I'm gonna lose like fifty dollars!"
"I don't think Church has fifty bucks anymore," says Caboose. "There's no room in Carolina's
armor."
"Fuck! Goddammit, I got swindled by making a bet with a dude who was secretly like ten AI
in a trenchcoat with no cash."
“Don't you hate it when that happens," says Caboose.
"I'm gonna be real honest here," says Tucker. "I actually hate it more when your crimsoncolor-coded neighbors won't tell you why they're suddenly fighting like cats."
"We're not fighting," snaps Simmons. Oh, there goes the mellow post-purge feeling;
completely gone now. "Are you just going to nitpick at all of our flaws? Because we've
already got Sarge for that."
Tucker waves a hand. "Oh, what the fuck ever. Fine. Geez, you guys get one guy pulled off a
cliff one time, and suddenly it's a Korean soap opera with you. Grif didn't even die and you're
falling to pieces!"
Simmons's eyes narrow. "That's— excuse you? That’s not what this is about. You think this is
about the time Grif almost died? Why would I give a shit about that? Why would anyone? It's
Grif. There's an entire Red Team subclause outlawing it."
"I can't tell if you're joking or not," says Tucker, squinting. "But like, for the record, dude, I
was."
“Mind your own business, Blue.”
“It is entirely my business, asshole,” Tucker replies. “Both of you are being huge buzzkills
and general downers.”
“What Tucker means is that sometimes friends ask about each other because they care,” says
Wash dryly.
For what? Simmons thinks. Like they could do anything even if I told them.
“No I fucking didn’t; don’t put pansy words in my mouth,” says Tucker.
“Also,” says Wash, “if Tucker were not allergic to pansy words, he would also say that the
point of a team is that you all help each other.”
“Good thing I’m not on Blue Team,” says Simmons.
“And the point of a team isn’t fucking friendship, dumbass; it’s that some asshole steals all
the hot water and you can’t shoot them for it because it’s their turn to make Caboose lunch,”
Tucker says.
Wash thinks about this. “I actually can’t argue with that,” says Wash.
“Teams are for a bunch of individuals to live in the same space while staying in their lane,”
Simmons replies.
“Dude, that sounds lonely as fuck.”
“And it keeps Red Team out of drama, doesn’t it?” Simmons retorts. “You see any of us
hiding ex-evil Freelancers under our beds from the authorities?”
“Why don’t you say that louder in this very crowded, very public food court,” Wash says.
“Teams are for when you are too short to reach the cookies on the top shelf so someone helps
you get it,” says Caboose.
“That’s dumb,” says Tucker.
“Sometimes they can carry you and you can reach it that way,” says Caboose. “Or maybe
they can get it for you. And if they can’t do those, maybe they can teach you how to climb up
the cabinets. Or they can find a ladder for you and hold it while you use it. Or maybe they
know where the ladder is and you don’t. Or they know where the cookies are in the first place
and you don’t!”
“That’s super dumb,” says Tucker.
“Tucker is just saying that because he is short,” says Caboose smugly.
“I’m not short! I’m average! A normal height! Plenty of guys are this tall!”
“And maybe they can’t help you get the cookies at all,” says Simmons sourly.
“Then they can cheer you on!” says Caboose.
Simmons’s eyes narrow. “Then maybe there’s no cookies in the first place.”
“Maybe you can learn how to make new cookies!”
“You can’t,” says Simmons bitterly.
“Then they can keep you company,” says Caboose. “I think that’s very nice no matter what.”
“You’re an idiot,” says Simmons, and then pretends to not see the little startled look on
Caboose’s face. Caboose says nothing. Of course he doesn’t; he’s used to being called an
idiot, isn’t he?
Wash looks from Caboose to Simmons to Tucker and back.
Simmons looks at the table. Caboose has a half-eaten sandwich that he’s eaten only the bread
from. Wash has the same sandwich on his plate, with only the sandwich meat eaten. Fucking
Washington , eating healthily and balanced and actually dealing with his team’s bullshit—
stupid fucking Caboose, fucking manchikd dragged along by his team day in and day out—
fucking Tucker , sticking his shitty jock nose in everyone else’s business—
“I’m leaving,” Simmons snaps, and stands up.
“Y’know, I’d say you just got here, but considering you’ve been only a massive dickhole
since you got here, I think I’ll say good fucking riddance instead,” says Tucker.
Simmons’s entire chest squeezes and his stomach squirms. He deserves that and he knows it
and he hates it and fuck Tucker for saying so.
“Well, it’s not like I came here to talk about my feelings!” Simmons cries. “There’s nothing
fucking wrong with wanting to destress with other people once in a while! Just because
there’s a problem doesn’t mean you have to make it a federal fucking issue! Why can’t you
just ignore it and let the only people who can deal with it fucking deal with it by
themselves?!”
There’s a silence. Tucker’s suspicious, grudging expression doesn’t change. “So you admit
there is a problem,” says Tucker.
“NO,” says Simmons, and stomps away.
“What did you expect when you two clowns can't stop fucking echoing each other!" Tucker
calls after him. "Because Grif said all that shit, too!"
The Vacancy
Chapter Summary
“It’s not a big deal,” says Grif.
Chapter Notes
“Yeah, people love to see Grif and Simmons together. I mean, Caboose and Church is a
pair as well. But Grif and Simmons are different. You cannot separate them." -Burnie
Burns
How fucking dare they.
It’s not like he asked to be in this impossible situation. If people knew how much time and
energy he’d put into this stupid recovery scheme, nobody could accuse him of not trying.
He’d done nothing but try since he got onto this stupid ship. But nooooo , for some nonsense
reason, he in particular is forced to live with this--this-- whatever the fuck this is, and
nothing, it seems, would kill the stupid thing, not to the standards he needs, not without doing
something hideous like resigning himself to eating fried lard and turning into a pile of
garbage himself because he’s just somehow too fucking broken to stay away from them--he’s
so fed up with this--he’s so fucking fed up with this. He went into recovery to get away from
single stalled bathrooms that would take over his life and now the effort of recovering from
that turns out to be just as bad. What’s next--that he’ll have to recover from recovery? If he’d
only just not had to deal with this, if he could be normal, if he could be anormal human who
just ate and never made a big deal about it and maybe lived in a world where the food wasn’t
all fucking poison and deceitful, distrustful pieces of fuck that made the sheer act of giving a
damn a production requiring half his sanity and all of his time—
And so on and so forth. In other words, everything sucks and everyone is awful and everyone
in the whole world should fuck off about this stupid fucking situation.
Simmons’s irritable mood follows him through the Hand of Merope like a good friend. And
like a good friend, he takes his time to encourage it, to bolster it and listen to everything it
has to say back. Today, he’s getting a good and proper fume on, really marinating in it,
getting himself good and motivated, to the point that he’s so good and angry when he gets
back to his room he doesn’t realize how clean it is until he’s thrown himself in his bed to
sulk.
Specifically, he throws himself in his bed, and didn’t have to pick up any of Grif’s clothes,
and he didn’t trip over any oddly placed suitcases, and when he looks over across the room,
Grif’s bed is clean and made.
Simmons sits back upright.
Grif’s clothes aren’t on the floor. They’re not even in sight.
Grif’s suitcase isn’t in the middle of the room because, apparently, it doesn’t seem to be in
the room at all.
He jumps out of bed and checks under it, under Grif’s bed, in the drawers, in the bathroom
for some goddamn reason, slam cupboards and doors the whole way. Nothing that belongs to
Grif. Empty. Grif might as well not have ever lived there at all--Simmons can’t even find a
stain to prove Grif had ever been there, and since when did Grif not even stain the bedsheets?
That’s it, Simmons decides; he’s going to wake up and realize this is all a dream in a minute.
This isn’t really happening to him. “When the fuck,” he hisses to himself, thinking--when
was the last time he’d seen this room? How much time passed between when Simmons saw
Grif with the Blues and now? How long did Simmons spend with the Blues himself? How
clean was this room before that? Was Grif planning this? Why didn’t he say something? No,
never mind, Simmons knows the answer to that--how long was this going on? Why didn’t
Simmons notice?
There’s nobody in the hallway, either. For some reason, his heart hurts. His entire chest hurts.
He grabs his helmet and messages Grif:
SM: Where’s all your stuff??
(Unread)
No response.
SM: Seriously it’s too clean, what’s going—
--and then he deletes that message because he knows what’s going on. He clutches his helmet
in the nearly-empty room.
What the fuck is he supposed to say instead? They don’t have a language for anything like
this. They know how to bitch and complain and annoy each other and one-up each others’
terrible stupidity--they’re not supposed to do anything else--this isn’t fair. What is he
supposed to do? What was he supposed to have done? What was the right answer? Why did
nobody tell him? Is this like eating, or like school, or like the whole everything-about-him,
and he’s the only person in the fucking universe who missed the memo on how to be
adequate?
SM: Where’s all your stuff??
(Read)
GR: With sarge
(Read)
Simmons’s eye twitches. (Not enough sleep. Why sleep when you can binge and purge.)
SM: Why?
(Read)
GR: Im switching with wash
(Read)
GR: Wash doesnt know yet tho
(Read)
GR: If you see him let em kno
(Read)
SM: Where are you??
(Read)
But Grif does not respond.
Now, considering that Simmons is a socially inept person who’s built up a relationship
primarily centered around not talking about serious issues with Grif, who is also a socially
inept person, and has just acknowledged that he doesn’t know what to say and doesn’t know
what to do and in particular has no real plan of attack because he he has no real actual
argumentative leg to stand on, you would think that Simmons would, henceforth, sit the fuck
down, and maybe think, for at least a minimum of two seconds, about his next plan of action.
Fortunately, Simmons has only two settings, which is overthinking and impulsivity.
Therefore, we are all spared from another megalithic paragraph about Simmons overthinking
everything by virtue of Simmons doing the stupidest possible option available to him, which
is to go straight to Sarge’s door and bang on it.
Sarge’s voice says, “That’s probably—”
Grif’s voice says, “Fuck off, Simmons!”
“You don’t even know it’s me!” Simmons says angrily. “What if I were Caboose?!”
“ Are you Caboose?”
“No! Obviously! It’s me!”
“Then fuck off, Simmons!”
Simmons kicks the door. Hard.
Sarge opens the door. “We are absolutely not having a fight between you two! Shame on you!
Doing this in front of Lopez !”
Simmons looks down on the floor at the little compact travel case in which Lopez has been
disassembled. Looks back up at Sarge. “Where’s Grif,” he says.
“Right behind me! Grif graciously volunteered to accept his obvious mistake of having
promposed to you in the middle of the night!” Sarge declares. “As such, he’s removed
himself from the situation. You’re very welcome!”
“Did you tell him to leave,” Simmons says.
Sarge must hear or see something just then, because rather than answering, he just frowns.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Grif, and shoves Sarge out ot the way. “Jesus Christ, this isn’t a
battered women’s shelter. What do you want, Simmons.”
That’s not a question Simmons can answer.
“What’s going on?” Simmons demands instead.
“This sounds like drama,” says Sarge suspiciously. “I thought you said you were endin’ the
drama.”
“Yeah, I am,” says Grif. “Particularly because there is no drama, and we’re not fighting—”
“I can see through your fake news any day, Minor Junior Private Negative First Class Dexter
Grif!”
“How the fuck do you remember all that?! Go away already!” Grif says, and shoves Sarge
away with surprising gentleness. “And you,” he says to Simmons, “are not flipping shit. I’m
not divorcing you, goddamn.”
That weirdly reassures Simmons for half a second, before Simmons remembers that this is
supposed to be a sarcastic phrase because they’re not really married. Grif goes on, “I’m just
switching roommates. Everyone’s losing their minds about how we’re fighting or whatever
their drama-loving Blue hearts want to believe. If I’m not in your room, there’s less gossip.
Super simple.”
“So you just--what, up and evacuated while I wasn’t looking?!”
“It’s not a big deal,” says Grif.
“It kind of feels like a big deal!”
“Well, that’s none of my business,” says Grif. “No idea why it’d feel that way. Considering
that we’re not fighting.”
Simmons doesn’t have a response to that. Either he says yes, it is a big deal because we’re
fighting, or no, you’re right, it’s not a big deal because we’re not fighting. But Simmons
knows it’s a big deal but he can’t say why, and he also knows that they’re not fighting
because there’s nothing to be fighting about.
Grif glances back over his shoulder, looking for Sarge, and then back. He has a particular
expression of boredom, the one that got Grif his reputation in the first days of Blood Gulch-glazed over like he’s not entirely there, mocking and suspicious, but just mild and passive
enough that Sarge couldn’t tear into him for the insubordination that Grif hadn’t technically
committed yet. “Stop making a big deal out of it,” he says.
“I’m--I’m not,” Simmons stammers. “I just…”
“Sure. Okay. You just do whatever it is you’re doing, and I’m just switching with Wash.”
Simmons flinches.
“Like, I got it, man,” says Grif, with that same, oddly vacant stare. “I’m not going to pry or
anything. It’s none of my business and I’m the king of staying out of shit that doesn’t concern
me. I don’t--just--yeah. Just don’t tell me anything. There’s nothing going on anyway and it’s
not a big deal.”
“We’re not even having a fight anyway,” Simmons echoes.
“Yeah,” says Grif. “So just... forget I said anything.”
And Grif closes the door in Simmons’s face.
(Ignore This)
Chapter Summary
What is he saying?
Chapter Notes
THE. SEX. N U M B E R !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is fine. Simmons is fine. Everything's fine.
This doesn't mean anything.
People make a big deal out of the fact that Simmons donated, like, half his body to Grif. He
wishes they wouldn't. Most of the time they're in full body armor, anyway, and it's easy to
forget that their faces aren't literally Mark VI visor plates; and then Simmons takes off his
helmet and wow, Simmons sure is a cyborg, which is odd but not unheard of and (most
importantly) bears zero indication of where exactly he got those metal faceplates; and then
Grif takes off his helmet and whoops, that's literally half of Simmons's face skin on Grif's
face bones. It's not like anyone points it out anymore, but sometimes he sort of... sees it on
people's faces? That Grif and Simmons are two mishmashes of one weird bucket of bits, and
sort of were way before anyone got run over with a tank.
But it's not like that means anything.
For a while, in Blood Gulch, Simmons lived in vague fear of people asking him why he'd
done the surgery, and he has a whole constructed answer about how it was just math, you
need more Reds than Blues to keep the upper hand, it's just practical to have Grif alive even
if Grif never shoots anyone or follows basic orders or even gives much of a shit about the
Blues anyhow. But nobody ever did ask him why he'd done it, and that was fine with him,
because then he just held on to the answer he'd thought up, held it in his throat for the
moment someone might ask, swallowed it down until he believed it, and that was very find
with him. That was, in fact, great. Because now it didn't mean anything that he'd donated half
his face and also his arm and a leg and various organs, including his heart and fucked up
esophagus, none of that meant jack shit, because he's thought about it so hard that the (false)
thing became slightly (less false) more true. He can't let people go getting the wrong idea,
you know? (He can't let himself go getting the wrong idea.) It was the numbers; the numbers
have nothing to do with the endless daylight hours in the desert sun, standing post on the
roof, trading jokes like cheap cigarettes, addicted to the little moment when they'd almost
laugh before they remembered where they were. Every near-laugh counted. Every hit of
almost-happiness was better than nothing. Even if you're in bum-fuck nowhere and possibly
physically dying of boredom, you've got to live. You've got live. And if you're going to live,
you've got to keep trying.
He's being stupid--don't listen to any of this bullshit--it doesn't matter, he's fine, everything is
fine--he's making it sound like he needs Grif to live which is not true--it's not true at all--he
was a whole human being before he met Grif and he will be afterwards--he'll live, he'll live,
it's not like it matters if someone makes living a little more enjoyable, a little more worth it-there's nothing wrong-You know when there was nothing wrong? Rat's Nest. Simmons didn't care about anyone or
anything except his fucking career and throwing up in the armory bathroom, and he hated it,
obviously, but he must have hated it a little less than whatever this bullshit is--except that
that's false because there's nothing wrong--no, no, the time they almost died at Rat's Nest, no,
that didn't bother him at all, and that's the quality marker of a better situation. Grif and
Simmons would have died at the same time, side by side, and you can't be bored (or bulimic)
when you're dead. And it's not like Simmons isn't prepared for dying--he's a soldier, right?
The inevitability of death is old news; you get that memo when you're fucking born. He's
known he could die since he entered basic. But there are certain kinds of dying that Simmons
would hate: dying alone in a desert, dying by accident, dying from a stray bullet, from
friendly fire, on a mission nobody cares about, over some dumb embezzlement scheme that
amounted to nothing (and he's watching himself in the past tense from the outside in,
watching himself make flippant jokes in the face of a firing squad and half-thinking about
saying Hey Grif I love you just for the shit's and giggles, and he wants to shake his past self
awake and scream WHAT ARE YOU DOING. YOU CAN'T LET THIS HAPPEN, GRIF IS--)
The hell is he thinking? What is he saying? Ignore this! It doesn't matter! This isn't a big
deal-But you know what should be illegal? You know what should be fucking outlawed? After
settling down in Valhalla, actually finding a decent place to live unbothered by the UNSC or
Freelancer, it should be forbidden to get dragged into someone else's bullshit, because
someone else's bullshit is dangerous, and involves driving into the desert, which has
a minefield, apparently, and involves Red Team splitting up so they have no idea if anyone
else is still alive, when Simmons absolutely fucking knew that leaving to help Caboose would
have ruined everything, and then it fucking did, and Simmons let Grif go anyway because it
was better than Grif just lying in bed all day long and staring at the wall, but now that he
thinks about it he wishes to god that he'd made Grif stay at Red Base and made Caboose
move in--fuck off, Tucker--they should have settled down there and stayed the same, forever,
specifically in the way that they were right before Donut had to fucking go and tell Grif that
Lopez killed Grif's sister, when things were fine and--and--and it's not like Simmons had
been expecting anything, from their weird little fake-dating game; it was just a particularly
fun way to pass the endless acres of hours and hours and hours, and none of it meant
anything, it was no big deal, it's not like Simmons misses Valhalla or Blood Gulch because
they can't go back to Valhalla because the UNSC is pissed at them and Simmons isn't
something as stupid as homesick, because neither Blood Gulch nor Valhalla are home to any
one of them, they've moved too many times to have a home, and the only constant these days
are Sarge and Caboose and Grif and Grif and Grif (and you shouldn't be allowed to be
homesick for a person who lives right next door)-And he's not, because everything is fine and Simmons is fine and it's fine and it's fine and
Grif said it's not a big deal-And Simmons will never admit to this on pain of death, but after they'd pulled Grif up off the
cliff, they'd wound up hugging. It'd been a mistake! An awkward weird thing that shouldn't
have happened! But Grif was just—unsteady from having almost died, wheezing from the
exertion of having held on, and one second Simmons was just trying to keep him on his feet,
and then they were both keeping each other on their feet, and then it kinda turned into a onearmed embrace except there were two arms involved? Like, oh, wow, okay, this is really
happening, huh? They're really doing this, covered in snow and cold sweat from having
nearly died and very really unsure why they'd fought the Meta in the first god damn place,
and it would not have been worth it at all, Simmons remembers thinking, it wouldn't have
been worth it at all for Grif to have died just to kill some dude who was Blue Team's
problem anyway (and specifically, Wash's problem). And Grif was heaving entire lungfuls of
air in Simmons's arms, and although Simmons couldn't feel him at all through the two layers
of armor, that reassured him a bit--just a bit--knowing that somewhere in that orange armor,
Grif was alive and kicking. The only indication Simmons gets that Grif is a living, breathing
human being is when he opens his fat mouth to shit on everything Red Team stands for, but
talking is against the rules when someone's just gotten pulled up from off a cliff, don't you
know? It's a step too far. You can't. You're not allowed. Whatever you do, don't say something
sappy. Don't confess something you'll regret. Don't confess something Grif will regret. Don't
you fucking dare ask him if he's okay. What he's doing and what he's feeling and thinking are
none of your business, right? Don't pry or anything. It’s none of your business and we stay
out of shit that doesn’t concern you. Don't ask, and he won't tell you anything. There’s
nothing going on anyway and it’s not a big deal. We’re not even having a fight anyway. So
just forget he said anything! Because Simmons doesn't care and it's not his fault and there's
no reason his heart shudders like a flickering lightbulb and Grif's eyes are dull and vacant and
Simmons can imagine, with such force and clarity and repetition that it feels like it really
happened, the weight of Grif's hand slipping from Simmons's, the squeeze of Grif's skin on
his behind Red Base under the cool Valhalla sun while Simmons thought and overthought
about a million different things he could say, a million different things he could do, searching
for the perfect plan of action to put into a concrete voice and reason while something without
voice and without reason did not move or plan or think, it simply was, and this thing hoped
for something that even now he can't put into words, he only knew that every cell of his
body wanted something with the force of a body demanding that it be fed or a
body demanding that he purge, some terrible tidal pull that felt like drowning and strung him
out, flayed him open along the slight pressure of Grif's grip around Simmons's wrist before
Grif pulled away and left. And it's the same, always the same, the same sun in Blood Gulch
and the same stupid war games in Valhalla, which is what Simmons always wanted, isn't it?
To just keep the status quo forever and ever. The status quo's got to be enough, hasn't it?
Staying the same, being the same, will be enough, because he's going to make it enough.
Because change is like dying, and if Grif's hand slipping out of Simmons's fingers off the
cliffs of Sidewinder tells him anything, he never, ever wants to change. Just let them be the
same. It feels safe here. (This is what recovery looks like, right?) And if safe is a place like
Blood Gulch, hot and intolerable and boring and leeching the life out of them both, at least
he'll feel safe, and he might almost laugh at something Grif says, and if he can't have
happiness he should at least have that, so that they never, ever have to feel (Grif dying)---and it's not a big deal, it's nothing, it's nonsense, just lies and words and bad bad stories, all
the fake dating and the fake break-ups and the fake fighting is fake fake fake fake fake,
because Simmons thinks he might die under the weight of it if any of this was real.
Invisible Highwire
Chapter Notes
Chapter One
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost… I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter Two
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend that I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in this same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
Chapter Three
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in… it’s a habit… but my eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
Chapter Four
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter Five
I walk down another street.
-"There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk: An Autobiography in Five Short Chapters" by Portia
Nelson
On the thirty-seventh day, Agent Washington is standing in the middle of Simmons's room
(where Grif is supposed to be).
"Fare thee well, Wash," says Tucker mournfully, standing in the doorway of Simmons's room.
"We hardly knew ye. Actually super literally too; half the time you were around, Caboose
was calling you 'yellow Church'."
"I'm not going to die," says Wash. "It's not like you're never going to see me again. I'm just
moving into Simmons's room."
"Maybe not right away. I'm sure it'll take a few days for your brooding one liners and cryptic
messages and angsty staring-into-the-distance to really come out. But then they'll all hit
Simmons's drama, and then that shit'll mix like a margarita, and then one of you'll end up
dead and the other probably naked and covered in blood. That's chemistry!"
Wash looks angstily off into the distance. Simmons interrupts, "That's not how chemistry
works, idiot."
"Not the nerd chemistry! The human chemistry!"
"Human chemistry is about dating and girls and nobody is supposed to be naked and covered
in blood there either!"
"I mean it depends on what you're into--"
"Go away if you're not going to help Wash move in!" Simmons cries.
Tucker does not go away. "Okay, well, chemistry might not be the exact word, because I'm
pretty sure all your electrons are paired with Grif anyway, but you cannot tell me that two
white twunks in a room isn't the start of either a porno, a subreddit, or a movie going for
Oscar bait, and everyone knows the twunks end up dead in those--"
Wash kicks the door closed.
"He's already starting! He's doing his Freelancer Dramatics™! Rest in fucking pieces,
Simmons, you're about to eat shit!--And also if it goes down the porno route, get that shit on
tape!--For science!"
They wait, but it seems like Tucker's got it out of his system, and Wash just sighs and dumps
his duffel bag on the floor. Turns around to face the half-empty room. Simmons instinctively
tries to make himself smaller, hoping Wash will ignore him. He does. "Alright," Wash says,
and rolls his neck. "Let's get this over with."
Simmons tries to help, not because he wants to but because it'd be too awkward to just stand
there while Wash unpacks, but truthfully, Wash has it more than under control and his
instructions are too vague to do anything with--"Just put it over there," mostly, before Wash
his hand in a general direction like it doesn't matter to him where it goes. He's a terrible
picture of easy moderation: shoving clothes into drawers in decently folded shape, but not
sweatin git when a shirt fell out of its folding; the drawers are loosely organized by type of
clothing, except when Wash runs out of room for all the armor bits and he just shoves them in
a corner; toiletries are a disorganized jumble in a singularly contained bag; he has an entire
bag of weapons with duck tape on the outside that spells SHOES--DO NOT OPEN, like
anyone's actually going to fall for that.
He also has a whole plastic bag of snacks. And Simmons told Grif to take all the snacks out
of the room, which Grif did, but like hell is Simmons going to tell Washington that.
There's lots of protein powder--buckets of them, in mostly vanilla or plain. A jar of peanut
butter. Dried banana chips. A few battered ration bars, for some reason all in the blueberry
oatmeal flavor. In the middle of unpacking, Wash eats a snack, mostly to take the time to
survey what still needed to be unpacked. He forgets about the meal bar on Grif's bed halfway
through, refinds it when he has to put the sheets on, and ends up rewrapping it to save for
later. Simmons watches this like Wash is an alien.
Wash--and Carolina--are both absurdly fit, but they do not eat the same way, and they are not
fit in the same way. Carolina is ripped and everyone could tell even through the armor. She
ate mostly ration bars. While they were on the road, Epsilon might insist that she take a rest
break and eat something, at which point Carolina might drink powdered whey with powdered
milk and water and call it a meal just to appease him. It's not a hyper clean diet. It's a boring
diet, without variety, joy, or doubt. They eat things to stay alive--not like Grif, eating for fun,
or Caboose, insistent on only the hyperpalatable foods that can hold his attention, or Donut,
who mostly chose his foods based on how sweet they were. Carolina eats like Sarge, like
they've got marching orders.
Wash, mostly, just eats whatever. He's fit, but from the times Simmons has seen him work
out, his stomach is flat with only the soft outline of where abs should be. He's got broad
shoulders and a trim waist with a bit of a pouch on his stomach and zero bicep definition,
although the biceps are definitely there. He looks like he should be a model, except for the
freckles and acne scars and the fact that his body fat percentage isn’t low enough. And he
eats effortlessly, maintains a terribly attractive aesthetic standard apparently without thinking,
a terrifying balancing act of easy moderation, suspended between extremes on a highwire
Simmons can't see. And it's not like Simmons doens't know how to micromanage a diet and
outwardly look like he isn't, because he certainly does, and has, but the difference is that at
the end of the day, Wash moves on and does something else with his life, like eating food is
no big deal and is not the central conflict around which his life revolves, and that, more than
anything is the thing that Simmons hates.
Simmons hates everyone like Wash.
Wash catches Simmons staring and frowns. "Want one?" he asks, pointing to the bag of
snacks lying forgotten on the floor.
Absolutely not. He forgot to draw up a potential recovery plan yesterday. He's not equipped
to fight with food. For just today, he really wants to just not throw up and not fight for it, and
he's so tired of trying to make it happen with his bare hands and white knuckles.
Wash shrugs and puts the snacks in the pants drawer.
"Can I ask a question?" Wash asks, when he's finished unpacking.
Simmons's brain replays Donut dying in slow motion and also the entirety of the singular
conversation Grif had with him at Rat's Nest about the eating disorder that Simmons totally
doesn't have.
"Not like a serious question," Wash says hastily. "Normal question. Average question. Nostakes question."
No, Simmons is not fooled by this. He's not falling for Wash's Freelancer tricks. He glances
covertly for the nearest exit. "Uhhh, sure? Okay? Uhhh, whatever you say, go ahead, I'll just
be inching unobtrusively towards the door...?"
Wash gives him a flat look. "Do you remember how you were all talking about how you hate
Blood Gulch a few weeks ago?"
"What about it?" Simmons says warily.
"Well, Grif--is it okay if I bring up Grif?"
"Why wouldn't it be?" Simmons says. "It's not like we're fighting. It's not like we broke up or
anything. Which we couldn't do, because we weren't dating. And also we weren't married,
either, I've heard that joke from Tucker. We're not in any sort of relationship except for the
one that it is absolutely entirely normal for two dudes to have, except that obviously
homosexual relationships are okay and normal too because I'm not a homophobe and I
definitely didn't mean to imply that a romantic homosexual relationship between two men is
somehow abnormal ha ha ha that would be really weird and not a thing I would do! And for
that matter it's absolutely okay to bring up Grif because I definitely have zero hang-ups
whatsoever about that whole situation and would love to hear about Grif but not in a gay way
like I'm starved for information about what he's doing or thinking or saying because I'm not
that either! I am a perfectly normal and adequate amount of chill surrounding Grif. Please
continue and tell me about Grif."
"Uh-huh," says Wash suspiciously. "Okay, well, Grif was talking about Blood Gulch again,
about how it's dumb to go back to a place you all hate, and... I've never lived at Blood gulch,
so I wouldn't know. But it seems like a fair point me."
Yeah, Simmons doesn't like this question. And surprisingly, it has nothing to do with Grif.
Okay, maybe it has a little bit to do with Grif.
Wash goes on, "Like, I know that you've been there a lot, and you've spent a lot of time
making Valhalla the same sort of place, but if none of you actually want to go back... what if
you all just... went somewhere else?"
"Like it's that easy?" Simmons says sourly.
"Sure. Why not?"
Blood Gulch might not be a good way to live--even Simmons knows that. But it's the one he's
got, the one he knows. Wash--what would Wash know about tearing up your own life of your
own volition and starting from nothing? Wash had his life torn up for him. He got to
reconstruct from the ashes someone else made for him. It's one thing to be forced out of your
life; it's something else altogether to have to do it with your own two hands. To make
something new, you've got to tear down the old, and there's no guarantee that you'll come out
better for it once you're done destroying even the meager good things you cling to. And that's
why not: even the worst ways of living kept you alive, barely, and you can fall in love with
the small happinesses that it grants you even as it kills you. Many people would cling to that
than take the plunge and raze their own securities to the ground.
But fuck if Simmons is verbal enough to put such a thing into words, so mostly he just
glowers at Wash, and Wash holds open his hands, as if to say, Well? Why not?
"Because we're a bunch of candy-colored dumbshits who make terrible life decisions," says
Simmons.
"Wow, I had no idea," says Wash. "Tell me more about these terrible life decisions that may
or may not include fighting an eight-foot-tall supersoldier, adopting an internationally-wanted
criminal, lying directly to the UNSC's faces, smart-assing Agent Carolina, charging directly
into the heart of a high-tech military project's secret base, providing Caboose with live ammo,
and apparently fucking an alien."
"Also feeding Caboose crayons and lighter fluid on his birthday," Simmons says.
Wash sighs and visibly tunes back out of the conversation. "Never mind. Forget I asked
anything."
"Oh, and also deciding most major arguments with either real bullets or rock-paper-scissors!"
Simmons adds.
"I said never mind!"
On the thirty-eighth day, Grif and Simmons are Officially Unfighting.
Move out. Stop fighting. The end.
And potentially stop talking to each other altogether, because if nobody is going to break the
silence after an awkward conversation first, then the awkward silence keeps going and going
until it's an awkward silence between strangers and then it's just silence, and then it's not your
problem anymore. Case in point: procrastination and denial always work. True facts.
Scientifically proven.
Simmons remembers this from the older days--Rat's Nest, most vividly, when they had the
real opportunity to declare that they didn't know each other and didn't care and fully go their
separate ways with something as small as an awkward conversation, except they can't do that
when they're still living next door to each other and only have mutual friends in their social
circles and also they're stuck on a spaceship cruiseliner for the next foreseeable months.
They've done this before, haven't they? Over and over and over again.
When Grif asked about if Simmons was okay at Rat's Nest--when Simmons didn't ask if Grif
was okay in Valhalla--when Grif found Simmons half-covered in blood in the bathroom in
the middle of the night--when Simmons told Grif that he "throws up on purpose sometimes"-it's always the same, isn't it? Turn away, awkward silence, feel the encroaching imminent end
of their relationship altogether, compromise, start talking but definitely not about whatever
the awkward thing was--every time.
Every time.
The same day, intolerable and tolerable; the sun never sets; the war never gets won; the
single-stalled bathroom never ends; the conversation never gets done.
And the next time Grif slouches out of Sarge's room and refuses to meet Simmons's eyes in
the hallway, it occurs to Simmons that he's really fucking sick of it.
Fakedating Doghouse
When Simmons is sure that Wash has gone to the gym for his regularly scheduled Freelancer
sweat session, he pulls the door to the single stalled bathroom closed and, for the first time
since he got on this ship, takes a good look in the mirror.
Caboose is right: Simmons doesn't look any different after spending nearly forty days with
his head in a toilet. It might as well not be happening, for all the proof he's got to show for it.
He's certainly no wasted stick figure that he was at the end of high school. Just a totally
normal guy here, not fucked up at all, with his average freckles and average eyes and average
haircut and average frown.
But Simmons isn’t here to look himself. (For once.) Simmons clears his throat. Tries to meet
his reflection's eyes and winds up embarrassed, so he looks away.
"Hey, Grif--"
No, that's too stilted.
"Hey, asshole--"
No, that's too aggressive.
"Hey, fatass--"
Too, uh, elephant in the room.
Simmons slams his forehead into the mirror. Maybe if he broke it and bled all over the floor,
Grif might materialize with a first aid kid and gently insult him and they could pretend they
weren't being schmoopy and fond over Simmons's idiocy. But not in those words, because
that would be gay.
"Hey, Grif," says Simmons. His reflection looks about as displeased with this imperfection as
Grif will be. "How're you doing. great, that's super great, really glad that everything's fine
and I definitely know how you're doing lately because I definitely didn't forget to pay
attention to everything and everyone for forty days straight. Wait fuck I didn't say that. Okay,
cool, I'm glad to hear that you're alive and definitely recovering from the time you almost
died off a cliff and you're not at all traumatized by that or endlessly ruminating on that one
moment for entire days out of fear of losing your teammate that you don't care about wait ok
hang on I didn't say that either uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no, it's fine, I'm
going to do this right--I'm glad to hear that you're totally okay even though your sister
recently died and literally nobody talked about it or acknowledged it or held a funeral or
anything and also one of our team members killed her and I didn't even ask if you were okay
like I intended to and it's probably still on your mind actually now that I say this out loud and
I really did mean to ask if you were okay but FUCK, UH, I'M, JESUS CHRIST oh just fuck
me--NO NOT THAT EITHER BECAUSE that would be gay--HEY GRIF HOW ARE YOU
I'M GLAD TO SEE YOU."
Simmons squints.
"Wow, that last one was terrible," he says to himself. "Even the 'fuck me' was less gay than
that. It sounds almost like I care about him."
And everyone knows it's better to awkwardly bring up someone's dead sister and unresolved
trauma than to care about people. Obviously .
Here's the problem with talking: If you want to talk to someone about the shit you're doing,
you've got to have either a) a number or b) a set of words, because knowing a thing doesn't
just show up magically in someone's head. If you want someone to know something, you've
got to make it real. Walls and floors and dirt and other mundane shit like that is obviously
real; things like truth or beauty or justice are harder to pin down; the things that happen
entirely inside a person's head, like happiness or love or sadness or being fucked up, are by
far the hardest. You'd have to have some kind of proof, a way of measuring it, in order to be
fucked up, at least in a tangible way, otherwise--well, you know what they say about trees
falling in a forest and no one's around to hear.
You've got to put it into either a number or a word to make it neatly packaged to be
transferred to another person's brain, and everyone knows that words are bullshit, so
obviously numbers would be the superior choice, every time.
Which is why logically Simmons really should start calorie counting and weighing himself
again, which, Simmons knows, would be the best and fastest way to rocket-boost himself
straight into hell. And for once in Simmons's life, he really just does not have the time or
energy to self-destruct, okay. He's got to have a non-awkward talk with his fake boyfriend.
"Hey, Grif," says Simmons to his own reflection. "Can I grab you for a second from whatever
ungodly thing you're doing that Sarge is likely mercilessly insulting you over? I'd like to have
a very short and not-at-all extended conversation about something that is definitely not
feelings and weirdly personal business that doesn't relate to the fight we're not having
because there's absolutely no weird tension between us over the dating we weren't doing, and
it'll be great and also not awkward at all and very very heterosexual."
Simmons is super prepared and this is going to go really well.
Simmons finds Grif in the hallway.
"Hey Grif--"
"Sorry I have to go someplace else immediately," says Grif and books it out there.
Simmons finds Grif lurking in the Blood Gulch corner.
"Hey G--"
"Oh no look at the time gotta go sorry," says Grif, jumping up and speedwalking away.
Simmons tracks Grif down at the upper floor, lurking outside the movie theatre.
"H--"
"JUST REMEMBERED I HAVE TO BE AT A PLACE THAT'S NOT HERE," says Grif
loudly, nearly leaping through the ticket window to get away.
All of a sudden, Simmons doesn't even have time to overthink what he's going to say, because
he can't get Grif to fucking be in one place long enough for them to actually have the talk.
Honestly, he doesn't have the time to spiral over this conversation because the way Grif's
going, the conversation isn't even going to happen at all, because of course fucking Grif has
to throw a wrench in literally everything Simmons tries to do, god, typical god damn Grif .
(Also, it’s easier to not focus on Wash’s snack stash if he stays out of his room altogether. He
wonders if this is what Grif did—finding it easier to be out of the room, day after day, until
one day you’ve vanished and nobody realized.)
On the forty-third day, Grif is also not in the room he shares with Sarge. Or Simmons thinks
he isn’t, because Sarge won’t fucking confirm where Grif is, and he’s also not letting
Simmons into the fucking place to see for himself.
"And I swear to god, if you don't stop lurking outside this doorway like Grif's murderous exhusband, I will call the cops on you," says Sarge.
"There's no cops on this ship," says Simmons, instead of denying that he's lurking outside
Sarge's and Grif's room like Grif's murderous ex-husband, because sometimes Simmons has
flashes of self-introspection that aren't complete garbage.
"Living with that Blue is rotting your brain, Simmons!" Sarge says. "Or perhaps you've been
fooled by Washington's attempt at plainclothes."
"Wash is not a cop ."
"That's what he wants you to think!" Sarge cries. "You've fallen for his lies! His Blue devilry
ways! Simmons, don't fall for his temptations!"
"I'm not! There's no temptations at all!"
"Excellent work, Simmons. Keep going on that way," says Sarge. "Absolutely do not think
about his chiseled jawline and big strong hands and muscled thighs."
"I think those are very specific examples, sir," says Simmons.
"You're thinking about it! He's already working on you!" Sarge wails.
"I wasn't--I didn't--don't sidetrack me!" Simmons cries. "I didn’t come here to talk about
Wash’s biceps and freckles and nice smile! I came here to look for Grif! Either he's here or he
isn't!"
"And I'm sayin' that I don't want any trouble! Get out of here before I call the chiseled,
strong, muscular cop, and-or get my shotgun out!"
" You wanted us to break up. Why are you protecting Grif's honor now ," Simmons hisses.
“I said I didn’t want any drama ,” Sarge corrects.
Tucker pokes his head out of his room, followed immediately by Caboose’s head above his
like a pair of Stooges. “Did I hear drama?”
“Look what you’ve done, Simmons!” Sarge cries. “You know drama is like blood in the water
for Blues!”
“ You’re the one making it dramatic by not telling me where Grif is! I literally just want to
have a conversation with him!”
“I won’t have you on your hands and knees begging Grif to take you back like a terrible soap
opera cliché! Next you’ll say that Grif’s the father and you want Grif to take you back and
you can do better!”
“ You’re the one who said that Grif was terrible for me and that I’m the one who supposedly
dumped him!--which, uh, I definitely did in Valhalla, like right in front of your eyes, there’s
no ‘supposedly’ about it,” Simmons says hastily under Sarge’s glare. “Look, forget about it,
it’s hard for me to keep all my levels of denial straight sometimes. The point stands that
there’s no reason why I would be the one begging Grif to take me back!”
“Oh man, Caboose, tell me we have popcorn somewhere,” says Tucker.
“There’s no drama and no fighting!” Simmons and Sarge snap in unison.
At this point, Grif comes down the hallway stairs with a bag of take-out leaking grease
everywhere, sees Simmons outside his door, and immediately turns around to go back up.
“GRIF WAIT NO--”
“GO AWAY I DON’T WANT YOUR EMOTION GERMS,” Grif yells back.
“Excellent work, Private Grif!” Sarge shouts. “Defend against the Soap Opera Threat!”
“STOP COMPLIMENTING ME SARGE THIS IS ALREADY TERRIBLE AND WEIRD
AS IT IS.”
"GRIF PLEASE COME BACK I PROMISE I CAN DO BETTER," Simmons hollers across
the entire hallway in front of all their friends without thinking, and Grif’s shoulders shake in
a way that could be laughter, or maybe just him walking faster.
Letter Day, pt. 5
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
You know what they say: if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. And if it doesn’t
work, try and try again. And if people tell you that trying the thing that didn’t work over and
over is the definition of insanity, feel free to punch them with your cyborg arm and try and try
again.
By the time Simmons finally corners Grif, Grif’s gone from warily irritated to bored. “Really,
Simmons?” he says, without affect. “Do we really have to do this now?”
“Well, if you responded literally any one of the other times that I texted you--”
The cashier running the mail center looks rapidly between Grif and Simmons and visibly
resigns herself to having One Of Those Days At Work.
“--I wouldn’t have to hunt you down while you’re--what’re you doing, anyway?”
Grif looks at Simmons balefully.
“That’s a legitimate question,” says Simmons.
“Why do you even wanna know,” Grif replies.
“Because you’ve been avoiding me!”
“You wanna know what I’m doing because I’ve been avoiding you,” says Grif blandly.
“I--yeah? Yes? What?”
“Do you hear your own circular logic sometimes, Simmons?” Grif asks.
The cashier interrupts, “Sirs, if you need more time, could I ask you to step to the side for
other people in line?”
“There’s nobody in line,” says Grif.
“This is a line?” Simmons asks.
“Yeah. Get in it. Wait your turn to have a meltdown.”
“You’re in line to have a meltdown ?”
“It’s a joke ,” Grif groans. “This is the fucking post office, take a wild goddamn guess what
the line is for?”
Simmons, who is usually one of the most observant people on Red Team (which doesn’t say
a whole lot), might be observant , and might have known, theoretically, where they were (the
long distance communications office of the Hand of Merope ), but noticing facts and putting
facts together is, unfortunately, two separate processes, particularly when putting the facts
together usually leads to you having walked in on your not-boyfriend who you aren’t not
fighting with attempting to send a letter to his sister who probably isn’t not undead.
“Oh,” says Simmons. “Uh.”
There’s a pause.
“I’m just gonna, um,” says Simmons, and points to the door.
Grif seems even more disgruntled at this. “Ugh, fuck, no, you’re just going to lurk outside the
window and look like a kicked dog. Just stay here.”
“So I can lurk over your shoulder and look like a kicked dog here ?”
“I really don’t like how you have, like, selective moments of self-awareness,” says Grif.
“I can only do it when it’s funny,” Simmons says.
“Sir?” says the cashier, unhappily.
What ensues is Grif and the cashier doing what looks like the Chinese back-alley debate over
the price of a trashy souvenir, except it goes something like:
Him: “What do you mean, Blood Gulch isn’t in the register?”
Her: “I’m sorry, sir, do you think there’s another name for it?”
Him: “No, it’s just called Blood Gulch--can I look it up by physical location?”
Her: “Sure, what sector is it in?”
Him: “It’s around here, these coordinates, physically in the middle of fuck-all.”
Her: “I’m sorry, sir, there’s no communication offices near that area.”
Him: “I don’t need it to go to an office, it just needs to go to someplace that can receive
communication.”
Her: “I’m sorry, sir, but there doesn’t seem to be anything in that area--”
And on and on and on. Simmons lurks over Grif’s shoulder and does, indeed, look like a
kicked dog, until the cashier and Grif agree to send the letter to a station about seven hundred
miles off from where Blood Gulch is actually located, because it’s all they could really find.
“Okay, sir,” says the cashier, and inhales very deeply. “Okay. You can drop a file via
flashdrive, email, upload into this portal here. We support rich-text files, images except
JPEG, and audio files.”
“Cool,” says Grif, and doesn’t move.
“You can deposit the file at the portal,” says the cashier again.
“Okay,” says Grif.
He doesn’t move.
“Grif,” says Simmons.
“What,” says Grif.
“Do you, uh,” says Simmons. “ Have a thing to send?”
“Uh,” says Grif.
The cashier looks right at Grif in such a polite way that implies she wishes she could smite
him from this earth in such a way that the murder would be untraceable to not only the police
but, more importantly, her manager.
“ Grif ,” Simmons mutters.
“Mmmmmmm,” says Grif.
“Holy fucking shit,” Simmons hisses, and pulls Grif right out of line, except the line is just
Grif. “Grif, if you’re going to send a message to Blood Gulch, don’t you need a fucking
message ?”
Grif shrugs Simmons’s hand off. “Yeah, I know. I got it. Never mind. This was dumb.”
Simmons wants to say that no, it isn’t dumb--how can wanting to send a letter to your sister
be dumb ?--but he thinks that Grif would read more into it than Simmons really means. Is
there a cool, casual, non-serious way to ask someone to stop talking shit about themselves
and what they want, particularly when you yourself casually talk shit about this person and
what they want? Is there a way to deviate from your normal modus operandi without it being
like, a huge deal?
“Well, you could always just… write one now,” says Simmons. “I dunno, record a message.
How hard is it to make a soundbite? Send an email?”
Darkly, without looking at Simmons, Grif says, “Making an email is easy. It’s what goes in
the email, which goes to my sister, who may or may not read it.”
Oh holy shit, Simmons is so not ready to have this conversation.
“Sir, you’re welcome to take a moment to compose a message at the kiosk over there,” says
the cashier, with a helpful gesture.
He glances at her. “Nah. Thanks. But never mind.”
And Grif walks right back out, and Simmons, like a kicked dog, doesn’t know what else to do
but follow.
They wind up on a public bench outside the mail office, looking out at the open space
outside. There’s linoleum tile. There’s a kiosk selling ritzy jewelry that looks like plastic.
There’s three different restaurants and Simmons hates that so much socializing happens over
food. There’s four different families flitting in and out of a nearby convenience store; a
girlfriend and boyfriend are trying on different types of headphones. It reminds Simmons of
an airport.
“That was dumb,” Simmons says.
“Yeah, it was.”
“What, did you just wanna know if Blood Gulch got a post office or something? It doesn’t.
It’s not going to. Pretty sure the UNSC wants that place wiped off the map forever.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“We just wasted that lady’s time.”
“She wasn’t doing anything anyway.”
“We just wasted that lady’s energy.”
“Okay, you got me there.”
Simmons’s leg bounces in place. Grif glances at it. Simmons stops bouncing his leg.
“I dunno, man,” Grif says. “I don’t know what got into me. It was just a dumb idea I had
when I got up this morning, and I did it without thinking.”
“Wow, you think before you do things?” Simmons asks.
“You’re hilarious,” says Grif. “Seriously, dude. This whole trip has been really weird. Like,
does time exist here? What are we even doing ? There’s just a whole lotta nothing to do, but
it isn’t even the fun kind of nothing to do. We can’t blow up anything or party in a tank.” And
when Simmons sneaks a glance at him, Grif’s eyes flick downwards, half-closed. “This is
like, the regular kind of doing nothing. I didn’t even realize there was a kind of ‘doing
nothing’ that was worse than the Blood Gulch kind of ‘doing nothing’.”
Around them, the Hand of Merope bustles about, normal people doing their normal nothing.
Grif on one half of the bench. Simmons on the other half of the bench. Two feet apart,
Simmons’s hands in his spread lap, Grif slouched over the armrest, looking tired. They look
like two strangers who’ve sat on the same bench by accident.
“Blood Gulch is alright,” says Simmons.
“Blood Gulch fucking sucks.”
“Yeah, it does. But it’s a fucking sucks that’s alright.”
Grif scowls and does not agree, like he should if he was going to complete his half of the
joke. “No, it just fucking sucks. But Kai’s at Blood Gulch. So.”
“What, you wanted to give her a heads-up we’re coming?”
“No. I just wanted to talk to her,” says Grif, without inflection, and then: “Kai’s been always
kind of unsteady.”
Aw, fuck, Simmons thinks, and holds absolutely still. He isn’t sure if he’s holding still
because he doesn’t want Grif to startle and run away, or himself to startle and run away, but
either way, he holds still.
Grif taps his fingers along the wooden armrest. He looks, from what little Simmons can see
from the corner of his eye, studiously and pointedly bored. “Sometimes I wanted to, I
dunno... solve it. Solve her shit for her. Like, when she was going really off the rails, I was
like, why can’t I just get in there and squeeze all the bad habits out of her life? I’ll just throw
away all the booze in the cabinet and then everything will be fine. But then she’d
intentionally go out of her way to ruin it all over again, because--I dunno, she didn’t want to
stop, or couldn’t stop, or something. So obviously I couldn’t fix shit for her. She wouldn’t let
me.”
Simmons looks away.
“So if I couldn’t do anything to fix shit, I at least tried to say something to fix it, but no
matter what I said to her, nothing worked. You always hope that what you say will actually
have an impact, like if you just, I dunno, sit down and have a quality conversation about it,
then everything will work itself out, but it doesn’t work that way. So it’s like, what’s the point
of saying anything if it’s not going to fix their shit? So I just had to sit there and watch her
fuck up her life.”
Simmons looks down. Grif looks off to his left, away from Simmons. Simmons’s hands
squeeze together, but he can’t figure out what to say. (No wonder Grif never sent a letter.)
“I need a fucking cigarette,” says Grif.
“To complete your sad, moping, brooding image?” Simmons says.
“You know it.”
“This is a no-smoking zone. Use the e-cig I got you.”
“‘S not the same.”
“Well, it’s better than nothing.”
Grif doesn’t move for a second. Then he sighs, and shifts his weight on the seat, and digs out
the e-cig from his jacket pocket. Slouches again. Pulls a few puffs to get it warmed up, then
takes a drag of the e-cig Simmons got him with the lungs Simmons gave him, and blows it
out.
Simmons supposes Grif’s absolutely right, that words don’t do anything. Hasn’t that been
what he’s been saying all this time? There’s no point in honesty and no point in talking. They
sit there on the bench, too far apart to be friends, too close to be an accident, and don’t talk at
all. Nothing real comes from Grif’s moment of honesty--they’ve got nothing to show from
this talk. No letters get sent. Kai is still neither dead nor alive. Grif’s words cool in the air and
accomplish nothing. It only feels nice.
Chapter End Notes
hey all!! im doing another project for a bit, so i'm putting this one on hold for the next
two weeks. i'll see you guys on the tuesday two weeks from now (9/11/18). ty for
understanding!!
Courage Running
Chapter Summary
“You finally show up and the first thing you do is ruin everything."
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
On the fiftieth day, Grif still does not come back to the room and Simmons googles “how to
recover from bulimia.”
The results are terrible.
Google gives him ads for treatment centers, all of which cost more than the UNSC will cover,
and he wouldn’t touch that anyway, considering the stories he’s heard about treatment
centers. Some of the websites are near evangelical, with a clear story of “I had a religious
awakening and you could too!” Most of the sites seem to be written by people who’ve never
gone through an eating disorder (“eating disorders are about control” “eating disorders are a
maladaptive way of dealing with life”). Some of them are apparently written by people who
had an eating disorder, but then came back around to say exactly the same thing as everyone
who’d never had an eating disorder (“I had a control complex” “I had a destructive method of
dealing with life”).
This seems particularly dumb to Simmons, who just wants to know how to stop doing a thing
he doesn’t want to be doing. It’s not fucking voodoo magic, he thinks, disgruntled. He
doesn’t need to know why he’s doing it. He just wants to stop doing it.
One of the articles is written for a health and lifestyle magazine about crash diets you should
never try, in which the author confesses to having dealt with anorexia in the past and that her
editor was concerned that she shouldn’t write the article in case it would trigger a relapse.
She’d consequently felt the need to prove that she wouldn’t relapse by eating more and
unhealthier in front of him during the process of writing the article. She felt always on
display, performing normal eating, her history branded on her forehead, needing to prove
herself to a standard of health. Abnormal passing for normal, proving yourself to be worthy
of the in-group while everyone stares at you and waits for you to relapse, like it’s an
inevitability that you’ll rip off your “normal person” skin and reveal yourself to be the ugly
deviant that everyone thinks you should be. This seems even more exhausting to Simmons
than having to spend fifty days fucking over his epiglottis and tearing a hole in his esophagus
via stomach acid.
Simmons types in several different wordings of the same search—”how to recover from an
eating disorder,” “bulimia recovery,” “ednos recovery,” “osfed recovery,” dives through a few
subreddits on diet and weight management, then a few on recovering from alcohol or other
drug addictions, and then skims through the WikiHow for “how to eat healthily.”
Then he goes to the second page of his google search, and then stops, because he read
somewhere that you have to be really desperate to go to the second page of a google search.
You probably also have to be a little desperate to google how to fix your brain, too.
Do you have to be more or less desperate than reaching the second page of a google search in
order to reach out for a real living person?
But there has to be an answer, doesn’t there? Something that will crack the code of why he
keeps eating too much and throwing it up? Something that will protect him from being his
terrible, incompetent self? Some magic bullet that will fix everything?
You can’t possibly mean to say that he has to fix it himself.
On a whim, Simmons goes to the Blood Gulch Corner and cleans the entire place.
“You finally show up and the first thing you do is ruin everything,” says Tucker.
“How is this ruining everything ?” Simmons demands. He’s holding several shopping bags
worth of trash, half of which is old food and the other half of which is disinfectant wipes he
used to wipe everything down. “You guys were trashing that poor table! There’s other people
who live on this hallway, you know!”
“It was homey!”
“That’s disgusting . Are you secretly Grif in disguise?”
“You don’t have to be Grif to appreciate the frat house aesthetic, Simmons,” says Tucker.
“Nobody appreciates the frat house aesthetic! Not even frat boys like the frat house
aesthetic!”
“Like you’ve ever been in a fraternity.”
“Like you’ve ever been to college,” Simmons retorts.
“You finally show up and the second thing you do is be super duper racist,” says Tucker.
“Wh--wait, no, that’s not what I was—”
“I’m gonna call Wash and have him chase you away, I swear.”
“Wash won’t chase me away . I’m not scared of any Blue.”
“And that’s why you’ve been avoiding him despite rooming together,” says Tucker.
No, Simmons has been avoiding Wash’s snack stash, because Simmons, in a moment of
foresight, figured that if left to his own devices, he’d probably steal them just to throw them
up (don’t look at him like that, he doesn’t know how that works either), and then Wash would
use his Freelancer Powers and use Detect Theft and then Simmons would probably get shot
out back like Donut because he stole Wash’s freeze-dried blueberries, which for some reason
sounds like an innuendo now that he puts it into words but he swears it isn’t.
“I’m not obligated to like Wash just because we’re rooming together,” says Simmons.
“Maybe you’re just too busy lusting after your ex-husband,” says Tucker.
The husband joke is familiar, but something about Tucker’s tone of voice strikes Simmons as
not entirely teasing, and also not entirely friendly. Maybe it’s the body language. Crossed
arms are a Wash or Simmons move, not a Tucker move; an exaggerated scowl would be
typical from any Blue, particularly Church, but instead Tucker just looks like an
inconvenienced teenager. Sourly, Simmons says, “Mind your own business, Blue.”
“Then stick to Red Base,” says Tucker. “Unless Sarge kicked you out of there because you
wouldn’t stop pestering Grif.”
Simmons freezes. swallows. Thinks back to the funny look on Sarge’s face when Simmons
came to find Grif hiding in Sarge’s room. The way Sarge wouldn’t even let him look inside.
Didn’t want drama, Sarge had said, but on the other hand, since when had Sarge ever said
anything directly.
“I hear Simon?” Caboose’s voice says, thankfully saving Simmons from having to actually
think about himself and his failures towards literally everyone who has shown him marginal
kindness in his entire life. Ah, wait, no, this is Caboose, who Simmons has ignored for fifty
days straight. Hm, so, not quite saving him from having to think about his failures towards
literally everyone who has shown him marginal kindness in his entire life, then.
“Don’t get your hope up,” says Tucker. “He’ll probably fuck off again for another two
months.”
“It wasn’t two months! It was…” Simmons squints. “Eleven days short of two months!”
“Wow, dude. What an accomplishment,” says Tucker.
Hm, yeah, so all those times that Grif told Simmons to stop being a passive-aggressive fuck?
He’s really feeling what Grif meant now. All of Simmons's fledgling curiosity that led him to
google "eating disorder recovery" seems to evaporate on the spot.
“Simon?” asks Caboose. He looks, miraculously, still happy to see Simmons, the way
Simmons figures that Caboose will still look happy to see Church and Carolina whenever it is
that they show up, if they ever do.
“Hey, Caboose, uh," says Simmons.
Caboose's expression seems to fall just a fraction.
Simmons can't do this. "Um," says Simmons.
Tucker does not seem impressed. Almost vindictively pleased, even. Simmons can’t deal
with this right now.
“I've got to go,” says Simmons quickly, and picks up his trash bags and hurries past the hall
and towards the stairs.
“Okay,” says Caboose.
Simmons spins around and, still walking backwards, says, “I’ll be back, though!”
Caboose brightens. “Oh! Okay!”
Behind Caboose, Tucker is still scowling.
Chapter End Notes
heyyyyy welcome back ;)
Criss Cross
Chapter Summary
"D'you wanna talk about it?"
Chapter Notes
"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." - Joe Klaas, "Twelve Steps to
Happiness"
To everyone's shock, Simmons actually does come back. And actually does talk to Caboose.
And actually does maintain a conversation with Caboose, entirely under Tucker's glare.
Until Caboose--Caboose, not Simmons--says, "I think I want to go somewhere without
Tucker's stupid face," and Tucker throws up his hands and doesn't move, which means
that Caboose gets his pissy look on his face and does the thing he does sometimes where he
just stops talking and walks away. It's only when Tucker's pout deepends that Simmons
realizes that Caboose had cut off the interaction with Tucker, not Simmons, and Simmons
was supposed to follow him--bizarrely--for some reason that Simmons can't explain because
it wasn't like Tucker was the one who ignored Caboose for a month straight. Fucking Blues.
Simmons didn't know how Grif managed to speak Caboose-eese at all.
Caboose is sulking at the top of the staircase and even looks rather impatient. "What?" says
Simmons, suspiciously.
Whatever it is Simmons did, it obviously wasn't the right thing, because Caboose wheels
around and drags Simmons off into the main floor of the Hand of Merope. But what's new,
right? Simmons can't do anything right, ever, for anything, and he's getting really tired of
beating himself up for it. Can he just accept he's a fucking failure at everything he's ever tried
yet? Would that be the better alternative--to just lie down and give up and never try at
anything ever again? When Caboose takes them through the main atrium with the long
parade of food carts and restaurants, Simmons tells Caboose to go someplace else, and for a
moment he's just entirely exhausted with himself and his absolute incapability of letting this
go.
Why can't he just get better, huh? Why can't this just be over with? Why does this have to go
on and on and on for so long?
There's a long hallway full of windows out to the starry expanse of space, which, frankly,
always makes Simmons rather nervous even if he knows these are stupid-thick megaenforced space windows. He can't see the damn things, they're so clear; there's so much
nothing outside and all the nothing can kill him. Logistically, if the windows were to blow
out, it wouldn't matter where Simmons was on the spaceship; they'd all be dead within
seconds; but it's one thing to know, realistically, that you could die because you're in a metal
can hurtling through the blackness of non-existence and another thing entirely to see it, and
especially to see it through a sheer window pane that doesn't even look like it's there.
Maybe it made the people who made the hallway nervous too, because it's an outrageously
beautiful hallway with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out into the depths of space, and not
a single chair, table, door, bench, or stool that would invite someone to stay. Short of just
standing there like a toolbag, or squatting like a hobo.
So of course Caboose squats like the hobo, leaving Simmons to bring up the slack on the
standing-like-a-toolbag department, which is fine, honestly, because he's been doing real
great at that lately, and honestly Caboose has gotten such an itchy, fidgety, little-kid pissedoff-ness going on that he's probably less squatting and more sulking, except he's chosen to
sulk right by the gigantor windows that scare the shit out of Simmons.
"Did, um," says Simmons. "D'you wanna talk about it?"
Grif would smirk and resolutely refuse to even acknowledge a feeling was occurring.
Unfortunately, Grif is not here.
"Tucker is being a stupid, whiny, sulky baby," says Caboose, like a whiny, sulky baby.
"Uh-huh. What about that is new," says Simmons.
"Because he is being a whiny baby because Church isn't here," Caboose blurts out, "or
Washingtub is here, or you're not here, or Griff isn't where he should be! And he doesn't want
to go back to Blood Gulch but he doesn't want to go anywhere else and he doesn't like it
when things are not the way they used to be but he doesn't like it when they change, and then
you come back like he wanted and now he's being a whiny baby about that too! And
Church is here anyway, we just can't see him because he is with Carolina and Carolina isn't
here, and I do not see why Tucker is making it harder for everyone when he actually gets
what he wants, which was for Simon to come back and you're here but it just made him more
angry and he is being very mean which makes me think that he doesn't want you to be here
after all but he said that's not true but if that's true then he should shut up and be happy Simon
is back! Or decide he hates you and Church and Washingtub! One or the other! Because he is
not saying what he means, or if he is, it's a hard thing to mean, and either way I think he
should make up his mind. So there!"
Oh, god, Simmons shouldn't have asked. "Uhhhhhhh," he says, because what the fuck is he
supposed to do? Play therapist to a bunch of Blue Team bullshit? Absolutely not. Simmons
doesn't even want to play therapist to his own bullshit. "Hmmmm."
Caboose's irritation seems to deepen. "Don't worry. It is not your fault."
Mmmmmm. Yeah, see, about that. It probably is.
Now, for the record: Not a sentence Simmons has ever wanted to have to think to himself,
and he will probably willingly string himself up to die before he says those words aloud, and
frankly, Simmons has found this whole process of moving past his own dumbshit self to be
extremely distasteful. Really and truly, he does not recommend self-improvement. It's better
to keep your head in the dirt and be an idiot for the rest of your life, because if you never pull
your head out of the sand and your head out of your ass, then you never have to reckon with
how fucking awful you really are. If he can just stay stupid and pretend being not-stupid
never happened, that would be great, thanks; alternatively, if he could just pretend to have
been always not-stupid and not have to deal with people being like hey Simmons why aren't
you mercilessly trampling over my feelings all the time for no reason, that would also be
great, thanks. Can Simmons unlearn something about himself? Can he keep being oblivious
to his own shittiness for the rest of his life and hopefully never have to be held responsible
for his flaws and the damages he's done to others? Yes? Yes? what a great idea? And he'll
never have to come to terms with not only the pain of being known for who he is, but also the
pain of knowing that he is, in reality, hugely transparently and already mortifyingly known by
everyone around him. Absolutely logical and viable plan, yes?
Caboose looks at Simmons expectantly, waiting for Simmons to agree with him. Simmons
intensely does not want to be here.
Therefore, Simmons sits on the floor with Caboose, criss-cross-apple-sauce, if only because
Caboose invites absolute shamelessness and Simmons knows--he knows--nobody else in their
friend group, maybe nobody else in the world, will ever be as accepting as Caboose, and if
Simmons can't sit here and fucking talk to Caboose, he certainly will never be able to talk to
someone like Grif. Maybe this is why Caboose always seems like he must be smarter than he
looks. Nobody else could be this stupid, this trusting, this nonjudgmental, this kind, could
they? Caboose can't possibly mean what he says, can he? How is this man not dead or
swindled out of everything he owns?
Therefore, Simmons will now say something apologetic, or at least taking responsibility for
having shafted his entire social circle for two months, or at the very least something kind.
What comes out is:
"I don't give a fuck if Tucker doesn't like me," says Simmons.
Wait. Hm. That's not what he meant. Simmons tries again:
"I've talked to him, what, twice in my whole life? He can do whatever he wants. It doesn't
matter!"
Oh god why is this happening.
"I did some shit he doesn't like. So what? What he does with that is his business," says
Simmons angrily. "What I do is up to me, isn't it? He can take it or leave it. And if I never
talk to him again, then that's just how it is! And if I get miraculously better and start talking
to everyone again, then that's just how it is! If he doesn't want to take me back, that's--that's
good! Good for him! He can do that if he wants! And we'll just go our separate ways and he
can be bitter and not talk to me and I'll do--whatever it is I do."
Oh god why are words not working.
"He can hold all the grudges he wants. That's his business. My business is getting better.
What the fuck does it matter! I don't even like Tucker! Blues are assholes anyway! Fuck him!
I'm just going to do this all by myself, and he can be petty and upset all by his self, and it'll be
a great time of nobody talking to each other!"
"Ah, no, I don't think so," says Caboose.
Unfortunately, Simmons might disagree with himself, but the instant anyone else disagrees
with him, Simmons is contractually obligated to get pissed. "What do you mean, you
don't think so?"
Caboose frowns. "If Church disappeared for a long time without saying goodbye, and came
back without at least explaining, I'd probably kill him again."
"What--like, on accident?"
"On purpose."
Simmons scrunches up his face.
Oh god, he thinks. If even Caboose can hold a grudge against someone he loves--Caboose,
who doesn't even understand the concept in words--that's like saying there's no easy answers.
No, it's like saying there aren't any answers at all. There is no solution. You just have to
figure it out and fuck it up and hope for the best.
God, that's awful. What the fuck. That's bullshit. This is terrible service. Where is life's
manager. Simmons demands to speak with them.
"Maybe I wouldn't actually kill him," says Caboose, apparently seeing Simmons's horrified
face. "Maybe I would just heavily maim him. Also, I think Griff is too lazy to maim you, if
that is what you are worried about!"
"We weren't talking about Grif," says Simmons grumpily. "Why does everyone think that I
revolve around Grif all the time for every second of the day."
"I am sure that everything with Griff will be fine," says Caboose, as if Simmons hadn't
spoken.
"What? Why? Did he talk to you? Did he say something? Do you know something? What did
I miss? What did he say to you? Tell me everything word for word--"
"Ah, no, he didn't say anything," says Caboose serenely. "I just figured, what else does
Simmons have to lose?"
Simmons stiffens.
"So it will work out well no matter what," says Caboose.
Simmons glances away, out at the thick windows, cold with the lacking of space. It isn't fair
that what Caboose says is actually reassuring.
Serious Jokes
Chapter Summary
“God knows why he did such an out-of-character thing in the first place."
On the seventieth day to Chorus, Grif decides to “get some things off his chest,” except it
happens almost entirely by accident because nobody in their social circle ever, apparently, got
anything off their chests, and just slowly let the weight of their own problems flatten them
into the dirt. But that’s just semantics. Same difference. It still happened even if it happened
by accident.
“Can we go literally anywhere else but Blood Gulch?” Grif says under his breath at the Blood
Gulch Corner while Simmons is walking by, and Sarge, who’d been lurking at the Corner
himself, goes off about how Grif has “always been a lazy good-for-nothing who doesn’t
wanna do the bloody sweat-n-tears work!” and he’s been “a negative-nancy from day numero
uno!” and “shut up Grif someone has to say ‘negative nancy’ now that Donut’s gone!”
“You don’t have to make such a big deal out of it,” says Grif sourly. “Can’t a guy get some
things off his chest? Guys, we all know Blood Gulch was a shithole. Is a shithole, if we go
back there. Like, I’m pretty sure we all hated that place—”
“I neither confirm nor deny these allegations,” Sarge declares.
“Fucking christ,” says Grif. “Sarge, there was nothing there . It was impossible to like the
place.”
“Because you don’t know how to put in the work to sustain a long-term relationship!”
“Shut up! According to you, Simmons and I were dating for a whole month! That’s--longish! It’s not short! It’s--uhh--there was a length of time that wasn’t nonexistent!”
“Excuses! Justifications! I know the games you play to excuse your own laziness and fear of
commitment!”
“ I don’t have a fear of commitment, ” Grif snaps. Simmons abruptly wishes he was not
standing here without Grif’s knowledge, because it’s about to get really weird when Grif
realizes he’s there. “I’m just saying, there was fucking nothing at Blood Gulch. You can’t like
a place with nothing in it!”
“Well, uh,” says Simmons, before he can think. Both Sarge and Grif’s heads snap around to
look at him. “He’s. Kinda… right…?”
Both Sarge and Grif’s faces turn incredulous.
“Sarge, there really wasn’t anything there,” says Simmons. “I’m pretty sure we all spent
every second of our post there wishing we were somewhere else. Like--look--if we went back
in time, and asked our past selves—”
“Private, what the bonkers heck are you talking about,” says Sarge.
“No, no, hear me out. If we went back in time, and then back in time again to accomodate for
the time we were all blown up and shot hundreds of years into the future, and talked to our
past selves, and said hey we got out of Blood Gulch what do you want us to do, our past
selves would most definitely say, ‘You’re all absolute idiots for coming back here, what are
you doing, go literally anywhere else.’”
“Since when have I ever respected the wishes of my past self,” says Sarge. “That seems like a
thing that people do when they’re being nice to themselves! You wouldn’t catch me dead
doing a self-care! Ride or die! Sacrifice everything for the Red Army!”
“I’m gonna tell Wash you’re back on that Red Army simtrooper bullshit,” says Grif.
“You wouldn’t dare,” says Sarge. “That man doesn’t know how to respect a man’s need to
cling to delusions. That’s antithetical to half the things that keep you sane.”
“Yeah, fine, I wouldn’t,” says Grif.
Sarge rounds back to Simmons: “Look here, Private. I think that due to your incessant need
to self-destruct in the privacy of your own home--which is entirety understandable and a
man’s right, of course; just give us a holler when we should drag your body to the casket--in
any event, I think you may have forgotten how Red Team is supposed to go! Y’see—” Sarge
points at Grif, and says, very slowly and clearly at Simmons: “ This one is the one you make
fun of. This one,” pointing at himself, “is the one you validate the superiority of in order to
maintain my failing self-esteem and crushing sense of nihilism in the twilight years of my
life.”
“What?” says Simmons.
“What?” says Grif.
“And Lopez, if he were around,” says Sarge, “is the one you’re embarrassingly racist
towards, so we can laugh behind your back for your own white fragility. But Lopez isn’t here,
unfortunately.”
“I’ve been picking up the slack with Tucker,” says Simmons.
“Taking initiative, I see! How tragic that you’re taking initiative for possibly your worst
character trait.”
Grif makes a doubtful noise. “Oh, I dunno, Sarge. Simmons has so many terrible character
traits to choose from.”
“Hey!” says Simmons.
“I said possibly !” Sarge interrupts. “Don’t correct me, Private Grif, I’m well aware of the
laundry list of Simmons’s failures as a man and husband. And last but not least, Donut is
supposed to…”
Sarge stops.
Everyone looks at him.
Sarge grunts.
“Be the manifestation of all of our latent fears of homosexuality, sir?” Simmons suggests
helpfully.”
“Yes, well noted, Private Simmons.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“But no brownie points for stating the blatantly obvious,” Sarge warns.
“I’m pretty sure we need someone to state the blatantly obvious,” says Grif.
“We might need someone, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them!” Sarge says, and points
at Grif: “Case in point! You come into my home and insult Blood Gulch--insult my mother
while you’re at it, why don’t you?!”
“Oh, should I—”
“I will kill you where you stand, Private Grif.”
“Can Simmons do it?” Grif asks.
“I only agreed we shouldn’t go back to Blood Gulch,” says Simmons.
“God knows why he did such an out-of-character thing in the first place,” says Sarge.
“I backed it up because ‘things get better’ is the theory of how things work!” says Simmons
irritably. “And if Blood Gulch was shitty, we shouldn’t go back! So things can get better!”
“‘Things get better’ is just that shitty slogan from those gay-acceptance videos from like five
hundred years ago,” says Grif sourly.
“Yeah, well, I,” says Simmons, and feels panic begin to creep in, so he just blurts it out
before he can think: “I used to watch them a lot, and it’s a catchy slogan. So sue me.”
And then Simmons stands there, mortified, feeling like he’s offered Grif his own heart on a
plate, and contemplates maybe throwing himself out the window so he can pretend that
whatever Grif’s about to say next didn’t happen. Even Grif looks thrown. Simmons can’t
even look at Sarge. This isn’t part of the script. Simmons wasn’t supposed to say that.
“You would pick the ones from five hundred years ago,” says Grif, at length.
“It’s catchy,” Simmons says weakly.
“Guess so. Vague as fuck, though.”
The vaguer a promise is, the more truthful it can be. Nothing about the idea promises that
Simmons will stop being mortified by moments where he admits to having watched LGBTacceptance videos when he was young, or that Sarge’s sudden silence won’t make Simmons
squirm as if he’s under a microscope. It doesn’t promise when or how; it doesn’t even
promise what the end will look like; it doesn’t even promise an end. Just that things, vague
things, anything, will get ‘better’. How? Why? By whom? Unclear. And possibly the idea
that ‘things get better’ promises that it’ll just happen naturally, by magic, by no real effort on
your part; and that’s just patently untrue. But you’ve got to believe something that’s a little
untrue before you, with your own two hands, can make it a little less untrue, right? In theory,
at least.
“It is catchy,” says Grif, after another silence.
“This slogan is anti-Blood Gulch propaganda,” Sarge mutters.
“You’re right,” says Grif. “‘Leave Blood Gulch’ is the real gay agenda.”
“I’ve changed my mind and I love Blood Gulch,” says Simmons.
Grif sputters. “I--wh--don’t chicken out on me! You hate that hellhole too!”
“I’m joking!” says Simmons hastily. “I’m joking.”
“Your idea of a joke looks an awful lot like just you being yourself,” says Grif suspiciously.
Yeah. Simmons knows.
Recovery Ave
On the seventy-second day to Chorus, Simmons gives up on recovery.
This looks like him staying holed up in his room for a few hours, realize that Wash had
thrown away an entire loaf of bread, immediately take it to the sink to soak and make
inedible (so he doesn't have to rely on willpower to not eat it, you see--old habits, and all
that)--stop--reconsider--promptly overthink what he's doing (while a small voice in the back
of his head remarks that inspecting everyone else's leftover food is not Normal People
Behavior, and a snider voice notes that digging through the trash for food is a thing Hungry
People do), put the bread back in the trash without soaking, think about it, try to distract
himself, leave the room altogether, remind himself that bread always comes up in dense
chunks that are hell on your throat (like golf balls swallowed in reverse), find Sarge, talk to
Sarge, keep thinking about the bread, leave Sarge, take a walk, think about the bread, think
about alternatively exercise-purging it if he shouldn't purge-purge it, listen to the sharp funny
staccato of his own cyborg heart, is (very briefly and very dully) pissed off his parents for
their gentically-inheritable alcoholism and workaholism, get pissed off at the universe for the
injustice of him having to deal with something that apparently nobody else suffers from,
wonder why it is that nobody else seems to have this problem, everyone else eats like it's no
big deal, nobody else has to make some sort of deal with the devil to get through a sandwich
without either eating nothing or throwing it up and more than unfair it's really just
oppressingly cold, cold like space, that he has never seen this problem reflected in anyone
else around him; get tired of his own anger, go back to his room, steal the bread, and eat all of
it.
He checks the calorie count per slice. (High.) Checks the carbs. (Yikes.) Does the math.
Adjusts for nutrition facts report twenty-percent margin of error, multiplied by slice,
compared to his theoretical TDEE (also large margin of error for the cyborg bits and also the
damage he's doing to his thyroid). The numbers tell him he's fucked up. He's a fuck-up by
statistical, quantifiable measures. He's done it wrong and he is wrong and probably he's going
to keep being wrong, if his track record of this bullshit over the last decade-plus of his life
has any statistical weight, until everyone can see how wrong he is, meaning his mistakes and
deficiencies and all the things about himself that he can't help and tried for so long to twist, to
bend, to break out of himself, and still, still, despite everything, he's still himself.
Well.
In any case, he's supposed to be throwing up all this bread now, so he can fix what's wrong
with him. But bread never comes up easy, even if he had drank water with it. And gag
reflexes don't get stronger the more you purge; they get weaker and less helpful. And his
throat is raw, and his cheeks are swollen, and his chest hurts, insistently, sharply. So in the
end, he just closes the door to his and Wash's room and lurks in his own bed like a sulky
teenager afraid of what his father will say when he goes outside, curls up and waits for the
jitters from the carbs to start, and, tired and beaten, concludes that he'll just have to forgive
himself for his failures.
Oldest Habits
Chapter Summary
Maybe people are just ashamed of their own consequences.
Chapter Notes
“This book is neither a tabloid tale of mysterious disease nor a testimony to a miracle
cure. It’s simply the story of one woman’s travels to a darker side of reality, and her
decision to make her way back. On her own terms.” -Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A
Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
If Simmons were a little more aware of what he was doing, he’d probably panic and choke.
But for something like this, there’s no narrative for him to compare himself to, and therefore
no minimum standard he felt under pressure to achieve; he has never really read an account
that covers the process of getting back on your feet after everything’s s slipped off the rails
and crashed into the dirt. First off, they don’t truly exist in eating disorder literature, films,
TV shows, documentaries. The usual way it goes is that the girl gets sick, sick, sicker; a
turning point is reached; and either she checks herself into an eating disorder recovery ward
or, worse, she’s shown beginning to eat again as if there were no steps between point A and
point Z. They don’t show picking up the pieces of the family relations she’s ruined, or the
aftermath of the terrible things she’s said, or the learning to live with the wreck of herself.
Whether or not she disappears into the mystery of a recovery ward or she seems
spontaneously able to “eat like a normal person” (whatever that means), it’s a hard fade to
black. You get sick, and then you get unsick, and everyone spends the entire film talking
about the intricacies of how you got sick and forget to explain how knowing how you got
sick is supposed to help you get unsick. Maybe people think you’re supposed to come out of
hell the way you come in, as if going through hell—in one way, out another—is not a
commonly-used phrase of the English language.
Maybe people are just ashamed of their own consequences. Watching a little girl burn in the
stratosphere is beautiful. It’s the clean-up that people try to hide.
Second off, it’s not like Simmons would have ever watched or read such things. Most of them
are about girls, anyway, or gay boys, and all of them solidly in their teens or young twenties,
as if eating disorders evaporated when you got a diploma from an educational institute,
instead of what was more likely to happen, which is that school-funded mental health
counselling was what evaporated.
Simmons, without knowing so, is in uncharted territory: a complete black-out, a total
vacuum: a thirty-year-old man in the darkness of space, with no guidemap and no criteria to
fail and no earthly clue of what he’s supposed to be doing. Everything he’s ever read on
recovery is a different set of advice: Maudsley, psychotherapy, CBT, veganism, Atkins,
Christianity, a hundred and one born-again beautiful narrations. And here he is, halfdisowned by his parents by radio silence he doesn’t want to break, in the smoking car crash
of a military career he never had because he couldn’t get his head out of the toilet long
enough to pass his own college exams and desperate for someone, something, to straitjacket
him back to sanity, beat him back into rationality. What theory is supposed to prepare him for
the practicalities, the hard physical lines of his daily life, the having to look at Tucker’s face
and see nothing of forgiveness? As if everyone of those theories he hasn’t already gone to on
his hands and knees, begging to be saved from being himself if only he does everything
right?
The sorry fact of it is that in the dead zone of no map, no story, no reflection, no body to tell
him what he’s supposed to do , he’s left to use only himself and proceed with the unenviable
task of easing himself back into the one thing he actually knows he wants for himself instead
of wanting it because everyone told him was supposed to want it. Being a famous general, a
scholar, rich, lauded, handsome and loved, preferably zit-free and popular (and also straight
and beloved by girls for no discernible reason)—maybe if he woke up tomorrow and had all
those things, he’d take it in a heartbeat and never look back. But since he’s so damn bad at
having what he’s supposed to want to have, he’ll just have to settle for what he actually wants
to have.
“Hey,” says Grif.
“Hey,” says Simmons.
“What’re you doing out here,” says Grif.
Simmons is sitting at the Blood Gulch Corner with a tablet and a text-adventure he never
finished coding, because he knows at one point in his life he actually enjoyed coding these
things and their terrible plotlines. He’s not entirely sure he’s still going to enjoy doing the
things he did before, but it’s worth a shot, at the very least. He isn’t enjoying it. He’s just
sitting here trying to look recognizably like a Richard Simmons that the Reds and Blues
know, and not whatever hideous thing has crawled out of him over the last eighty days.
“Why, am I not allowed to sit here?” Simmons asks.
“Just sitting?” Grif says suspiciously.
“It’s not like there’s drills to run or a base to guard.”
“Yeah,” says Grif, and collapses into the chair one over from Simmons. Not next to him.
Simmons is trying not to read into that. “Thank god for that. Nothing to do but eat and sleep.”
“That’s your idea of heaven.”
“It’s been great,” says Grif tonelessly.
There’s a silence.
“How’s Sarge?” Simmons asks.
“He’s Sarge. Old. Crazy. Annoying.”
There’s another silence.
“How’s Wash,” Grif says.
“Dramatic.” Simmons wracks his brain for something else to say, just to keep the
conversation going, but only comes up with: “Uh, kind of dumb.”
“Don’t think we would have taken him if he wasn’t kind of dumb. It’s like, our only
requirement to hang out with us.”
“I think we also have to be losers,” says Simmons.
Grif gives him a funny look. That wasn’t a very Simmons-like thing for him to say. “That’s
true,” says Grif.
Another silence.
“Cool,” says Grif.
Silence.
“This is kind of boring,” says Simmons.
“Please tell me you didn’t just notice that.”
Simmons gives him a startled look. “I—what—I mean, of course… not? Yes, of course I
spent the last eighty days bored out of my mind like the rest of you guys and totally was on
the same page as everyone else…?”
Grif rolls his eyes, but doesn’t comment on it, like it’s just par for the course for Simmons to
avoid talking about the elephant in the room in the worst possible way, and there’s nothing
left in Grif but to just be tired of it. “Whatever. Tucker and I played Chrono Trigger up at the
rec room until our brains melted out our ears, and that was basically the last thing left to do
on this fucking ship. Another hundred and twenty days to go until we hit Blood Gulch, and
then I guess we can be fucking bored for the rest of our lives.”
“This sucks,” says Simmons.
“God, tell me about it.”
Simmons starts thinking about Rat’s Nest, about Blood Gulch, thinking about thinking that—
what’s the phrase—purging sucks but sucks a little bit less than being wherever he was, and if
he was wrecking his esophagus and heart and life expectancy, well, it’s not like it was much
of a life if he was just going to spend it guarding a base that didn’t matter from an army that
didn’t exist. At least back at Blood Gulch, he did his best to pretend there was a point to
guarding Red Base. At least back at Blood Gulch, the Blues did their best to give him a point.
Yeah, fuck that. “Are you serious? That’s stupid. Let’s do something.”
“You think the police are out there preventing us from doing things? Jesus, Simmons, we’d
do something if there was anything to do.”
Grif slouches further into his chair, an odd, glassy-eyed look on his face, like he’s watching
life slide in front of his eyes through a TV screen, and Simmons is stuck in the peculiar
situation of realizing that this is when Grif is supposed to say something dumb or weirdly
profound to generate something to do, but Grif is the one being This Way. It’s like trying to
put out a fire, only to realize the fire extinguisher is on fire.
No, think, Simmons. Actually, that’s probably not what he needs to do; Simmons doesn’t
need to think; Simmons needs to figure out what Grif would think and then say if Grif
weren’t being This Way.
“Wwwwwwwhat,” says Simmons, “would you do if you did have something to do?”
Grif’s eyes flick towards him. Simmons never realized until just then how small his eyes
really are until they seem flat and lifeless in their sockets. “Is this a philosophy question?”
“No, like, if you could do anything right now—no limits—any choice of anything you could
do—what would you be doing?”
“Not being here.”
“Yeah, but where?”
“Not Blood Gulch.”
“This is embarrassing,” says Simmons. “I could tell you a bunch of mundane things I’d rather
be doing right now, and you can’t even come up with one . Like, I’d rather be, uh, watching a
movie.”
“Not Reservoir Dogs ,” Grif says quickly. “That’s not specific, either.”
“Fine! I’d rather be watching, uh, um, Avatar .”
Grif sits bolt upright. “The James Cameron one? Are you fucking joking ?”
“I panicked! You put me on the spot!” Simmons hesitates, then adds: “But I’d actually rather
be watching a shitty movie than being here.”
“Shittiest movies you could stand to watch rather than being here. Go,” says Grif.
“Uhhh, Top Gun. Wicker Man. Con Air. National Treasure. National Treasure II —”
“Stop giving me the entirety of Nic Cage’s career! That’s cheating!”
“Nic Cage is a perfectly commendable level of terrible movie that’s both lukewarm enough to
be watchable! I’m being efficient! You couldn’t do better—”
“ Sharknado ,” says Grif promptly.
“ Sharknado is—”
“The entire series,” Grif interrupts.
“No,” Simmons breathes.
“Oh, yes, Simmons,” says Grif. “All sixty-three of them.”
“That’s a lie,” Simmons says, trembling. “You wouldn’t dare rather be watching the entirety
of the Sharknado series than be here. That’s seven days of footage—”
Grif leans forward. “Maybe not by myself . But nowhere in the rules did we say that I
couldn’t bring help. If I make you and all the Reds and Blues suffer through the entirety of
Sharknado with me, you think I wouldn’t fucking hesitate to throw you under the bus for my
own entertainment?”
“You sick son of a bitch,” Simmons whispers.
“Don’t hate the player, Simmons. Hate the game.”
“You’re the one who made the game!” Simmons snaps, kicking him in the leg, and Grif
snickers for just a moment.
And then he hesitates, and seems to go far away again.
When Grif had been leaving Valhalla for Caboose’s roadtrip, there’d been this weird moment
that Simmons tries not to put a label on, and a weird look on Grif’s face that Simmons tries
not to put into word, so he’s left with only the funny lurch in Simmons’s gut when he’d seen
Grif’s face.
And Grif has the same sort of look on his face now, only now it’s disappointed. Simmons
doesn’t know what would be worse: if it was Grif disappointed with Simmons, or Grif
disappointed with himself.
Three Way
On the eightieth day:
"Hey," says Grif, as they pass each other in the hallway.
Simmons doesn't know how long it's been since he last purged, but the hard swelling in his
throat still hasn't gone down yet. He guesses he's supposed to have to wait for it, but he
doesn't really care that much about the swelling anyway, so it doesn't even seem worth
waiting for. Why's everything about waiting? Simmons isn't a patient person. He takes his
finger off the swollen node and forgets about it. "Hey," he says back.
There's a moment of silence, in which boredom sets in its teeth, and Simmons wonders how
Grif ever survived Blood Gulch the first time around if it'd felt this way to him.
"...You ever tried mattress jousting?" Grif asks.
"We're gonna get kicked off this ship," Simmons warns.
"But have you?"
Simmons thinks about this.
"First time for everything," Grif presses.
"I'm getting Sarge," Simmons says.
"Oh, don't do that. He's just going to bring rocket launchers and shotguns into it."
"But is it really fun if there's no live ammo involved?" says Simmons.
Grif thinks about this. "You're so fucking right," says Grif.
Wash hollers at all of them about stupid Red and Blue games and civilians on this ship,
civilians in this hallway, don't you know Mrs Whoever down the way could have broken her
hip, and also something very practical about not using live rounds in a fucking spaceship.
Tucker rolls his eyes and says, "Don't look at us. It was Grif and Simmons who started it."
Wash, slowly, turns around, in the wreckage of two broken mattresses and a wrecked carpet.
"Ah," says Simmons. "Er--"
"No, Simmons, this is the part where we run," says Grif.
They bolt the fuck out of there. "I know where you sleep, Simmons!" Wash yells, but they're
already gone.
Brunch Moms
"You know what I hate about Wash?" Simmons asks, safely in some other part of the ship.
They're lurking at a free bench on the side of the hallway, judging passerbys, as best as two
absolute losers can judge everyone else.
Grif twists around. "Oh, dude, you having roommate bullshit? Because I have some shit to
say about mine."
"What? You're having roommate bullshit too?" And then, suddenly convinced that the
'roommate bullshit' actually referred to Simmons, Simmons says, "Isn't your roommate...
Sarge?"
"Yes my roommate is fucking Sarge, of course I have roommate problems. Wait, you first, I'll
get my brunch-mom mimosa."
"It's four in the afternoon," says Simmons.
"Every time of the day is the right time for brunch food, and someone has to be resident
gossip since we left Donut behind. Give me the deets, Simmons."
"No, you first, your roommate is Sarge."
"First we throw Blues under the bus, then we throw our own team under the bus, Simmons.
Even if Wash will never compare to the absolute fuckery that is Sarge, that's just good
etiquette of Red Team."
Fair and true. "He does this thing where he hoards a thousand snacks, and then eats half of
one, and then leaves the opened package somewhere," Simmons complains. "The crumbs,
Grif! The wasted food! There's snacks all over the room!"
"Hm," says Grif. "I can see how that might be a problem."
"It's not like that," says Simmons.
"Not like what," says Grif.
"It's just unsanitary," says Simmons quickly. "Like, we might get space rats or something--I
don't know. Aren't there usually rats on ships?"
"What's the difference between rats and space rats?"
"They're... rats that live in space."
"Lame," says Grif.
"It's not lame, it's just a shorter way of saying 'rats in space'!"
"But that's just earth rats in the location of space. Space rats makes me think they'd be like,
rats from actual space, and nine feet tall and neon green."
"What?! That's not how space works! You don't just put the earth rats in space and they
mutate into nine feet tall and green--"
"I never said they were earth rats in space, Simmons, that's my point. They're rats from
space."
"That's not how space works either!" Nothing lives in space because it's--well--empty space!
That's the whole point!"
"Well if there was anything that could live in empty space," says Grif, "it'd probably be space
rats, right? Because rats are supposed to be indestructible motherfuckers who get into all the
weird places and never fucking die."
Simmons squints. "Wouldn't that make... us space rats?"
"Do we look nine feet tall and neon green?"
"We never agreed space rats had to be nine feet tall and neon green," Simmons argues. "They
just have to live in space."
"You're the one who said that nothing lives in space. Also, now we're back to the original
problem, which is that you can put earth rats in space and they would then be space rats,
which isn't true--"
"Fine! Nothing is a space rat and they don't exist. Only earth rats in space."
"Who are going to eat Wash's food," says Grif dryly.
"He's the one who leaves it all over the place," Simmons grumbles.
"Yeah, but I also leave food all over the place, and I never attracted space rats."
"Earth rats in space."
"Yeah, fine, earth rats in space."
"All the earth rats in space probably knew that your food is gross and not worth stealing,"
says Simmons.
"Earth rats in space only have the finest palate for vegan oatmeal and gluten free blueberries,
huh?"
"You know that's not how oatmeal and blueberries work," says Simmons, and Grif snickers.
"Okay, that's the Wash dirt. Where's the Sarge dirt?"
Grif sits back on the bench and laces his fingers behind his head. "Sarge thinks," says Grif
serenely, "that you and I shouldn't talk to each other because we'll be forever trapped in an
on-again, off-again cycle because we can't acknowledge the things making us spiral into this
endless drama-generating circle, and therefore we should stay far away from each other even
in good times so we aren't suckered back into the loop of good-and-bad times."
There's a pause.
"That's rich, coming from Sarge," Simmons mutters.
'"Oho-ho-ho, is that dissent I hear from the resident kiss-ass--"
"No and shut up. He said that?" Simmons says, in disbelief.
"It was in Sarge-ese," says Grif.
"Yeah, but what does that look like in Sarge-ese?"
"Well I can't do an imitation now. The comedic timing isn't right, and everyone knows Sarge
is just various comedic timings in red armor," says Grif.
"I'm pretty sure we followed that man into battle at one point," says Simmons.
"Go Red Team. Fuck Blues," says Grif.
"Think Wash is un-pissed yet?"
"Let's give it more time," says Grif. "I don't want him to sic his space rats on us."
Night Show
On the eighty-third day, Wash pops a ton of popcorn with Caboose, so Simmons leaves the
room. "You don't have to leave," Caboose tells Simmons.
"I'm really okay," says Simmons, idly wondering if snacks will ever not be a warzone for
him. He's not optimistic about it.
"You're invited, though," Caboose insists. "Everyone is invited. Even Church!"
There's no good responses to that. Simmons settles for scowling. Scowling hasn't failed him
yet, except literally every time that it has.
When Simmons was still in college, and hadn't yet flunked out--okay, no, he didn't flunk out,
he just lived in the college gym instead of actually going to class and then coincidentally
didn't turn in any of his homework and then doubly-coincidentally decided he didn't want to
maintain his nonexistent GPA and then triply-coincidentally decided he was going to enlist in
the army instead--anyway, when he was in college, there was a late-night mental health
helpline to call if you felt like you were about to do something terribly stupid. Stupid, in this
case, meant things that were presumably very important, like cutting or shooting up drugs or
beating up your girlfriend, and not Simmons's dumbass problems.
Still--he made the mistake of calling once. The poor woman he got was obviously one of the
therapists on the day team who'd had the misfortune of being on call, and, from what
Simmons could hear on the other end, was driving home from work at ten at night and had
him on speakerphone, probably concerned he was about to off himself. And he had to explain
that no, really, he just felt kind of shitty and was wondering if he should either binge drink
himself to sleep or binge and purge himself to sleep, and preferably wanted to do neither one,
because he was extremely dehydrated and tired of the whole thing. And even as he said it
aloud to this poor woman at the end of her twelve-hour work day, he thought: What the fuck
am I complaining to her about? I could fix this myself.
It sounds, uh, like you're, uh, attempting damage control, said the woman on the other end,
even while Simmons could hear her voice fade in and out in relation to the speakerphone, the
sound of her fiddling with her garage mechanism, attention obviously elsewhere. Yeah, like
Simmons was going to blame her for that. Do you have anything, er, anything else you could
do--have you talked to your therapist about mindfulness?
No, Simmons hadn't talked to his therapist about mindfulness, or CBT, or addiction theory, or
urge-surfing, or anything like that. Instead, his therapist thought it was most important to talk
about his childhood and how his unresolved conflicts with his parents had manifested itself as
an conflict with himself that he'd internalized, or something like that? Was he supposed to
have a tactic to get through the times when he wanted to crack open his own skull and scatter
his brain across the nearest unforgiving surface, just to have a moment's peace in
obliteration?
Y'know what? I'm just going to take a walk, he told her.
That sounds like a good idea, she'd said.
So instead of doing his midterm, Simmons went to the twenty-four hour gym, turned on a
treadmill to a low speed and high incline, and watched the TV run.
Now, on the Hand of Merope, Simmons thinks that if he wanted a decent shot at not doing
something stupid tonight, he should talk to Grif, but that seems like the kind of--oh, what did
Sarge say? The kind of endless cycle of shitty relationship that Grif doesn't deserve. Wait, no,
that hadn't been what Sarge had said. (But it'd been what Simmons heard.) So Simmons goes
upstairs at eleven at night and wanders around the main floor, now that all the shops have
closed and there's no threat of some dangerous food.
In the hour between midnight and one in the morning, he drifts past the twenty-four hour
gym, hands in his hoodie pockets like a shitty college teen with no better place to be, and
looks through the ceiling-to-floor windows at the rows at treadmills, ellipticals, dumb-bells,
weight racks.
Standing in the middle of the gym, a dumbbell in one hand and a music player in the other,
wireless earphones plugged in, dressed in a neon-turquoise sports bra and biker shorts, is
Agent Carolina.
Not that Simmons really cares about Carolina himself. Look--she'd been terrible to them, and
enlisted Church into being even more terrible to them than he already was, and frankly if any
one of the Reds and Blues says that someone's being terrible--the Reds and Blues, whose
baseline interactions included insults and live ammo--then something was probably very,
very wrong. Carolina had been a unique kind of terrible, because she'd been mostly terrible to
herself, and in a way that made them all think that there was some very real risk that the
entire debacle could end up with Carolina either a murderer or murdered, and how are you
supposed to make a joke out of that? Everyone makes jokes about Donut liking lace doilies
because it's one kind of scary. Everyone makes jokes about Tucker being a sex weirdo
because it's one kind of scary. Nobody makes jokes about Simmons's dad because that's a
different kind of scary. Nobody makes jokes about Carolina, period.
So what're you supposed to do with something if you can't make a joke about it? What, take
it seriously?
Carolina finds whatever song she was looking for and puts her PD back in her pocket. She
puts the dumbbell back on the rack and picks out a pair three times bigger.
Yeah, Simmons is a Red, and Simmons doesn't know if he wants to start poking any hornet's
nests, you know? That whole thing with the billion Texes and the Holo-Church SuperDouchebag Debacle was more than enough for all of them.
He looks for a moment longer. Does she have Church with her? Wouldn't Church be in her
armor pieces? Is she keeping them in her room? Is he supposed to, like, go talk to her? Be
like, hey, what're you doing here at one in the morning by your lonesome without even an
AI? But he doesn't think that'd go over well. If someone had asked him that in college, he'd
probably have socked them in the face, and Carolina can obviously land a better punch than
Simmons.
Simmons slinks away. It's rude to watch too long.
Embarrassing Secrets
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
On the ninetieth day, Sarge becomes the physical embodiment of Old Man Yells At Cloud
and starts yelling about how Grif and Simmons are "gettin' reconciliation up in public! A
tooth-rottin' threat to our repressive sensibilities!" Except that he does it way off in the
distance down the hall, like a whole forty yards away, so mostly Grif and Simmons just sit
there and watch him like a well-worn TV episode rerun. They take bets on whether or not
he's going to pull out the shotgun, except that they both agree that he isn't going to, so instead
they take bets on why. Simmons bets that Sarge will get distracted before he can manage it,
while Grif says it's because his shotgun shells were confiscated.
Instead, Sarge sends Wash their way.
Simmons opens his mouth to ask what's going on.
"What's going on," says Wash.
"Fuck, dude, I sure don't know," says Grif.
"Somehow I don't believe that."
"No, we're very serious," says Simmons. "We really don't know what's going on. We're just
sitting here! And then Sarge loses his head, and now you're here like we've done something
terrible and it all feels like we're waiting for the principal to call our parents and then expel
us, leading to our later disownment so we can be psychologically scarred by our family
rejection, which we will never recover from, and ultimately die alone and broken on the
street."
"That got dark," said Grif.
"I also feel weird about it, yeah," says Simmons.
"It's a conspiracy!" Sarge's voice hollers from Sarge's room.
"There is no roomswap conspiracy!" Wash yells back.
"There's a roomswap conspiracy?" Grif asks.
"There is no conspiracy," Wash says firmly.
"And there is no war in Ba Sing Se," says Simmons.
"Okay, but if there was a conspiracy," says Grif, "what would this conspiracy be?"
"If there was, which there isn't," says Wash, "Sarge is worried that because you two are done
with your--married couples spat, or whatever just happened--you're going to want to start
rooming together again."
"Oh, no, dude," says Grif. "That was definitely not a thing we were talking about."
"So you were talking about it," says Wash sharply.
"No! We just said we weren't talking about it! We just moved everyone around and made a
huge deal out of it," says Simmons. "We definitely would never ever try to room together.
We're fine where we are. It'd be, uhhhhhhhhh, really weird, and definitely not a thing we
would do, and..."
"You're definitely talking about it," says Wash.
"Simmons, shut up about the conspiracy we're not talking about; you're making us sound
suspicious," says Grif.
"I'm just talking normally!"
"You talking normally is you talking extremely nervously and guiltily about fucking
everything. Stop talking, dude. You're making us look weird."
"So you... aren't talking about it," says Wash.
"We weren't talking about anything," says Simmons, nervously and guiltily.
"So you are--"
"Simmons shut up," says Grif. Then to Wash: "That's not even a conspiracy, anyway. That's
just two dudes talking about a roomswap. So even if we were talking about it, it wouldn't be a
conspiracy."
Wash squints.
"So actually, we can't even tell you if we have a roomswap conspiracy, because we don't even
know what you're talking about, or what constitutes a conspiracy for you," says Grif. "You'd
probably better tell us this roommate conspiracy looks like, so we can tell you what it is that
we're definitely not doing."
"I feel like I should stop this conversation before this gets out of hand," says Wash slowly.
"We're just trying to help," says Simmons. "Can't do our part to help the Reds and Blues and
the anti-roomswap conspiracy cause if we don't know what we're looking for, sir."
"I'm not being baited. I'm leaving," says Wash.
"Oh, c'mon, Agent Washington! We're trying to be helpful!"
Wash gives Simmons a grudging glance. Unfortunately, Simmons has perfected the art of
asskissery, and Wash has not yet become immune to Simmons's willingness to completely
lose any and all self-respect for the sake of gaining a higher-up's approval. "Sarge thinks,"
says Wash slowly, "that you two are going to try and make a roomswap happen by
gossiping."
"Oh, dude, if gossiping made roomswaps happen, we'd be playing musical chairs with rooms
already," says Grif. "Shit, have you seen Caboose after he's eaten a roll of Oreos? You
wouldn't believe the things he knows."
"No, no--as in, Sarge thinks that you two want to room together again, but you don't want to
ask for it," says Wash. "So you're going to get around it by--"
"This seems like a higher level of intelligence than we really have, you know," says Grif.
"--no, listen. Sarge thinks you're going to get around asking for a roomswap by making you
two impossible to room with anyone else, so we have no choice but to put you two together
to contain the damage."
Simmons squints. "What damage?"
"Well, presumably, you two are going to share Sarge and my own embarrassing secrets with
each other, and out of mortification, Sarge and I will have to stop you two from gossiping
about our embarrassing secrets by giving you two what you want, which is to be put back
together in a single room."
"Oh my god," says Grif. "This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Simmons, let's do it."
"It's not a suggestion," Wash interrupts.
"Wash, you just dangled one of the most convoluted, ridiculous, ass-backwards methods of
social blackmail I've never heard in front of me," says Grif. "And you're telling me that you
don't wanna actually see if it works?"
Wash crosses his arms. "I, in fact, do not, because I know that it won't work, because I don't
have any embarrassing secrets."
"So that means you have like, three closets full of embarrassing secrets, then."
"That's the direct opposite of what I said," says Wash.
Grif looks at Simmons in delight and anticipation. "Oh, please, Simmons, please let me see at
least one of the closets. You're rooming with this guy, you've seen his embarrassing secrets--"
"My embarrassing secrets are none. Nada. Nonexistent," interrupts Wash loudly. "That is why
Simmons will not be telling Grif any of them."
"Don't worry, Agent Washington," says Simmons helpfully. "I, as a helpful and respectful
roommate, shall definitely not share any one of your embarrassing secrets."
"I don't have embarrassing secrets."
"Ohhhhh, okay. So we're just pretending they don't exist altogether? Right. Gotcha. Say no
more," says Simmons.
"Stop talking like that," says Wash.
"Like what?"
"Like I'm lying! I'm not--wait a minute," says Wash, sounding surprised. "I'm not lying! I
really don't have any! What the hell did you tell Grif?!"
"Nothing, becuase you don't have any embarrassing secrets," says Grif, and winks very
exaggeratedly and conspiratorially at Wash.
"Don't do that either," says Wash.
"Didn't do anything because you don't have any embarrassing secrets."
"What did you tell Grif," Wash hisses.
"Nothing!" says Simmons. "Because you don't have any embarrassing secrets, remember?"
Wash looks at Simmons. Simmons looks nervously and guiltily at Grif. Grif looks, very
smugly, back at Wash.
"This isn't over," says Wash.
"Nothing's over because nothing happened, obviously," says Grif.
"Because there's no roomswap conspiracy," says Simmons.
"And no embarrassing secrets," says Grif.
"Glad we could help, Agent Washington sir," says Simmons.
Wash petitions for Simmons to move back into Grif's room within a day. "What are Wash's
embarrassing secrets?" Grif asks, out of earshot of Blue Team.
"He doesn't have any," says Simmons.
Chapter End Notes
happy midterm election voting day!! i hope you voted!!
Tuna Sandwich
Ninety-first day. Nine days to Chorus remain. Grif suddenly has somewhere else to be every
time anyone mentions switching rooms, which everyone does constantly, and therefore Grif
seems to have just vanished altogether.
This means that Simmons, who'd planned to eat lunch and keep it down, come hell or high
water, is without the person he was going to drag to lunch with him to make sure that he
actually ate it and then didn't escape to a bathroom the instant he was done, but not, y'know,
explicitly stated or anything, because there's simply no way that Simmons is going to say that
to Grif's fucking face. And since Simmons doesn't intend to tell anyone that he needs a lunch
partner so he doesn't puke it back up, therefore anyone can do the job.
The problem is that the only person around is Tucker, who is both a) still pissed at Simmons,
and b) one of those people who is talking constantly about switching rooms.
"Fucking Grif," says Tucker. "Like, dude, I'm not one for touchy-feely junk either, but it's
just fucking weird when you go around avoiding shit like that. Get it over with, man. If you're
gonna have a hissy fit, have a hissy fit. Rip that shit off like a band-aid and then get over
yourself."
Simmons, who is in a loud, semi-crowded food court and staring down a tuna fish sandwich
that he's trying really hard not to dissect into its individual ingredients out of nervousness,
really could do without Tucker talking about Grif for half an hour. He promised himself he
was going to eat the sandwich and he wasn't going to stress about it and he wasn't going to
overthink the ingredients that went into the sandwich. He made a plan and everything. He's
supposed to eat the fucking sandwich and it's not a big deal, but also why the shit did Tucker
order a plate of parmesan chicken with a side of pancakes, and can Tucker shut the fuck up.
"And another thing--"
Simmons gives Tucker a scathing look. "I know Blues are too dumb to realize what's going
on right front of their faces unless Leonard Church yells it at the top of his lungs," says
Simmons, "but if Grif's avoiding talking about the roomswap thing, it's probably because he
doesn't want to talk about it."
"Dude, I'm not fucking blind," says Tucker. "And I'm saying he should get it over with. Just,
like, do the thing, get it over with, be done with it. You two could get this roomswap thing
solved in like, three seconds if you had a conversation."
Simmons rolls his eyes. "What is this, couples therapy?"
"Maybe it should be!" Tucker said irritably. "Or you guys are just gonna fuck it up again if
you room together, and we'll be doing roomswap merry-go-round for the next four months!"
"Three months."
"Four months because it's a hundred and ten days to Blood Gulch which is more than
fourteen weeks which means you round up which means it's closer to four months! I can do
math too, nerd."
"Great," says Simmons. "Thanks to your amazing ability to round up, we have to spent
another four weeks on this ship."
"Not, like, a literal four weeks. Rounding up doesn't actually change the amount of time we
spend here. Right? Wait, no, I'm rounding up because we're talking about you and Grif going
without couples therapy, which at this point is like sex without lube, except literally everyone
in the Blood Gulch Crew is involved here, which is hopefully not a thing that would happen
during actual sex. I should hope I can score better than one of my own asshole teammates.
No offense to you and Grif."
"Is gossiping about other people's private business directly to their faces a new Blue Team
hobby?" asks Simmons. "Because I'm still Red Team, and I'm not having fun."
"It's not even private anymore! Literally both of you two are walking window panes, you're
so transparent! Oh no, tiny ittby bitty problem in our relationship, time to fucking implode
and turn into a soap opera--"
"'Tiny, itty bitty problem'?" Simmons repeats.
"Uh, yeah, dude, that's what miscommunication is."
Simmons looks down at his tuna sandwich, which he'd meticulously scoped out beforehand
and plugged into a meal plan that was entirely more micro-managing than he should have.
Looks back at Tucker, who he'd dragged here explicitly for the purpose of socialpressuring Simmons into, at the very least, not just throwing the tuna sandwich in the trash.
"It's not a tiny problem to Grif," says Simmons.
"Yeah, because he's probably, like, making a big deal out of it in his head or something, and
then saying, oh, welp, too lazy to deal with that hot nonsense, like he always does--"
"It's not his fault," says Simmons, keeping his eyes on his plate. "It's my problem. Lay off
him."
And he really doesn't want to have to continue talking to Tucker, so he takes a huge bite of
his sandwich, and makes "no can do" motions to his full mouth when Tucker tries to speak
again.
Temper Mental
Chapter Summary
So shut the fuck up, keep your head down, stop thinking, stop lying, and give up.
Simmons’s eating habits implode.
The thing about most people’s eating habits is that they do, in fact, have some kind of order
to them. Even the most disordered of patients have a repetitiveness behind it. Tucker can be
relied on to choose a protein and a carb, even if they don’t match, and prefers neon blue
sodas over all others and never diet soda. Sarge can be relied on to choose MREs first, and
even from the MREs he has favorites; he tends towards savory dishes, that would be savory if
they had any fucking salt in them; he drinks coffee black, obviously, and hard liquor. Wash
drinks water and tends towards healthy foods eighty percent of the time, a bite or two of
something unhealthy here and there, and he’s more likely to snack than to have a sit-down
meal. Donut experiments like a Pinterest recipe conoisseur, but when he forgets or doesn’t
have the ingredients, his staples are like he’s a farmhand from the midwest: bacon and eggs,
sausages and potato salad (oh god, Donut and his sausages). Caboose will eat whatever you’d
imagine a five year old to eat. Grif will eat just about anything, always, unless it’s healthy,
and will always order the largest portion, and will always eat all of it, and will sometimes
scavenge other people’s leftovers and shove them in the back of the fridge.
For the last few years of his life, Simmons could be relied on to live in fear of fucking up all
day long, and then eat, regret, purge, chug water, go to sleep exhausted, wake up, and repeat.
What, that doesn’t sound like a good system?
At least it was a system.
On the ninety-second day, he shuts himself in his room for nine hours and and eats nothing
and plays video games until he can’t think and then goes for an hour run on an empty
stomach and then goes to sleep nearly shaking.
On the ninety-third day, he eats three take-out boxes in one sitting and then walks up and
down the Hand of Merope with nervous, useless energy.
On the ninety-fourth day, he tries to buy some packaged food from a vendor and then
accidentally spends four hours reading ingredient labels. Simmons already knows about over
twenty different types of sugar and how they differ and what foods they’re most commonly
found in, and Simmons learns about seven more. He doesn’t buy anything and eats a plate of
plain white rice instead.
On the ninty-fifth day, he discovers that one of the reasons he feels so ill lately is because
whenever he eats vegetables, his stomach (which has been constantly purge of its stomach
acid for so long) just isn’t producing enough acid to actually digest vegetables, which he
discovers because he ate broccoli in the early morning and felt like a balloon until nearly nine
at night.
On the ninety-sixth day, he realizes he’s forgetting to brush his teeth at night because for so
long, the cue to brush his teeth was having just thrown up. He brushes his teeth for six
minutes out of spite, because that’s disgusting.
Now Simmons wakes up and has no fucking idea what’s going to happen, except that he
won’t purge and that because he won’t purge, it’s going to be really fucking ugly.
He doesn't purge.
It's really fucking ugly.
Four days to Chorus remain.
Simmons is looking at a plate of spaghetti and is utterly, completely certain that if he
inevitably eats this, he’s going to have to throw it up. Meanwhile, Private Sissy is talking
about Grif.
He doesn’t hear what Sissy is talking about, except that it’s annoying and sounds a little bit
like whatever Tucker was saying a few days ago about Grif, by which Simmons means
literally anything Simmons doesn’t want to hear about him right now. Simmons sits there in
the Rat’s Nest cafeteria, the sound of a thousand soldiers moving around in his ears, but there
doesn’t seem to be anyone there; just him and Sissy, who’s not done with his own plate and
therefore Simmons can’t leave this table until Sissy is done. Shut up, he thinks. Shut up, shut
up, go away, I’m not listening. I haven’t thrown up in five whole days and that’s the longest
I’ve ever gone without circumstance breathing down my back and I’m going to crack if you
don’t let me go. I don’t want this—and he looks down at this plate of spaghetti, bright red like
a spat of blood on the plate, and he knows that if he sits here he's going to eat it and then he'll
have to throw it up and—I don’t want to break, I’m going to break, I’m going to break if you
keep me here. No one liked you. No one listened to you. Go away, leave me alone, don’t sit on
my chest and make me sit with myself and me and hear about what I am or who I am because
whatever I am, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to hear anything this irritating, infuriating
little man has to say anymore; I don’t want to put up with your conspiracy theories and you
somehow having stumbled right into Grif’s trading deal with Caboose. Do you hear yourself
talk? Do you have ears? Are you capable of actually listening to yourself, like you force the
rest of us to do every time you waste our time by opening your mouth? I’m fed up with you,
and the rest of this fucking Hand of Merope, and Rat’s Nest, and Blood Gulch, and me. I’m
tired of you and your shitty logic and all your crackpot theories that don’t check out or make
sense or have a single ounce of self-reflection or criticism and speaking of, what’s your
fucking problem nothing you say makes sense nothing makes sense in this army there's no
need for logic we don’t need reasons to live or die there is no reason why we’re here and we
won’t get any reasons either so shut the fuck up keep your head down stop thinking stop lying
give up or I will snap and escape however else I can and I’ve been trying please god I’ve
been trying and I don’t want to lie down and die please let me go I don’t want to be here with
you and I don’t want to be here with me and I hate you for making me be here with me and I
don't want to eat and I don't want to purge and I don't want to be sick and I hate you for
making me and I hate you for me and I hate you and I hate you and I hate you and I HATE—
Then Simmons wakes up, bolts out of bed, and is halfway to the bathroom before he realizes
that he didn’t eat any spaghetti at all. There’s nothing to purge. It was a dream and Private
Sissy is dead; has been long enough that he’s probably bones and maggots, now. Simmons
stops dead in the middle of the dark bedroom and feels more relieved than he’s felt since he
pulled Grif up from the cliffs of Sidewinder.
Home Stretch
Ninety-seventh day. Three days to Chorus.
Simmons will remember this ship like he does Rat's Nest: cramped, dark, filled with
adrenaline and dread and the incessant feeling of drowning. Everyone else will recount
that Hand of Merope was boring as fuck, and so was Rat's Nest to boot, because nothing
fucking happened there. If it was cramped, dark, filled with adrenaline and dread and the
feeling of drowning, it most certainly only happened in Simmons's head.
The Hand of Merope is, it should be said at this late hour, objectively not a bad ship.
The Hand of Merope has twelve floors worth of legroom for passengers alone, let alone the
floors for crewmen, and the entire ship stretches miles long. Maybe that's a little
claustrophobic, when you're spending two-thirds of a year on those twelve floors. But what
place isn't claustrophobic when you're only got eighty years to live? You can't have it all.
There's so much of everything, and only so much of you.
The Hand of Merope, in further defense of this poor ship, has entire rooms full of people,
making excessive room for its passengers. It provides food, water, laundry services,
entertainment, a steady stream of movies, simulation decks for when you want to pretend
you're somewhere else--shit, it has a foosball table. It's done what it can to be as cozy as it is
allowed, because you can't be too cozy, when all your passengers are going to leave, in the
end. The Hand of Merope is a shuttle, an in-between moment, a connection between different
segments of people's lives.
The people in the Hand of Merope are mostly military, but not the kind of military that went
out and killed aliens; these are the military who sat in the lab and programmed armor, or the
military who ran the schools on outposted planets, or the military who did the datamining and
statistical number-crunching--the interns, the clerks, the lawyers, the desk-jockeys, the
accountants for the UNSC's many wallets, the medics, the meal preppers, the administrators,
the secretaries, the assistants to the brigadiers. About half of these people brought their
families when the UNSC stationed them, and of that half, the majority of them brought their
children, rather than rely on the UNSC's half-assed attempt at childcare. The rest of these
passengers hope to go home to see the families and children they've left behind.
The name "Merope," in the Greek myths, referred to too many figures of no real significance-all minor characters, who had no impact, no consequence, no real recorded reason to exist in
their own story. She is the daughter of Titans, then the daughter of Atlas, then of Helios, then
a princess of Athens, then a wife of some hero, a foster mother of Oedipus, a queen; Merope,
the footstool of bigger men; Merope, the goddess of no function, swimming in the same
mortal mulch as everyone else; Merope, the patron of supporting cast. Her starring role is not
actually Greek: she is best known as Merope Riddle, née Gaunt, the mother of Tom Marvolo
Riddle in a childhood fairytale from the 20th century. Her name means "with face turned." It's
her hand that crawls across space now, full of the half-hacked parts of families and the
unappreciated cogs of the UNSC military, distributing these nameless people back to where
they call home.
The universe is full of big motherfuckers who do big motherfucking feats. Everyone in the
galaxy knows about Cortana and that shitshow--old news, practically. Master Chief is some
federal fucking hero. Everyone knows that some guy saved like, everyone everywhere,
hooray, hallelujah. The stories of Big Men.
In seventy-two hours, unknown to everyone on this ship, the Hand of Merope will fly through
the contact zone of the planets Cadenza, Clef, Coda, Canon, Concerto, Cavatina, and Chorus.
The ship will change course to avoid a moon so small that it isn't even on the map, possibly
can't be classified as a moon at all--this moon will be called Iris, although to the captain
of Merope, it will be "the fucking hell is this piece of shit in the radar." Changing course will
take them closer than planned into the airspace of the smallest of the planets, Chorus, in
particular.
Because it won't be planned, it will be an unexpected opportunity to people that the
passengers of the Hand of Merope will never know of, will never meet, will never look in the
eye and hold accountable for their actions. On Chorus, two men will make a decision call,
one of them watching the cruiseship via long-range goggles and the other calling in via radio
from an underground rebel base. They'll argue about it. They'll come to a decision, barely,
based on the few things they manage to hold in mutual regard. They make their decision
because some other man somewhere else--who the passengers of the Hand of Merope will
also never know of, will never meet, could never even imagine--some other man is heading
Charon Industries and has made his decision to hire two mercenaries to strip a planet of its
resources, a decision made based on the decisions of the Board of Trustees that holds him to
expectations and, like the Board of Trustees, this man too will make decisions based on the
decisions of a larger market, which influences his wallet and his assets and his own desire to
consume and subsume and grow his monolith creation called Charon Industries, and also this
man makes this decision based on the decisions some other man made when he decided to rip
apart an AI and break every AI ethics code that hadn't been written yet, which he did based
on the decisions of his wife and his dead wife and his daughter and what he was and wasn't
told from his own AI and his counselor--and so on, and so forth; entire genealogies of
decisions, stretching far off across the galaxy, and the passengers on the Hand of Merope will
never know about these decisions or these Big Men making these decisions, and the Big Men
making these decisions will not know the passengers on the Hand of Merope.
Those Big Men belong to Big Stories, after all. The stories worth hearing. The stories that get
told. There'll be entire textbooks written about Dr Leonard Church--entire laws, in fact, and a
new slew of crimes added to the document that constitutes what is a "crime against
humanity." Even when Chairman Hargrove sits in jail, Charon Industries will be taken up by
a new chairman, and will churn on without him, while dozens of reporters rush to write
Hargrove's biography.
There will be two news articles about the crash of the Hand of Merope. The first will report
the event as it is. An entire cruiseship disappearing isn't common, but it's not unheard of,
either. Newsworthy, but not front page. The universe is very large, and on the day that the
article runs, the presiding president of the planet of Yul-Banuk will have announced an
unprecedented infrastructure policy overhaul that will turn the fledgling post-war economy
on its head, nearly demolishing the vast working class of reconstruction laborers. There's
more important things than the deaths of a thousand humans on a cruiseship in space.
The second news article will be when the Reds and Blues help expose Chairman Hargrove.
The Hand of Merope, obviously, will be the beginning of the Reds and Blues, who have
become newly-minted Big Damn Heroes, will become Big Men in their own right, and
the Merope will be the birthplace of their contact with Chorus. Nothing else of note.
In about a year from now, a mercenary named Locus will try, with complete sincerity and
extended effort, to remember and do right in the name of everyone he's ever wronged. He'll
have forgotten all about Merope, and will never seek justice in its name. It won't be on
purpose. Accidents happen.
In seventy-two hours, the Reds and Blues will have spent a hundred days, on the dot, on
the Hand of Merope. They, like everyone else, are intending to go "home," which they told
the ship coordinator was a little outpost in the middle of nowhere called Blood Gulch. Blood
Gulch is not a place they are likely to see again, and if they do, not for a long time. Blood
Gulch is a place for small people. The Hand of Merope is a place for small people. If you
change, you can't go back to where you started--obvious on its face, but not comfortable.
Becoming someone else means killing your home.
Still, they got on the Merope to go to Blood Gulch. They, like everyone else, are intending to
go "home," and said so sincerely and honestly. They were assigned to a hallway with
everyone else, everyone who also wants to go home, and then promptly barricaded
themselves in their "Blood Gulch Corner," refused to speak to anyone but each other, and
when everyone on this ship dies, the Reds and Blues won't remember a single face. Not even
a name. They won't even know that they were supposed to be looking. Why would you
bother? Normal people are a dime a dozen. The world's up to its neck, choking on all the
small stories, the daily nonsense of nonsense people going nowhere.
Ninety-seven days go by. In that time, Simmons will have purged ninety-two times--very
nearly a neat one-to-one ratio. Sometimes twice or thrice in a day, sometimes nothing, but
consistently, and enduring. Constant. Small nonsenses. Very temporary insanities, that last
only an hour, and then are flushed away and will never ever happen again, until it does
twenty-four hours later. Thousands and thousands of minutes in a hallway, looking at Grif's
door, looking at Simmons's door, saying nothing, wondering when, wondering how,
wondering why, small nonsense people stretching on, and on, and on, and on, and on, grand
narratives stretched so long and so thin it becomes worn through, see-through, flimsy and
lacking power. There is nothing painful about losing and gaining, one step forward and one
step back, revolving and returning, over the course of decades. When pain happens slow and
small enough, it might as well not happen at all.
By form and structure, the difference between a Greek tragedy and a Greek comedy is only
scale. A tragedy has a grand arc, a grand high, and a devastating fall from grace. A comedy
has a cast of fools whose blunders are so inconsequential that the audience can't help but
laugh, and also usually involves two fools getting married. The purest form of comedy is,
then, minor tragedy.
Ninety-seven days.
Three days until Chorus.
Seventy-two hours remain.
In the midst of the deaths of a thousand passengers, Grif and Simmons accidentally get
engaged.
Fear Food
Chapter Notes
"At some point during treatment for an eating disorder, most individuals will meet with
a Registered Dietitian. One of the many important things you’ll do during those sessions
is identify and discuss your personal list of fear foods. [...]
"What are fear foods?: A fear food, or challenge food, is a term for foods that one
finds difficult to incorporate into everyday eating. This term is used for foods that feel
scary to eat, often because of negative thoughts or feelings related to the food’s nutrient
content. Fear foods can be items or categories of food that one perceives to be “bad” and
which, when consumed, might trigger feelings of intense guilt or shame. As a result,
people with eating disorders often completely avoid or restrict their fear foods.
Sometimes, just being around a particular food or being faced with the possibility of
eating it can result in increased anxiety. [...]
A person’s list of fear foods might be specific, like ice cream or peanut butter. For
others, their fear foods might encompass a whole category like all desserts or fried
foods. Someone else’s fear food list might include an entire nutrient group such as
carbohydrates. Common fear foods are also items considered by many to be tasty, but
may also be labeled as “junk food” in our current culture." - from "What Is A 'Fear
Food'?" https://eatingdisorder.org/blog/2016/12/what-is-a-fear-food/
*
also ty prim for the movie title
On the ninety-eighth day, the Reds and Blues take over the hallway.
All of them—Caboose, Sarge, Wash, Tucker, Grif, and Simmons—barricade themselves in
the Blood Gulch Corner like a pillow fort made of mattresses and guns and blast Ke$ha and
Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.” “A match to the death!” Sarge cries. “Nobody leaves this
fort until we’ve settled the war once and for all!”
“There’s NOTHING WRONG with watching Reservoir Dogs for the four-hundredth time!”
Tucker shrieks back.
“Tyranny and injustice! You might as well have killed democracy yourself!” Sarge yells right
back. “We didn’t get rid of Church just to have another protagonist take over this group!”
Caboose’s head pops up from where he’d been fiddling with the laptop player. “Church?”
“Someone call a movie before Caboose puts in Reservoir Dogs on autopilot,” says Wash.
“Sharknado 1,” says Grif, just as Simmons says, “Sharknado 7.”
“Someone who’s not going to recommend Sharknado movies,” says Wash.
“Muppet Christmas Carol,” says Grif, just as Simmons says, “Muppet Treasure Island.”
“Someone who’s not going to recommend shitty smuppet movies,” says Wash.
“She’s The Man,” says Grif, just as Simmons says, “Legally Blonde.”
“Someone who’s not Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum,” says Wash.
“As if,” says Grif, just as Simmons says, “We’re not even roommates!”
“WE KNOW,” says Tucker at the top of his lungs. “AND IT’S BEEN THE BANE OF MY
EXISTENCE FOR THE LAST HUNDRED DAYS.”
“I’LL SHOW YOU THE BANE OF YOUR wait a goshdern minute,” says Sarge. “Really?
Grif and Simmons’s roomswap drama has been the bane of a Blue’s existence?”
Before Tucker can even respond, Sarge turns to Grif: “No,” says Grif. “Literally whatever it
is you’re thinking, no.”
Sarge turns to Simmons: “Sorry, sir,” says Simmons. “I can’t be the bane of the existence of
the Blues anymore because we deleted them, remember?”
“You deleted us?” Tucker asks. “Holy shit, I knew Reds were dumb, but—“
“DECLARATION OF WAR,” Sarge shrieks. “I’LL SCATTER YOUR ORGANS FROM
THE RAFTERS, YOU DAMN DIRTY—“
There’s a knock at the front door. (Front mattress, actually.) There’s a Chinese take-out
deliveryman standing with three bags full of food.
“Um,” says the deliveryman.
“Delivery for Sergeant Sarge?” Sarge asks.
“Uh,” says the deliveryman.
“No cash, I only have debit,” says Sarge, pulling out a wallet. The name on the debit card
reads Sergeant F. Sarge. “Did we pre-pay the delivery tip, or do I need to beat another twenty
dollars out of a Blue? No, that’s too much trouble; I’ll just use my authority to command Grif
to beat twenty dollars out of himself.”
“I have twenty dollars,” says Wash hastily. They actually had already pre-paid the tip, so the
delivery-man was tipped twice. While Wash isn’t watching, Caboose puts Emoji Movie 8:
The Hunter Becomes The Hunted into the video player.
And that’s when everything gets really difficult.
They all sit on the floor like a bunch of preteen girls at a sleepover and pass out plates and
beers (the second of which Simmons passes on), and then Tucker rips open the brown paper
bags and pulls out—well, colloquially speaking, what comes out of the food bag is referred to
as: shitty food. Fried in grease, nutritionless noodles, all the meats unrecognizable, mostly
drowned in sugar and salt, dripping with fumes. Which is, uhhhhh, y’know, fine with
Simmons, considering that he’s trying to, um, not be fucking terrible about the things that he
eats, except that surely this is all gross even by normal-person standards, right? He’s not be
abnormal or—too picky or—it’s not like he’s avoiding these foods. He’s just choosing to not
eat them because self-care, or something like that? It’s not like he’s having an irrational
reaction to them, because he knows full well that most starches contain, like, absolute jack
shit nutrition and also fuck up blood sugar no matter how good your insulin response is and
also do nothing except provide immediate energy for your body to burn and god forbid you
give your body anything beyond the bare minimum it needs to stay alive. So he’s not being
judgmental or, uh, it’s not like he’s freaking out. He’s not, definitely not, that would be weird,
and also Simmons is practically an old hat at going to a party and seeing tons of food that he
won’t be able to eat without throwing it up. Caboose on his right passes him a carton of fried
rice and Jesus Christ he hasn’t touched fried rice with a ten foot pole in twenty-something
years (except, of course, unless he’s intending to throw it up, again; not to be repetitive but
he’s trying to be honest). What, avoiding something is a thing you do around things you’re
afraid of, you say? Simmons doesn’t know anything about that. He looks down at the fried
rice and runs a calorie calculation in his head before he smacks himself. (Just one time?
Keeping a calorie total just for today, to get through just the one time?) (Wait, no, if he does it
now, he’ll want to do it again tomorrow. Don’t think about that. Uh, what’s a mental
distraction—how many shades of red shirts does Sarge own? Definitely at least seven, but
that’s based only off the standard weekly rotation of T shirts in varying states of faded, and
he hasn’t really considered any of Sarge’s weird red cargo shorts collection—oh god the
socks—the sandals—the sock with sandals—) “Hey space case, take the fucking carton,”
says Tucker, so Simmons takes the fried rice from Caboose and takes a quick glance at
everyone else’s plates like a student who definitely didn’t study for the test but is pretending
he did and also maybe trying to sneak a peek at everyone else’s answers on the down-low:
Grif’s got a small indistinguishable mass of food balancing on a creaking plate, Caboose has
nothing but is looking patiently at the chow mein, Wash and Sarge have identical neat palmsize portions of rice in the corner of their plate, Tucker has mostly friend rice and is applying
sriracha and tobasco. Simmons imitates Wash and Sarge and passes the carton along. Okay,
he’s got it: the way he’s going to get through this is that Simmons is going to make a deal
with himself: he has to eat the whole plate but no more or less, in case something stupid
happens in his brain. Whole plate. No more or less. Keep it down. Try not to fuck this up.
Yes, everything, even the rice. Whole plate, not just the parts he thinks are “healthy,”; not
anything more, in case he panics. Don’t crack under pressure, Simmons. Don’t think about
the pressure. Don’t psych yourself out. It’s not a big deal. It’s just a plate. Eat the fucking
thing. Go slow or something. Wait, no, he used to do that when he was restricting and would
take two hours to eat an orange—fuck why is moderation so hard. This is unfair. This is
bullshit, honestly, but don’t get angry, Simmons, you’re in a public space—oh, shit, is he
having a meltdown? Is that what he’s doing? Him, Simmons, nervous mess extraordinaire
and resident panicky trigger-finger, having a meltdown? Who would have thought! What a
fucking shocker! No, wait, go back to the plate thing, that was a kind of good idea, now that
he thinks about it.He doesn’t need to commit to the system for the rest of his life. He just has
to get out of this encounter, right here and right now, alive, and also not purge it afterwards.
That’s the deal. Whole plate, no purge. (How many days of non-purging has he strung
together in a row yet? Four? Five? Only five? Is it five days if they’ve been the longest five
days of Simmons’s life? Can he count them like a separate species of day, one that counts for
quadruple?) If he works himself up into a meltdown, it’ll bite him in the ass later, so he’s
really got to stop them. (How?) Eat the whole plate, Simmons. Just do the damn thing.
Caboose says, “Do you need a fork?” and Simmons says, “Oh, uh, yeah, actually,” so
Caboose passes him one and Simmons has the fork in his hand and he’s gotta actually do this.
Put the fork in. Do not think about the nutritional value of rice. Do not think about the
calories or the damage this is doing to your body. Don’t think about any of that by
specifically denying yourself the right to think about it—yeah, that definitely works, yes.
Wait, no, eat the broccoli and beef stir-fry first; that’s safer—did he say safer? As in to imply
other foods are dangerous, as in to imply he’s afraid of them? OKAY NEVER MIND
FUCKING EAT wait breathe first or he might pass out; put the fork in, lift it, put the thing in
your mouth. Chew it. Great. Look at that. Like riding a bike, except that he’s fairly sure he’s
never really ridden the “normal eater” bike before in his entire life. It’s fine. He hasn’t thrown
up in five days and he’s practically a normal person now, basically cured, except that that’s
absolutely false and he knows it. Okay, put the fork in the rice again. He hasn’t thrown up in
five days. He can do this. By the time he’s worked his way through the whole plate he’s tuned
out nearly thirty minutes of conversation that he was physically, actually present for and
heard nothing of. He puts his plate on the floor on top of Wash’s. He can’t let go of his fork.
His hand is clutching it so tightly he can’t unlock his own grip. Uh, that’s fine. He’ll just, um.
Keep that. There. He guesses. He’s not going to bolt for the bathroom. He’s going to stay
right here and—well, suffer, mostly, but he’s not supposed to make morbid self-deprecating
jokes like that because that’s Grif’s half of the dialogue. He’ll sit here and be nervous, then?
Yeah, sounds right. Wait, no, that’s bad. He’s supposed to be becoming unnervous about
food. The opposite of stressed. That seems like the point of this exercise, in theory? Wait, no,
the point is to stop fucking up his stomach and his estophagus and his heart with purging.
Stop that. (Y’know, admitting you have a problem doesn’t help a whole lot when the problem
is actually an amorphous cloud of shapeless gasses. Good luck fighting that one, sucker!) He
really needs Grif to get in on this whole situation or something, because he can’t keep doing
all the self-deprecatory morbid jokes himself; it’s weird to have to do that part of the dialogue
himself. He puts the fork down (but his hand still won’t cooperate), looks up, and there’s
Grif.
Grif looks terrified.
“—wrong with captions! You’re just one of those weird people who prefer the dubbed anime,
like a freak—“
“Tucker, that has nothing to do with the fact that the volume is set a maximum when it’s two
feet away from our faces—“
Grif’s face spasms. Simmons has the overwhelming compulsion to look away. The only
reason he doesn’t is because half his thoughts get dumped out of his head and he thinks:
Grif in the Blood Gulch shade, reclining against the Warthog. Simmons’s hand still bandaged
from where he’d shoved it in a mirror and Grif had made fun of him while wrapping it up.
“Dude, why’re you even trying?” Grif says, but doesn’t seem interested in the answer.
Rhetorical quesiton. Statement as proof of its own answer, but Simmons doesn’t know what
the answer is supposed to be. Simmons feels overwhelming irritation, quick as a flash flood
and just as total,up to his eyes with instantaneous fury—
Grif in the Rat’s Nest armory, grinning guiltily over his illegally-traded ammo, waiting for
Simmons to agree to his stupid-ass plan, and Simmons hates all his slacking, because there’s
no consequences to Grif. At least, none that matter. Nothing really matters, right? We all die
eventually; global warming will kill us all; there’s no such thing as space fate; there’s no
reason why we’re here; no reason to not give up; having nothing means nothing to fight for,
no reason to do anything; you can’t lose if you neve fought. Who gives a shit, really?
Grif snickering in the Valhalla Red Team kitchen. “You were demoted ages ago,” Simmons
mutters snippily, and dumps his uneaten spaghetti in the trash and goes to the bathroom to
throw up the little pasta he did, thinking the whole while Grif knows Grif knows Grif knows,
wishing Grif would say something and desperately praying he won’t because Simmons would
never survive Grif Knowing, feeling Grif’s eyes on his back the whole way into the single
stalled bathroom, long after he’s locked the door.
Grif looking at him funny in the Valhalla canyon. “You’re not getting heat stroke, are you?”
Simmons asks, and Grif’s whole body flinches—(fear)—“YES I’M DYING OF HEAT
STROKE OKAY GOODBYE,” Grif blurts out and bolts—
Grif in the shade behind the Valhalla base. “And give away the rest of your flesh parts?” Grif
scoffs. “I’m not a robot fucker, Simmons.” And Simmons doesn’t even think, just blurts out:
“You’ll have to be if you die again.” Grif freezes. There: fear—
“I don’t know you people,” says Wash grumpily.
“We saved you from the police, asshole,” says Tucker.
“And if the police come for me again, I’ll tell them I don’t know you, because I’m ninetynine percent sure—“
Simmons looks down at his plate, looks down at his fork, looks back at the clock. He’s been
sitting here (zoning out and panicking, but still here and not in the bathroom) for other an
hour. Looks back at Grif.
“—that it’s not me they’re going to arrest for you blowing up this spaceship with your lasersword.”
“Ohoho, dude, I just wanted to swing it around a little—do you really think I could blow up
the spaceship with just my swor—“
“That wasn’t a challenge!”
Grif looks away. Simmons looks away. Neither Grif nor Simmons say anything. But they
don’t leave, just sit right where they are. Blues yelling, stewing in fear, holding their ground
—yeah, that’s familiar; practically home sweet home. The secret Simmons would take to his
grave is that for all their differences, Grif and Simmons are the same coward (but you didn’t
hear that from Simmons), and there’s no one better to keep at your back than a fellow
coward.
(Cowards get out alive.)
“Ten bucks says that if this ship goes down, it’s Tucker’s fault,” says Simmons to Grif.
“Tucker did it,” says Caboose.
“Yes, Caboose, we know,” says Grif. “Also, I’ll take those odds and bet on Wash.”
“I’m feeling left out,” says Caboose. “Also, what are we betting on.”
Both Grif and Simmons consider Caboose. “Caboose accidentally bringing down an entire
spaceship somehow seems too obvious,” says Grif.
“No winner if it’s Caboose,” says Simmons.
Simmons is ready to let it slide when Grif hesitates, and scratches at his jaw, and does an
awkward nod towards Simmons’s empty plate. Hell, Simmons still has the fork in his hand.
“How, uh,” says Grif. “How was that.”
“Kind of shitty, but I still ate it,” says Simmons, and before Grif can look alarmed: “The rice
didn’t taste like anything.”
“That’s airline food for you.”
“We’re on a spaceship, not an airplane. That makes it spaceship food.”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me that airline food improved just because we went to space,”
says Grif.
“Airline food improved just because we went to space because at least I’m eating shitty
airline food in space, which is scientifically and factually and objectively cool,” says
Simmons.
“That might be the geekiest thing you’ve ever said.”
Caboose is sitting between them, head bouncing back and forth like he’s watching a tennis
match.
“I feel like this is underestimating the time I tried to send Sarge a secret signal that Agent
Washington was holding me hostage,” says Simmons.
“God, you’re right. You’re never going to be able to top yourself after sending a code in
Sargese that Sarge actually understood.”
“I’ve peaked, Grif,” says Simmons.
“Tragic,” says Grif.
Tucker throws his greasy paper plate at them, and Simmons sputters when it hits him in the
face. “Get! Fucking! Married!”
“Sorry, I thought we were waiting for Sarge’s prophecy of a hopeless proposal in the middle
of the night to come true,” says Grif flatly.
“It’ll happen!” Sarge cried. “Or it’ll have happened already! One or the other—good god I
can never keep your story straight anymore.”
“Schrodinger’s proposal,” says Simmons. “Either it already happened, or it’ll happen later,
but until it happens in the present we’ll never know.”
“Okay, whatever, Mufasa,” says Tucker, and when everyone looks at him weird: “What?
Mufasa was that philosopher dude, right?”
“Holy shit,” says Grif gleefully.
“Whatever! Shut up! That’s not how time works anyway,” says Tucker. “Either it happened
or it didn’t. How can you not know?!”
“Everything in Valhalla really was kind of a blur,” says Simmons.
“I think one of us got heat stroke at some point?” says Grif.
“Who knows what happened, really,” says Simmons.
“Ah, the sweet bliss of ignorance,” says Grif, and takes a long drink of his beer. Simmons
tries not to snigger.
Standing Proof
Chapter Notes
“Few things are more frightening to the body than getting what it most wants. Because
what are you, when you get the thing you’ve shaped your whole identity around
wanting?” – Rule #40, The Art Of Starving, by Sam J. Miller
Simmons throws the rice back up.
Not that there was much to throw up, considering how long he waited. Most of it was
digested. For whatever it was worth, sitting there as long as he did meant that most of the
food stayed down.
There's a funny pinch at the corner of his heart, and Simmons presses his organic thumb into
his metal sternum. What was it that medic at Rat's Nest said once about his heart? Christ,
Rat's Nest was three years ago--only three years! A thousand and ninety-five days. Feels like
a lifetime. Simmons has no idea what that medic said, except that it involved his Y-scar and...
Easy-Cheese?
He scrubs his face with a towel and throws it in the sink. Stares at it.
That's not where the towel goes.
He picks it back up, but his fingers dig into the cloth, tearing hard, like he could puncture it
clean through in a one-handed grip. He puts it back on the towel rack and has the sudden
compulsion to rip the entire rack from the wall. When he looks back at the mirror, his own
reflection is staring back at him, surly and gangly, rat-faced, thin-lipped, pointy chin, eyes too
close together, ugly and made uglier. He's got wrinkles. What was it Tucker said once--white
people age like milk? He'd be fucking shocked if those lines didn't come from the strain of
purging every god damn fucking day.
He can't look at this mirror.
Here he is again, standing in a single-stalled bathroom, face scrubbed clean after a purge and
his throat hurting and the calluses on the back of his hand having broken open again from
where his teeth rubbed against it. The bathroom on the Hand of Merope doesn’t look so
different from the one he’d used in Rat's Nest. He doesn’t look so different, somehow, as if
all these bathroom mirrors show the same pimply, ugly preteen he’d been when he was
thirteen. All these bathrooms have the same feeling of permanence, as if this, right here, is his
real life, and everything outside (from Blood Gulch to his college classes to his family) is a
feverish escapism from reality, which is firmly locked up in the tiny college bathroom in the
basement, next to the washing machines, or the high school bathroom between the squash
courts and the water fountains, or the junior high bathroom, third floor West building facing
the computer lab, all the way to here, the Rat’s Nest bathroom, hidden on the far side of the
armory. His whole life feels like it’s been reduced to single stalled bathrooms, as if he, as a
person, could be reduced to this one shame.
He tried. He gave it his fucking best, over and over for ninety-eight days and still, nothing’s
changed. Nothing is changing. Nothing will change. He's going to be fucked up and wrong
for the rest of his life.
(If he breaks this mirror--)
He's not going to break the mirror. Wash will flip shit. Grif will get that shuttered look on his
face. Also, he's not fucking thirteen. He's lived seventeen other years, and they have to have
counted for something. He's not thirteen, first figuring out how to cover the sound of retching
and whether or not to drink water afterwards. Simmons is thirty, and he's been there and done
that, and he's got to know something he didn't back then, and he's got to use it to wriggle his
way towards--something. Keeping a lid on his shit, at the very least. And if he tries enough,
he'll get better at keeping a lid on his shit. Practice makes perfect. Like playing a really hard
video game, right? Right.
Right.
Simmons drags both hands down his face. Presses his fingers to the tender sockets of his
eyes.
And then his eyes fly wide open again, because just then, it hits Simmons all at once that not
only does he have a hundred more days on this hellship, but after he gets off, he's going back
to Blood Gulch.
Blood Gulch. The place where he'll suffocate, he'll have to wake up every morning and do
nothing, be nothing, go nowhere, die nowhere. Blood Gulch--that place, the place where he
woke up every day feeling erased out of time and space. That place. And he willingly got on
a spaceship to go there.
Simmons skids to Grif's door and bangs on it until Grif cracks the door open and Simmons
blurts out: "We're going back to Blood Gulch!"
Grif looks at him. "...Yeah, dude?"
"We hate it there!"
"Yeah?" says Grif.
"So what the fuck are we doing?" Simmons cries.
"Being stupid, mostly," says Grif.
Simmons could strangle him. Or maybe himself. "Don't tell me we're being stupid! We're
stupid all the goddamn time! Going back to Blood Gulch isn't stupid, it's going to kill us.
We hated it. We hate it, present tense! We hate it good fucking reason, too!"
Grif does not look impressed. If anything, he looks a little bored. "Yeah, dude. What do you
think I've been saying since we fucking stepped foot in that canyon?"
"We can't go back," Simmons declares.
"Little late for that. We're on a spaceship. Can't exactly get off on the side of the road, can
we."
"Why are you so calm?!" Simmons snaps.
"I've known where we were going from the start, dude."
"Then why didn't you say anything?!"
"I did," says Grif.
"Fuck, he did.
"Since the time we first got to Blood Gulch, actually," says Grif.
Fuck, that too.
"Which I told you just ten seconds ago," says Grif. "But who listens to me, y'know."
Fuck.
"Look, dude," says Grif, when Simmons doesn't say anything. "It's fine."
"Fine?! It's Blood Gulch. It doesn't even have a day cycle. No movies or wifi or
telecommunication or even goddamn people--there isn't even a military outpost there! It's
literally just a cardboard stand that Freelancer painted over in grey!"
"Not literally," says Grif.
"Goddammit," whispers Simmons. "Fine, fine, metaphorically then."
Grif shakes his head. "Give it up, Simmons. We're going back to Blood Gulch. It's happening
whether you like it or not. You might as well just let it happen--"
"No," Simmons snarls.
Grif doesn't look very impressed by this either. If anything, he looks disappointed.
"We can go ask them to drop us off somewhere else," says Simmons. "We can ask to be left
off at some other stop."
"What would be the point," says Grif.
"That we can get out--"
"And go where?"
"Anywhere!"
"With no money, and no jobs, and no resumes," says Grif. "And no careers, and no houses,
and barely enough clothes for each of us, because all we've worn for the last few years is shitgrade military armor."
"Stop pointing out important and relevant problems!" Simmons cries.
"Hey, dude, it's not my fault you weren't already doing that," says Grif. "We don't have
anywhere else to go, we've already gotten a ship to Blood Gulch--we might as well lie in the
bed, man. It's not going to change."
"Stop. Saying that," Simmons says through gritted teeth.
"Sure, I'll stop saying that," says Grif. "But it'll still be true."
Simmons could be speechless. Could be, if he weren't so fucking furious. "You're just going
to lie down and give up," he says.
"Yeah," says Grif.
"You're just going to let it happen."
"Yep," says Grif.
"What the fuck is your problem?!"
Grif looks at him, still standing in the doorway of the room he doesn't share with Simmons.
He looks worn out. Beaten, but still holding on to the last bit of ground he has. "Oh, I dunno,"
says Grif. "Go around and ask, then. Go see if anyone will get on board with not going to
Blood Gulch. See if you can convince them to jump ship."
"Well--" Simmons flusters. "Well, at least I'll have done what I could!"
And Grif's eyes flick up and down Simmons, and Simmons realizes: Simmons is not standing
proof that they can change, or that trying will do even the slightest bit of jack shit. He's proof
of every opposite: that they can't change, that trying doesn't work, that people don't get
better.
Simmons couldn't be more stunned if Grif had just punched him in the face.
"So that's it," says Simmons, or his voice does, from far away. "Not even going to give it a
shot. Not even going to try."
Grif hesitates. Shrugs. After a long moment, smirks wryly, even. "Did you come here just to
tell me things I already knew and fancy ideas, Simmons? Not that there's a lot of things better
to do with my time, but there's a few. Sleeping, for one. Being comatose, maybe..."
So shut the fuck up, keep your head down, stop thinking, stop lying, and give up.
Resignation looks the same as peace on Grif's face. Is it still a wound if you've hit the
Acceptance phase of the five stages of grief? Is it still worth trying? What's the point? Why
bother? Is it really worth it?
Simmons remembers Rat's Nest.
The two of them sitting under the halogen lights. Nothing much in the tunnels except wind
chill. Long, long metal pipes going nowhere, stretching across the entire planet for all they
knew. Two dumbass armies in a pipeline, sitting there just to kill each other. Two Reds,
sneaking out the back, waiting in the vague night air for Caboose to show.
He remembers, even though he didn't know it then, the hesitancy in Grif's voice, the
skittering away from the issue, the awkwardness, how Simmons just wanted Grif to pull the
punch and get it over with. Rip them both apart, obliterate them, just get it over with so that
Simmons won't have to dread the question anymore: Are you bulimic? The way Grif waited
for what seemed like hours, mulling it over, still not enough to avoid tripping over his own
words:
Do I have to worry about you?
There’s only so many times that Simmons come to nearly dying, and he can count them on
one hand: the time he nearly flunked out of college and had to avoid telling his parents, the
time he was nearly shot at Rat’s Nest, the time he nearly died because of Agent Washington
was holding him hostage, the time Grif’s hand slipped out of Simmons’s on Sidewinder’s
cliffs, and the time Simmons went to sleep convinced that he was going to have a heart attack
in his sleep from a lack of potassium (and then didn’t, obviously, felt like he probably did die
and had just forgotten to be dead), the time Grif asked why Simmons was throwing up in the
Rat’s Nest bathroom, and the time Grif asked if he had to worry about Simmons. (Which is,
uh, six times, actually, but that’s still one hand if you happen to have six fingers.)
Grif's asked him a lot of questions over the years: Why are we here? Do you wanna talk
about it? Do I have to worry about you? Before Simmons knows it, he's opened his mouth
and answered:
"I'm going to do it," says Simmons.
"What?" says Grif.
"I'm going to convince everyone to leave Blood Gulch and go somewhere else," says
Simmons angrily.
Grif bursts out laughing.
"I'm serious!" Simmons snaps.
"Yeah, dude, I know you are," Grif snickers. "That's why it's funny. Holy shit, you really
think you can just walk in and convince everyone to go somewhere else?"
Simmons leans in. "Watch me," he says, and stalks away.
Triple Interviews
Someone will agree. They can't have seven people in this crew and have all of them want to
go to a shithole like Blood Gulch. That would be ridiculous, and everyone knows that nobody
in the Blood Gulch Crew is ever, ever ridiculous.
Take one:
“I mean, yeah, maybe?” says Tucker. “But we’re already, like, halfway there!”
“So?” says Simmons irritably. “The first half was awful as it was. Why would we do another
half?”
“Because you gotta finish what you started!”
“So if I was halfway through murdering an entire planet,” says Simmons, “I should finish
what I started and murder the other half, should I.”
“Dude, no, don’t do that. I don’t like it when you’re actually smart,” says Tucker.
“I’m always smart! That’s literally my entire job on Red Team! To be the smart one!”
“The fact that they’re relying on you to be the smart one explains a whole lot about Red
Team,” says Tucker, and then refuses to explain what he meant by that.
This is fine. Simmons can try his luck elsewhere.
Take two:
“I really don’t have an opinion,” says Wash. “I was at Blood Gulch for maybe an hour, and
only to find information, and then I got out. I’m not exactly qualified to give an opinion.”
Simmons takes a deep breath. “I’m going to be real with you,” says Simmons. “I just need
you to tell me that Blood Gulch sucks, and that we shouldn’t go back, so we can convince
everyone not to go, but also particularly convince Grif that I’ve convinced you to convince
everyone not go to.”
Wash takes a long, heavy sigh.
“What?” says Simmons.
“Nothing. Nothing!” says Wash. “I definitely have no feelings whatsoever about you and Grif
and you two circling each other like a coin trying to go down a sink drain, driving all of us
absolutely batty in the process.”
“That actually sounds exactly like a feeling,” says Simmons.
“I just said that I definitely have no feelings whatsoever,” says Wash tartly.
“Just because you preface something with ‘I don’t have a feeling’ doesn’t stop you from
having that feeling! That’s not how that works!”
“I definitely did not say a feeling,” says Wash.
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
“Did—no shut up I’m not doing this.”
Pause.
“Do you,” says Simmons, “wanna talk about i—“
“No,” says Wash.
Pause.
“If I did have a feeling—which I do not confirm nor deny,” says Wash, “—if I said anything,
I only said that I could have figured this was a you-and-Grif thing.”
“A what?” says Simmons.
Another, longer, heavier sigh. “Simmons. I know that you didn’t take my apology the first
time, but I really am sorry that I paired you and your ex-boyfriend up to a single roo—“
“My WHO,” says Simmons.
Wash gives him a look like he’s doubting Simmons’s mental faculties. “That’s what
happened, right?”
“That doesn’t make us ex-boyfriends!”
“But you dated,” says Wash.
“Yes,” says Simmons.
"So that makes you boyfriends," says Wash.
"No," says Simmons.
Wash takes a deep breath.
"Okay, go back. You did date," says Wash.
"Yes," says Simmons.
“And then you broke up,” says Wash.
“Yes,” says Simmons.
“And then you stayed broken-up,” says Wash.
“Yes,” says Simmons.
“So that makes you ex-boyfriends,” says Wash.
“No,” says Simmons.
Wash stares at Simmons. Simmons stares at Wash.
“I hate that I'm associated with you people,” says Wash.
"That's pretty par for the course," says Simmons.
“I’d still like to apologize for putting you in the same room as your, uh… your Grif.”
Simmons thinks about it. “If you’re sorry, will you help me convince everyone not to go back
to Blood Gulch?”
Wash thinks about this. “Well, I did meet one person there—some really crazy bitch that’s
probably still there. It’d be pretty awful to live in the same place as her, I’d imagine. She was
really nasty—probably mildly insane? She kept calling me a cop, and basically nothing she
said made sense.”
“That’s Grif’s sister,” says Simmons.
“Oh,” says Wash.
“Who’s now dead,” Simmons adds.
“Ah,” says Wash.
“We think Lopez killed her.”
“Got it.”
“So maybe don’t say any of that in front of Grif,” says Simmons.
“Maybe,” says Wash.
“Actually, y’know what? Maybe let’s just call this entire conversation a bad job,” says
Simmons.
“Oh thank god,” says Wash.
Simmons turns to go, but then hesitates. “Actually, since we’re doing apologies—remember
that time you, uh, held me hostage and also shot and killed Donut…?”
“What about it,” says Wash.
Simmons stares at Wash. Wash stares at Simmons.
“Y’know what. Never mind,” says Simmons.
They can't possibly all unanimously agree on going back to Blood Gulch. They can't even
pick a movie without bringing out bullets. It won't happen. Simmons will find someone--
Take three:
“I go where the Blues go!” says Sarge.
“And I’m going to Blood Gulch,” says Caboose firmly.
Sarge smacks Caboose on the back. “See! Someone has to make sure they’re taken care of!
I’ll never rest until their threat to the universe has been ground into a red paste upon the
earth!”
“But sir,” says Simmons, “if the Blues went somewhere else, then we wouldn’t have to go
there either.”
“But Blood Gulch is where the Blues belong,” says Sarge.
“Agree,” says Caboose.
“You can’t argue with such a well-thought-out, eloquent argument, Simmons!” Sarge
exclaims. “Blues belong in their greasy, nasty hidey-hole, nicely situated within firing
distance of our base! Tell me where there’s a better layout, Simmons. I had to walk ten years
just to see Blue Base when we were stationed at Valhalla! I felt like we were left out in the
doghouse! It’s not right, Simmons. The natural order of things is Reds and Blues living in
each others’ back pockets, where we can kill each other at shotgun-firin’ range!”
“And I like Blood Gulch,” says Caboose.
“Caboose, that place was—“
“—full of my friends where we saw each other every day and everyone was happy,” says
Caboose. Caboose’s mouth is flat and his eyes narrow.
“Right,” says Simmons.
“Shotgun-firin’ range,” says Sarge, satisfied.
WHY ARE SIMMONS'S FRIENDS ALL SO FUCKING STUPID.
Saving Us
Chapter Notes
“Few things are more frightening to the body than getting what it most wants. Because
what are you, when you get the thing you’ve shaped your whole identity around
wanting?” – Rule #40, The Art Of Starving, by Sam J. Miller
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Now, Simmons is stuck with something of an Issue.
Fact 1: he hates Blood Gulch. He does not want to go back.
Fact 2: Grif also hates Blood Gulch. He probably doesn't want--okay, considering that Grif
had been complaining about Blood Gulch since the literal moment that they'd stepped foot
there, Simmons is going to bet that Grif also does not want to go back to Blood Gulch.
(Simmons feels a flash of anger for the first time in weeks: of course Grif would do that,
want something and then just refuse to work towards it whatsoever. Fucking irrational actors-fucking human beings--how dare human brains do this bullshit on him? Why can't they all
just be robots, tear out everything less than perfect about themselves and replace it with
machinery? Why doe sGrif have to be so human all the goddamn time?)
Fact 3: Simmons and Grif are on a ship headed straight to Blood Gulch, which they both hate
and never want to see again.
Fact 4: They are on a ship full of people who are, apparently, dead set on going back to Blood
Gulch for some absolutely ridiculous idea that Simmons can't fathom, or probably could if he
tried, but he's afraid he'll catch more irrationaly than he already has and he's pretty full up on
that, thanks.
Now, this might just be Simmons's own irrationality talking, which he can't discount the
possibility of considering that Simmons's heart keeps doing that funky arrhythmia thing at
strange times and his fingers sometimes spontaneously turn freezing cold for reasons he
knows are his own fault, his own dumbassery come to live in his body where it belongs. But
it seems, still, to Simmons's fleshy messy meat-brain, that if they go back to Blood Gulch,
they'll basically just die.
Look. He's not trying to be dramatic; it's just what his head is telling him. They might kill
each other accident. They might kill each other on purpose. they might go crazy and be as
good as dead. they might disappear into the dirt itself, or evaporate into the desert air-Simmons isn't defending his train of thought as rational, either. It doesn't make sense to think
that a place could kill you, because places don't kill people, in the same way that guns don't
kill people or money doesn't kill people, or even the way wars don't kill people. A medication
company refusing to sell you medication you need to live doesn't kill you; your disease kills
you, right? A corporation that destroys a water pipeline and then charges an arm and a leg for
bottled water isn't killing the people who can't pay; it's their own fault for not being able to
pay. It's your own fault for not being able to win the game. Like they say, just get good, right?
Just try harder. Do better. Do more. Just eat. Just get out of bed. Why's it so hard? Why can't
you just do it?
Simmons wishes he were being sarcastic, but to this day, even now, he thinks he believes that
a little, and that maybe he has to. Sometimes things are just shitty and it's not fair, and you
have to work harder than everyone else to get the same happiness. Sometimes there are
impossible games that you can never win, only manage draws and half-defeats, but at least
it's better than nothing. But whatever you do, you can't give up and say that nothing is your
fault. It's not all your fault. It's nobody's fault, maybe. Fault makes it sounds like if you blame
the right man, you can put him in jail for crimes against health and happiness, and everything
will be fixed. Since when did blame ever right a wrong? Does putting a murderer in jail bring
back his victims? Does jailing an arsonist turn ashes back into houses and cars and lost
goods? If you put yourself in jail for refusing to forgive yourself, does that fix you?
Simmons, at this point, is real tired of asking why. He's had an eating disorder for nearly
twenty years, depending on when you count it as starting and when you count it as actively
destroying his entire life, ha ha ha ha. Fuck if he knows why they're gotten to this point. Fuck
if he knows why they're here, period.
Here's what he knows:
He doesn't want to go back to Blood Gulch.
Grif also doesn't want to go back to Blood Gulch.
They're on a ship taking them back.
QED: They have to get off this ship, as soon as possible, by any means possible.
Simmons bursts into Grif's room while Sarge isn't looking and yells, "GRIF GET UP WE
HAVE TO ESCAPE."
Grif groans from the bed and rolls over. Simmons has a sudden case of strong deja vu.
"Grif! Grif, I meant it, I'm so serious right now get up get up--"
"Please tell me you're not still on about that Blood Gulch thing," says Grif into the pillow.
"OF COURSE I'm still on about the Blood Gulch thing we're still GOING there and we
HAVE TO MAKE IT STOP--"
"And I'm betting that nobody else agreed to leave," says Grif lazily. He yawns and reaches up
his shirt to scratch at his chest, and Simmons's stomach does an ill-timed flip. Oh my god, he
does not have the time to be nervous and gay right now.
"It doesn't matter what nobody agreed," says Simmons hastily. "I'm not going back. If
everyone else wants to go, I'm not stopping them, but I'm nog going. Get up! I'm going to
find us a way off this ship!"
"How," says Grif, not sounding like he's terribly interested in the answer.
"I'll--figure something out--I'll go ask the ship staff to let me off somewhere--"
"You're just straight-up ditching?" Grif asks.
"Blood gulch is a shithole!" Simmons exclaims. "The only reason we didn't all kill each other
and then ourselves was because the company wasn't a complete trashfire! I'm not ditching,
I'm refusing to follow a group of dumbshits into a situation that'll bleed us dry for no good
goddamn reason!"
"Because there's good reasons to be bled dry," says Grif.
"I--I mean--maybe? It was a figure of speech; I didn't really mean it literally..."
"Yeah, a really hyper-specific figure of speech. Maybe you're secretly a vampire in disguise,"
says Grif.
"It was a metaphor!”
"Okay, maybe, but also you're pale as fuck and stay u pall night, so..."
"Stop dragging us off topic," Simmons hisses. "Are you coming with me or not?"
"Not," says Grif, and then: "Wait, you want me to come with you?"
"Did you think I just came here to be a douche and rub in that I'm leaving without you? Do
not," says Simmons, "answer that honestly. Why wouldn't you come with?!"
"Why would I?" Grif replies.
"Don't reply to my questions with more questions! We all know you hate Blood Gulch!"
Grif sits up, finally. He's sitting swaddled in blankets, old shirts, a stained pair of sweatpants
wrapped up somewhere in the sheets. One of the bedsheet corners isn't even properly put on
the mattress. The whole places smells a little like unwashed body odor, sharp and tangy.
"Blood Gulch is awful. Tell me something I don't know. But, like, I figure I'll live. What's
really the fuss, you know. What's really the difference between being at that shithole and
some other shithole?"
"Because Blood Gulch is prime shithole. Shithole Outpost Alpha. Shithole Outpost Number
One. It sucks."
"Everywhere sucks," Grif mutters.
"There are most definitely some places in the universe that don't suck. It's just statistically
impossible for everywhere in the universe to completely suck."
"Pretty sure sucking has nothing to do with a patch of ground with two bases," says Grif.
"Pretty sure Blood Gulch being a shithole has everything to do with the people living there.
You can take the losers out of Blood Gulch, but you can't take the Blood Gulch out of the
losers."
Simmons throws up his hands. "Fine! Fuck this! I'm done having this conversation.
Everything sucks, you're right, get the fuck up anyway. I'll pack your fucking bag for for you.
I'm bringing you with me!"
Grif watches Simmons snatch a duffel bag from under the bed, yelp when he discovers a
moldy sandwich in it, dump it out, and then start shoving clothes of similarly dubious moldstatus into the bag. "Dude," says Grif. "Are you kidnapping me?"
"I'm getting us out of here so we can at least talk to the ship staff!"
"You can't kidnap me," Grif complains.
"I'm not! In fact, you're the one who pointed out that Blood Gulch was so awful in the first
place, and I wouldn't have even thought about it if you hadn't brought it up in the first plac-eactually, yeah, this is all your fault for thinking critically about our simtrooper gig for more
than two seconds! If you hadn't had intelligent thoughts, we wouldn't be here!"
"This is the most fucked up logic I've ever heard," says Grif.
"You just don't want to admit you're kidnapping me," Simmons sniffs.
"Maybe we're kidnapping each other," Grif muses.
"No, stop that, stop making it--"
"Hey, there's a word for when two people kidnap each other, right? Uh, running away
together? Escaping? Absconding?"
"I maintain that you're at fault for me kidnapping you, which I'm also not doing," Simmons
says.
Grif snaps his fingers. "Eloping!"
"We're not eloping."
"You're such a party pooper," Grif complains. "You said that at Rat's Nest, too. And you want
me to go with you like this? You can't even elope properly."
"I said we're not eloping!"
"Yeah, like that. If you're going to elope with me, you have to lean into it--"
"We're saving each other," Simmons snaps.
Grif hesitates. Simmons hesitates.
"Somehow, that was even more gay than us eloping," says Grif.
"So what if it was?" Simmons says defensively.
"I mean, a dude could get the wrong idea, is what I'm saying," says Grif. "You wanting to
drag me off into the sunset, all this heartfelt nonsense--saving sounds like a euphemism for
'in happiness and in health,' doesn't it?"
Simmons closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath. "Is this about the wedding ring I never got you
in exchange for you agreeing to escape Rat's Nest with me."
"Might be," says Grif.
"That was three years ago."
"Do you think I fuck around with blue raspberry ringpops, Simmons?! I was swindled!"
Simmons groans into his hands and resists the urge to lie down on the floor, mostly because
he doesn't know what kind of weird shit Grif and Sarge have been rubbing all over it. "Fine!
Yes! I'll elope with you, is that what you want me to say?!"
"And?" Grif says.
"And we'll get married!"
"And?"
"What is this, a Blood Gulch surrender speech? I'm a pretty princess who loves to kiss all the
boys, is that it?"
"And?" Grif presses.
Simmons closes his eyes. "I'll get you a ring-pop."
"Blue raspberry," says Grif.
"Blue raspberry is a false, amde-up lie by sugar companies! Raspberries aren't fucking blue!"
"And yet they're delicious," says Grif.
"Sarge will murder you at the altar when he catches you wearing it."
"I'll have eaten it by then. He'll be none the wiser."
"You're going to eat my wedding ring," says Simmons defeatedly.
"I'll keep the plastic bit."
"You better mean that. Youre going to wear that plastic ring for the rest of your life,"
Simmons warns.
"You know it. Couture, baby."
Simmons squints.
"Well," he says. "Okay."
Grif blinks. "Okay what?"
"Yes. That's acceptable," says Simmons.
"We're getting married with a blue ring-pop," says Grif.
"That was your idea. A relationship is all about being considerate of what your partner
wants."
"Since when are you considerate?" Grif snaps.
"Since I needed you to get up off your fat ass and come with me to go talk to the ship crew to
get off this ship anywhere that's not Blood Gulch," Simmons says. Pause. "Please."
"You're serious," says Grif.
"If that's what will get you to move!"
"You're actually serious," says Grif.
"You said that already."
"If I say it enough, it's a motif," says Grif immediately.
"You can't just say that every time you're too lazy to come up with original words, Grif!"
"If I say it every time I'm too lazy to come up with original words, it's a motif," says Grif.
"You're so fucking lucky I'm fake fake engaged to you, or I'd leave your smarmy ass right
here," says Simmons.
"You're really serious," says Grif again, for some reason, like the idea isn't quite hitting him
all at once, and he's only barely absorbing this turn of events in layers through osmosis. And
then, suddenly: "No, dude, this is a bad idea. Let's drop this joke. Let's go back to Blood
Gulch and forget about this."
"Grif," Simmons warns.
"No, listen. We'll fuck it up somehow," says Grif airily, and Simmons can't see anything
different between his usual airiness and this fake airiness, except that he's suddenly sure that
it is fake and has no way to prove it. "Seems shady. Two dumbshits who can't even help
ourselves, trying to stick together and help each other?" He scoffs. "Let's just go back to
Blood Gulch. Less work. Easier. It might have sucked, but it never changed, y'know? Never
got any better, but never got any worse."
"Nothing gets better if you don't even give it a chance! Literally the only thing we have to do
is go to the ship staff and ask to be let off somewhere else, and we can go off and do literally
anything else that isn't rotting at an empty base!"
Grif snickers. "And we'll run off into the sunset, and have a magical wedding, and live
happily ever after forever. Put two dysfunctional losers together, and you get one functioning
person, huh? Shit, dude, if change is real, I'll go anywhere with you. I'll go back to earth. I'll
go figure out where my sister is. I'll get married to you with an actual ring. I'll even get off
this ship and get away from Blood Gulch."
Simmons sits bolt upright. "Promise," snaps Simmons.
"Sure. Pinky promise."
"You can't take it back," Simmons warns.
"Swear on my ma's grave. If change is real," says Grif, "I could do anything."
"If I prove change is real," says Simmons, "we won't go back to Blood Gulch, and we'll get
fake fake married."
"Sure, dude. I'll take that deal," says Grif. "Only if change is real."
Grif smiles. Simmons knows Grif doesn't believe him, because Grif doesn't look afraid at all.
//end part 3
//next up, part 4: THE SUM OF RATIONALITY
Chapter End Notes
that's a wrap! i'll be taking a break, so happy holidays, and i'll see yall on 01/29/19 with
part 4. see you then!
PART 4: THE SUM OF RATIONALITY
Chapter Summary
There is no reason or rationality.
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
“When you’re young, Rosasharn, ever’thing that happens is a thing all by itself. It’s a lonely
thing. I know, I ‘member, Rosasharn. [...] You’re gonna have a baby, Rosasharn, and that’s
somepin to you lonely and away. That’s gonna hurt you, an’ the hurt’ll be lonely hurt, an’ this
here tent is alone in the worl’, Rosasharn. [...] They’s a time of change, and when that comes,
dyin’ is a piece of all dyin’, and [child-bearing] is a piece of all bearin’, an bearin’ an’ dyin’
is two pieces of the same thing. An’ then things ain’t lonely any more. An’ then a hurt don’t
hurt so bad, ’cause it ain’t a lonely hurt no more, Rosasharn. I wisht I could tell you so
you’d know, but I can’t.” -Ma Joad, The Grapes of Wrath (emphasis mine)
The Hand of Merope’s main crew is settling in for the night, the captain having just gone to
bed, when Nathan A. Reynolds, deep space transit engineering intern, finds some crazy dude
in the navigation deck.
Now, he's not trying to be judgmental. Who's really to say what's crazy, right? What does that
mean? Like, what's to say what's normal and what's not normal; that whole thing that
edgelords used to say about 'haha normal's just a setting on the washing machine'--but when
it comes to crazy, maybe, Nathan has a suspicion that crazy's kind of like pornography:
maybe you can't define it, but you just kinda know it's porn when you see it, you know?
There's a man standing in the bottom-most hallway of the navigation deck: tall, a little oddlyproportioned, like he never really got out of the mismatched puberty stage. He's clean. Wellkept. He's got glasses. Neat hair. The kind of skin that speaks to the bleach of a computer
screen, and cheekbones that look less sharp and more like an alien. Totally normal dude,
looks like he could be an IT desk jockey like Nathan himself.
But there's something about him--something a little too focused, piano wire pulled to a
painful pitch...
Crazy is like pornography, he's telling you. You know it when you see it.
“Sir, you can’t be here,” Nathan says, which is also true and helpfully unrelated to the fact
that Nathan thinks this guy is a crazy person. The guy jumps. “This area is reserved for
authorized personnel only--"
“Oh! Okay, yeah, I know, but l had to talk to someone immediately,” says the dude. “Nothing
urgent! Just had to talk to someone about it right now immediately."
"That's usually what urgent is," says Nathan.
"Actually, urgent implies some kind of danger or emergency, whereas I just need to do this
right now before I lose my nerve. It's really just an existential crisis. Or a breakdown. Or a
breakthrough? Possibly all three but all at once. Don’t tell Grif that, though; he’ll just say that
existential crises are old news.”
“That’s because they are,” says Nathan. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave--is that
computer on?”
“That one? The navigation pane? The one responsible for the ship’s very navigation and the
course plotted for literally thousands of people?” the man asks, and then thinks. “Yeah.”
“Why is it on,” Nathan says, who is definitely not being paid enough for this.
“Well, I was sitting here waiting for someone to show up so I could ask about this very
important issue, but since nobody was here, it was a little worrying, so I decided to relieve
some stress, because relieving stress in a healthy way is apparently something I’m supposed
to do? Google says so, apparently. The problem is that Google can tell you that you should do
something, but then you don’t know what that looks like, so you have to Google what you
should be doing relieve stress, except all their suggestions are terrible--”
“What were you doing,” Nathan asks.
“I just noticed you guys were using a really outdated web browser, so I went ahead and
updated it for you. Now it’s the one NASA uses!”
“You did what?! Those are the ship’s navigation systems--the thing we use to run the ship-NASA is five hundred years old!”
“Well, you know what they say--if a web browser isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
“It was broken,” Nathan hisses. “That’s why we fixed it.”
“Then you’ll be happy to know that I also fixed the graphics card,” says the man, “and also
the motherboard, and the fan--”
Nathan instantly sees his entire future career evaporating in a pile of accident reports and
lawsuits before his intern eyes.
“Just a little pet project on the side to cope with the stress, is all,” says the man. “The real
issue is that I need your help with helping me fake-fake propose to my fake-fake semi-ex
boyfriend, which I am absolutely not stressed about because I helpfully coped with all that
stress by overhauling your extremely-vital ship software.”
Just then, every alarm on the Hand of Merope goes off.
Meanwhile: when Simmons feels the Hand of Merope begin to go down, he realizes he’s
about to die.
He also realizes that he doesn’t want to die.
There is no one on this earth who does not want to claim some level of self-determinacy over
themselves and their lives.
Some people want other people, places, principles, corporations, governments, militaries,
gods to have that control, distrusting themselves and relieving the responsibility--but the
control is still very much there and intact with a person or thing they trust. (Or so people like
to think.) Some people, knowing it’s been historically and societally taken from them, want
to reclaim it. Some people believe the power over their lives is located squarely within
themselves and only themselves. (These people are idiots. One should never trust oneself
blindly.) Some people believe the power over their lives is located entirely outside of them.
(These people are idiots. The power you give up is the power you cease to have.)
Some people surrender to the despair of having no power over themselves, their decisions,
their lives. These people are typically classified as either Buddhists or clinically depressed.
Some people fight for every inch of self-empowerment, even as they feel it to be a losing
battle and, unable to bow out, find that the control they manage to wrest is hollow and devoid
of any confidence in oneself to use it. These people are typically classified as perfectly
disciplined or with General Anxiety.
Unless you have an eating disorder.
Then power does not belong to you at all, but to your therapist, who knows better than silly
boys and girls with a vanity complex.
The trajectory of an eating disorder is the loss of power. It’s not about power. It’s not about
anything. Most eating disorders are just a terrible survival mechanism gone hideously wrong,
like most mental disorders; once upon a time, a body needed to feel at rights with itself, and
did whatever it could do make it happen. But the thread of power tells the best story, the
constellation that connects all the stars, and most importantly, is the best vantage point for
recovery:
What can you do?
What do you think you can do?
How are you going to do it?
When people say that eating disorders are about “control,” they use this word because control
is a perverse, ugly idea that belongs to nagging mothers and micromanaging girlfriends. The
correct word is power. Power, the thing that belongs to governments and citizens, consenting
adults, anyone with a wallet, anyone with a body that breathes and lives. Power belongs to
people who eat healthily on autopilot, who treat their body well; the good monarchs on their
small kingdoms. Power belongs to people who trash their diet and themselves because they
can. Power belongs to people who falls into a bad habit over and over and over and over even
when they feel like they have none. Power belongs to people who do their laundry on time
and go to bed at a reasonable hour and get up early for ten-hour shifts and speak up in their
own defense when their coworker is a shit to them. Power belongs to people who do none of
those things. What can you do? What do you think you can do?
Deviance, dysfunction, distress, and danger. Feeling like you’re drowning is one of four
cornerstones of Psychology 101.
At the end of the day, a body will demand to be fed. And if you don’t want to feed it, your
body will take that decision from you. You learn for the first time that power escapes your
fingers, and then power is taken further still in recovery by therapists force-feeding your life
back to course-correction. You learn, over and over again, to resign, and lose, and give up.
“Acceptance” of yourself and your flaws and your shortcomings tastes like buzzwords and
defeat. Who wants to have lost the war? Who wants to claim they’re a failure? You’d do
anything than have to give up and surrender to your own terribleness, wouldn’t you? You’d
surrender to your ugly inner nature over your dead body, won’t you? You’d rather be dead
than give up, wouldn’t you?
Wouldn’t you?
But they say that once you’re weight restored, your brain will follow. They say this like you
weren’t at a healthy weight when the entire process started. You and your patient file, reduced
to your weight and the number of meals you eat and the number of times you talk back to
your therapists, just like a good calorie counter now in newer forms.
Cooperativity with your flaws and forgiving yourself of them does not need to be an
embracing of resignation. Recovery must not be losing a battle; it can’t even be a cease-fire;
it must be to realize that the war was never worth fighting, to slip sideways and out of the
binary of oppressor and oppressed. Who gives a fuck if you’re not enough? What does
enough mean? “Enough” and “not enough” is a leaderboard that goes only up and down,
when there’s so many other ways to go.
When your biology and health revolt with fire, enter cooperation and diplomacy with no
limp-wristed passivity, but the iron determination. Give no inch. There’s not enough time on
this earth to hold a grudge against yourself. You’ve got better things to do than hold on to bad
blood. Forgive, even if you won’t forget. Drag yourself and your flaws out of competition
and towards cooperation and make something of yourself again.
The power to do this does not come from nowhere. You will run out of spoons. You will be
tired. You will hit decision fatigue. The onus is not on you to generate endless amounts of
energy. Everyone has limits. Power has to be fought for. When you’ve run out of spoons,
figure out when they’ll be back; figure out how to keep them before they’ve been lost; figure
out what drains them and start to automate them. Pick your power back from your long dayjob shifts and your exhaustion and depleting spoons like a slippery thief-here and there, with
every underhanded, dirty trick in the book. Automate your decisions. Give to-dos to a
computer, who can manage them for you. If you wake up too tired to do anything, put
yourself to bed on time. When you hit brain fog from lack of calories, eat more; when you hit
brain fog from eating too much, eat less; when you hit brain fog from too much sugar, figure
out how to eat more veggies and meat. Find which of your behaviors can or cannot be fought
and work around them. Be incredibly lazy; the path of least resistance is always the one you
want. Talk to other successful people, the ones with imposter syndrome, and learn their
secrets; they will all have dirty, dirty tricks to smuggle control back from their untrustworthy
habits and an untrustworthy world at the core of their imposter syndrome. Nobody generates
endless amounts of ability from nowhere. Don’t forget what it is you’re after. You don’t have
to compete with yourself. Cooperate. Work together. Sharing is caring and mastery, too.
Choices must become yours. Consequences must become yours. No matter the namestherapy, feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, CBT, DBT, weight-restoration, meal
planning, body-building, veganism, Atkins, Catholicism, body positivity-whatever the brand,
the lens, the identity, they are vacated of their purpose if they do not restore power over
yourself to where it belongs: to you.
Use responsibly.
Simmons skids into the Reds and Blues' hallway at the same time as Tucker, Wash, Grif, and
Sarge. Passengers start poking their heads out of their rooms like gophers.
“PLEASE MOVE TO THE LOCATION OF THE NEAREST SAFETY POD IN A CALM AND
ORDERLY FASHION,” drones a voice over the speakers. “LEAVE ALL PERSONAL
POSESSIONS BEHIND. A CREW MEMBER WILL DIRECT YOU. PLEASE MOVE TO THE
LOCATION OF THE NEAREST SAFETY POD--"
"Put your armor on," says Wash, just as Sarge hollers: "THE WAR BELLS! THE BLUES
ARE ATTACKI--"
"We're right here, Sarge!" Tucker yells back over the noise. People are beginning to flood the
hallway. A man pulling his two children behind him gives Tucker a strange look.
Caboose's head pops outs of his room. Wash shoves past him into the room he shares with
Simmons and disappears. "What's going on?"
"Probably bad shit, dude," says Tucker sarcastically. "They don't ring fifty billion alarms in
the middle of the night for fun."
"Sometimes they do. Sometimes they have fire drills."
"In space?! There's no fire drills in space!"
Wash re-emerges from Simmons's room with The Duffel Bag of Hammerspace (christened by
Tucker). Around them, most of the crowd of people from their hallway has already passed
them, disappearing up the stairs. A young woman looks back at them curiously, lugging what
looks to be a violin case. "These alarm bells mean that unless we act fast," says Wash, "we're
going to die."
"Ooh. Finally," says Grif.
"I'm not joking," Wash snaps. "Get your armor and put it on. Don't bother saving personal
items."
"Shouldn't we get to a safety pod or something?" Tucker says.
"Your armor is your safety pod. You're just also wearing it. That's why the crew wears it. Stop
arguing with me!"
"That's the fastest way to make me want to argue with you mo--"
"YOU WILL DIE IF YOU DON'T PUT THIS ON," says Wash.
"Geez!" says Tucker. "Ease up on the melodrama, Agent Freelancer, some of us are keeping
our cool--Simmons!"
"What?" says Simmons, already pulling his undersuit from the duffel bag. "I’m not dying!”
“Cowardly!” Sarge cries. “Even if an entire spaceship is crashing, a man should fight the
universe with his bare hands if he has to!”
“How’re you gonna fight a spaceship from the inside,” says Grif.
“With my bare hands! Did I stutter, Private Grif?”
“You can’t fight a spaceship if you’re already dead, sir,” says Simmons.
“Give me that armor,” says Sarge immediately, snatching it right out of Simmons’s hands.
Tucker whisks his suit away like a sulky child, then takes Caboose’s for good measure to
make sure Caboose set it up right; Wash grabs Carolina’s armor and disappears into her
room. Which leaves Simmons and Grif to deal with the duffel bag--or rather, leaves Simmons
to deal with the duffel bag, because Grif is looking at his own armor like it’s a pain in the ass.
“--ALL PERSONAL POSESSIONS BEHIND. A CREW MEMBER WILL DIRECT YOU.
PLEASE MOVE TO THE LOCATION OF--"
Simmons dumps all the maroon bits into his own room, then shoves the remaining pieces at
Grif. Grif looks down at it on the floor and sighs.
“You do not get to tell me you’re too lazy to save your own skin,” says Simmons.
“Dude. We’re on a crashing spaceship,” says Grif. “I know Wash is going into hero mode or
whatever and theoretically having armor will save us from most things, but think about it,
Simmons. Come on.”
“I kind of don’t want to,” says Simmons.
“We’re in space,” Grif goes on anyway. “If we all blow up, sitting in an orange tin can in
empty space only saves my ass from suffocating for, like, thirty minutes. Gee! What a great
deal, huh! Thirty whole minutes of being bored in the freezing nothingness of the void,
possibly with no one to talk to and nothing to do, right before I slowly asphyxiate to death.
Great! This is a really hot deal, Simmons, and I am so excited to die in the worst possible
way.”
“That’s not true,” Simmons argues. “Burning alive is worse.”
“Burning? Dude, please. If we’re going with old-school medieval executions, you know they
made rats eat people alive back in the day, right? That’s definitely the worst way to go.”
“Okay, but the rats would take maybe two hours, right? Sawing could several days--”
“That’s not what you said! You said burning to death was worse, not sawing!”
“And I’m saying that rats isn’t the worst way to die! It’s gross, but you have drawn-andquartered, crushing, the bloody eagle--”
“GRIF AND SIMMONS,” Wash yells from Carolina’s room.
“Yeah, this isn’t actually making me feel any better about the whole ‘suffocate to death in
space’ thing,” says Grif.
“We’re not going to suffocate in space.”
In the distance, there’s a boom, and then a shudder that shakes the entire hallway beneath
their feet. Grif looks at Simmons doubtfully.
“Sometimes you gotta know when to call it quits, man,” says Grif. “Face your death like a
man.”
“Okay, fine!” says Simmons. “Maybe we are going to die! And in a terrible, awful, horrible,
no-good way that involves us drifting off into space to slowly suffocate in our armor. But
between the choice of facing my death like a man and being a yellow-bellied coward? You
better believe I’m enough of a coward to do whatever it takes not to die, even if it’s only for
thirty ugly, pointless minutes.”
Grif sighs.
“C’mon,” says Simmons.
Grif looks off into the distance and crosses his arms, like being persuaded to live is a huge
inconvenience.
“Grif,” says Simmons. “I know the only bigger coward than me in this whole group is you.”
“You flatterer,” says Grif.
“Shut up. Don’t make this weird. I’m only trying to tell you that even if we were lost in space
slowly suffocating to death for thirty minutes, I’d still spend it talking with you.”
Grif wheezes a short, nervous laugh. “Oh, dude, save it for the altar.”
“I’m not changing the fake fake wedding vows to ‘I’d die in the cosmic void of
meaninglessness with you’.”
“There’s literally no difference between that and ‘in sickness and in health, until death do us
part’! No difference!”
“It’s morbid!”
“They’re both morbid!”
“Well, nobody’s getting fake fake married at any altar with any non-morbid vows unless you
put the god damn armor on!” Simmons complains, and Grif finally, finally picks up the duffel
bag.
At some point in the near future, the Reds and Blues will be on another imploding ship,
trying to fight their way out. That’s a heroic tale. Big, bad villain. Faceless enemy goons. A
clear right and wrong winner. That, you could say, is a proper spaceship crash, and will
definitely make for a lovely story.
This spaceship crash is--how do we say--a little messier.
A tractor beam from Chorus's surface pulls The Hand of Merope violently off course at the
same time Merope attempts to "jump to slipspace, change course, and power down all at the
same time" (as will be recounted by one Zachary Miller, ne Zachary Cahnman). In real time,
this means that the Merope, caught in a gravitational force pulling it towards Chorus's
surface, is straining to go in three directions that aren't towards Chorus.
Imagine you were inside a whale. Now imagine that the whale were, inside of meat or fat or
bone, were made of geometrical flat planes of paper. And then imagine that someone attached
ropes to varying parts of these panes of paper, and pulled in four different directions, all
while you were still inside, and also thousands of miles off in space.
The shaking and the shuddering of the Merope starts first, hard enough to topple people from
their feet, then enough to slam them into walls, bouncing them off the rippling floor like
dolls. Chairs and tables in coffee shops jangle through hallways, a mass of hard edges and
pointed metal ends. Electronics explode into wires and sparks. Doors left open swing
violently back and forth as if possessed, sometimes ripping to fly free. Then came the
groaning of the hull itself, as the tractor beam gained insistence and strength, and only then
did passengers stop and listen--shaking walls, crumpling floors, and jumping furniture aside,
danger itself doesn't stop anyone; only fear blocks a person's way.
People flood to the safety pods. Nobody is stepped on; it isn't a mad, lawless rush, like a
movie might have a person believe. People come in banged up from slips and falling
electronics, and some don't come at all, trapped or killed under heavy metal benches or doors.
But people make it, and they come usually in groups, even those passengers who'd boarded
the Merope alone. In times of danger, it turned out that everyone understands, instinctively,
that individuals survive not because of themselves, but because of everyone else. Contrary to
a Hollywood depiction of Titanic-like ship crashes, there are even enough safety pods for
everyone. The safety pods even work.
Crew members wave agitated, sweating, fearful, but surprisingly orderly people into lines,
and slowly they load up one pod after another. Crew members tether themselves to the floor
before they begin plotting an escape route. Crew members who thought they didn't know
what the emergency protocol was suddenly find that they absolutely do remember; and if
they don't, someone reminds them, and nobody has enough time to berate anyone for not
remembering.
"Who's the commanding officer right now?" someone asks. Nobody responds.
Then the gravity field shuts off.
Passengers' feet leave the floor. The entire holding area is suddenly a mass of squirming,
fleshy limbs. People who didn't make to the holding area float in the hallways. A crew
member who forgot her tether starts to float away, before her partner grabs her and pulls her
back down and activates her grav-boots, and they go right back to typing furiously at their
computer terminal.
"Someone get the artificial gravity back online," someone barks over the radio, and nobody
asks who they are or under what authority. (Where the hell is the commanding officer?) In
another four minutes, the artificial gravity does come back online.
The artificial gravity, unfortunately, reacts sharply with the grav field of the tractor beam,
plus the new field from Chorus itself.
The result is that half the computer terminals, running on technology so intricate it might as
well be magic, collide with three grav fields, one of which of alien tech, and instantly die.
Then the lights shut off.
Now there's screaming. People choose strange things to be afraid of.
In the dark, Nathan flips on his helmet light (as do most other crew members); the back-up
(and the back-up for the back-up, and the back-up for the back-up for the back-up) couldn't
necessarily be relied on to turn the lights back on because nobody knew what the fuck was
going on. "Someone get a hotspot online!" someone says over the radio. "I need a signal to
launch these pods!"
"On it," comes a reply.
Nathan, for the first time in this whole internship, unmutes his radio, and thinks ruefully
about the crazy guy in the hallway that he's ninety-nine percent sure is the reason why all this
absolute bullshit is occurring. "Can we launch the pods with some sort of manual lever?" he
asks instead.
"That's blocked off," says a voice.
"Can it be unblocked?" Nathan asks, in the surly tone of voice that usually made teachers
upset with him.
The Merope finally starts moving towards Chorus. Planetside, Locus doesn't bother feeling
satisfied or relieved. Mission success was always the expected outcome. On the Merope, this
means crew members and passengers get slammed to the far side of the wall as inertia
attempts to keep them where they are, giving most of them a flat surface to kick off of.
Several technicians grab tethers and launch themselves off the walls to hand tethers to others,
or even a hand when the tethers run out.
There's four hundred passengers in large tin cans that won't launch, and hundreds more
waiting for a pod to open. Nobody has any idea why the ship is moving, except for the
captain and several high-ranking officers in the main room. At the current moment, they're
having an argument with each other about whether or not to release the information about the
grav-field, while one of them sends out an open-radio SOS; one of the officers says that
releasing the information about the tractor beam will only cause despair and anarchy, while
another says that more information is always better than none. Shortly after this argument,
before the captain can make an executive decision, the main room goes entirely dark, and
depressurizes altogether. Locus is growing peeved that it took this long for their electrical
short-out to take hold. It's ridiculous for the Merope to have had functioning power for as
long as it did, in his opinion.
"Undoing that security clearance isn't easy," someone over the radio grumbles.
"Do it anyway," says Nathan, who is now freshly tethered to the floor (or what he thinks is
the floor) and having no idea who's saying this over the open radio line.
"Do you have any idea how difficult it is--"
"Look, man, I'm just some dude out of college," snaps Nathan. "I can't do this alone because I
don't know how difficult it is! So are you going to help me or not?!"
If a person thinks too much about their situation, a person can't be expected to do anything at
all, let alone what needs to be done. The crew--the ones that are helping, at any rate--stop
thinking. A crew goes in search of a commanding officer. This takes longer than anyone
expects, because the doors, largely electrically powered and can only be opened manually
with an ungodly amount of arm strength, are rapidly succumbing to Locus's electrical
jammer. Without anyone to coordinate, people grab friends or just anyone who's nearby and
go off in search of engineers, who have information about the manual release levers
somewhere. (Most of them are dead now, though.)
"Someone stay with a functioning terminal to program the safety pods," the radio says.
Just then, several terminals go dark. Then another few. People in the safety pods are looking
through the windows with faces that loudly broadcast that they know exactly what that
means. "Get a hand crank," a woman tells Nathan, so Nathan the engineering intern goes and
gets a hand crank, so they can power the terminal's basic functions with good old-fashioned
kinetic energy, apparently.
"I've got the lever for manual release," the radio says. "What's the word on the
programming?"
Nathan cranks faster. "Wish I had better things to tell you," says the nameless woman over
the radio line. "Signal's wrecked. If we launch, we won't have any thrust from the ship. It'd be
a release with zero frills."
No response from the radio line. A purely manual release would mean just letting the pods
go, without any thrust from the ship to propel it in the right direction. In theory, the pod
would activate immediately anyway and use its own engines, but the thrust from the main
ship would be a lot stronger, and get the pod a lot further away from any environmental
hazards.
But it was still a chance.
"Do it," says Nathan.
The woman hesitates.
"We don't have any other choice," Nathan says again.
"Copy that," says the woman into the radio.
"Releasing."
The woman's terminal goes dark as Nathan stops cranking. The pods, one by one, detach
from the dock. In the terminal room, the crew members who are left look up from their blank
and dysfunctioning terminals to watch the pod slip off into the sky and disappear.
There's a silence. Then: "Did we do it?" says a voice.
"Probably? I can see fuck-all from here."
"I've got a signal. Shit signal, but pod's confirmed active," says someone else.
Someone laughs nervously over the line.
"Thank god," says someone.
"Load up another one?" says a voice.
"Thank god," says the woman quietly.
"Thank god," Nathan breathes, as someone gives confirmation to load the next ejection pod.
Outside, out of sight, the safety pod boots up its engines, auto-calculates a course for a
nearby planet the next galaxy off, and immediately does a U-turn, caught up in the residual
field of the tractor beam, and hurtles down to the Chorusian ground, where its safety landing
mechanism is no match for the force of the tractor beam. Half the passengers die on impact.
Locus already has the coordinates of the crash site and teams of pirates en route.
"Tell them that they can have whatever personal items they find on the corpses," says Felix's
voice over Locus's helmet radio. "Keeps morale up. Grave-robbing party."
Locus wordlessly switches back to the radio line with the pirates: "No survivors," he says,
and then disconnects his call with Felix. If Felix wants to backseat drive, he can come out of
the New Republic base and run the mission himself.
Unfortunately for Felix and Locus, the Reds and Blues are too stupid to get on a safety pod.
Specifically, Wash, who's been on his fair share of crashing spaceships (one of those things
where York might joke, "if Wash had a dollar for every crashing spaceship he'd ever been on,
he'd have two dollars, but it's kind of weird it happened twice, right?"), is convinced that the
safety pods are not the safest place to be. Rather, Wash's permanent tin-foil hat led him to go
over the architecture of the ship with Carolina, who's also been on her fair share of crashing
spaceships. They concluded that the safest place to be would actually be in a room adjacent to
the launch pods, where the metalwork would support a crash best (provided that side wasn't
the side tipped down), and a person in armor could jump to atmosphere if provided a
parachute or safe landing zone.
This is where Carolina goes, without Wash, who promised her to take care of the Reds and
Blues for her (considering she didn't exactly want them to die, but her track record in
cooperating with the Reds and Blues being... strained). She gets to the jump spot safely and
according to plan, as per Carolina's usual.
Wash winds up in an argument with Tucker in the middle of the ship while the Reds mill
around like bored children.
"There's safety pods right there," Tucker cries. "I already put this armor on, and now you
want us to go away from the thing they purposefully installed in this ship to save our asses?"
"Welp, it's been a good run," says Grif, "but the Blues are now officially led by crazy, and us
Reds are going to have to jump ship on this one. Metaphorically, I mean. Turns out the Red
and Blue divide is just inevitable. Us Reds are going to go follow someone sane."
"Don't you ever insult me with such a dirty word as 'sane' again, Private," says Sarge.
"I wasn't talking about you! You couldn't pay me to trust any of your leadership!"
They're now floating in zero gravity in the middle of what looks to have been a ballroom,
from the various potted plants, utensils, and round tables with tablecloths floating around.
Caboose is doing somersaults. Grif has grabbed a whole uneaten risotto from midair, like he's
just going to eat a floating risotto with his bare hands through his helmet. A cup of coffee
floats by, followed by the coffee. "I promise this is safer!" Wash says, frustrated. "Do you
guys have to fight me every step of the way?!"
"That's a dumb question," says Simmons.
"It's like you don't even know us," says Grif.
Overhead, the hull creaks and groans. If they'd look, they'd see the wood panels of the
ballroom bend and begin to snap.
On Chorus, Locus kind of wants this mission to be done and over with, except not because
machines don't want things. And he's kind of furious for having let Felix talk him into the
Chorus job in the first place, honestly, because it's taking far, far longer than his sense of
efficiency is comfortable with, but also not because again, machines don't feel uncomfortable.
"Increase gravity field," he tells a technician. The technician, who is scared shitless of Locus,
does so promptly and prays for good results.
And rather than come down faster, the Merope, still attempting to do three things at once, rips
in half.
Locus instantly feels his day get exponentially longer.
On the Merope, some hundred feet from the Reds and Blues, the ballroom splits right down
the middle. The sky cracks the Merope open. The tables jump into the air as a great bend
pops up in the center, then snaps in a spray of carpet and wood; the ceiling tears apart,
revealing its sinewy cables and jagged construction beams and layers and layers of broken
rooms spilling their contents into the open air. The walls of the ship break to the burning
atmosphere, in reds and purples, of Chorus outside. Furniture disintegrates instantly in the
maw.
"Oh holy shit," says Tucker, instead of doing the sane thing, which is to run in the opposite
direction, screaming. Actually, none of the Reds and Blues do that, for the first time in their
lives. The one time it's good to be a coward, and they're too stupid to capitalize on it,
apparently.
Arguably, one might say, the Reds and Blues are sufficiently far enough away from the
colossal rip that they're safe, plus the fact that they're all in armor meant to be withstand a
burning atmosphere as a billion-ton spaceship plummets to the ground, and therefore not
immediately running far away wasn't a colossally stupid move. It's at this point that the other
half of the ship careens away and out of sight altogether, exposing nothing but burning blue
sky, and the force of the other half of the ship tearing off jostles the whole ballroom. Caboose
immediately smacks into the ceiling. Fortunately, Caboose also seems only mildly
nonplussed by this development.
"Go back! Back the way we came!" Wash shouts.
"You're the one who told us to come here!" Grif yells back.
"Why are you still arguing with me?! That was before the ship ripped in half--go already!"
"Come on, boys!" Sarge hollers, sounding gleeful. "The sky's trying to kill us! Always knew
that blue bastard was up to something--"
"Not now, Sarge!" Grif snaps.
The broken edges of the spaceship end abruptly in clear, empty sky and fire, and for a second,
Simmons is convinced he can see Grif hanging off the edge, shrieking for Simmons to catch
him, to not let go, dangling off into the icy ocean waters. Simmons can feel Grif's hand
sliding out of his own. The feeling of letting go of someone is the feeling of someone dying.
This, outside of the safe, sane spaceship, is what the world looks like: empty and on fire and
trying to kill you if you'd let it, and it wouldn't even notice. Maybe dying is the default state
of being--how the entire world would have you if you let it, the one insistence the world can
agree on. The whole sky is trying to kill them all just outside of these walls.
Death is the default. Failure is the default. Living is the exception, a tiny miracle we take for
granted. And here he is, Simmons thinks: ruining his heart, purging every night, helping the
universe kill him faster.
"Simmons!" Grif yells. Simmons jolts. "What the hell are you doing?! Come on!"
Hell if Simmons knows. Simmons turns around and scrambles for the door.
The hallway they came from is almost unrecognizable, which makes sense considering that
gravity is reasserting itself at the same time as inertia, but the hallway is largely whole, the
sky nowhere to be seen, and Wash can slam a large metal door between their hallway and the
open tear in the ship. "Pick a flat surface!" he calls, just as gravity suddenly gets really heavy,
but also sideways for some reason, nearly instantly crushing them to the wall as they are.
The hallway begins to crumple like a crushed paper bag with them all still inside. The ceiling
dents dangerously low. In the atmosphere, one half of The Hand of Merope falls like a star to
the surface of Chorus, carrying its remaining passengers of less than a dozen humans. The air
howls as it changes from oxygen to flame as if in pain. Furniture debris, the remnants of the
thousands of people's lives, collapse on the heads of the Reds and Blues; Tucker disappears
under a collection of luggage bags; Caboose's hand waves from under half a kitchen's melting
metal inventory; Wash grits his teeth and makes himself as small as possible and wonders
why, if he's going to die now, he has to spend it with Sarge.
"Where's Grif and Simmons?!" Sarge shouts.
"Don't worry about them!" Wash yells right back, more irritable at his own impending demise
than bothered. "They'll take care of each other!"
He's right. Grif and Simmons have slammed into a collection of knotted wires and metal
beams, and as gravity slid them against the wall to crush them to the metal plates, they
reached out instinctively to each other, as if holding one human's hand would protect each
other better from the weight of The Hand of Merope's impending death than the four-hundred
pounds of armor they're wearing. As the ship rips itself to pieces, when the sky threatens to
swallow them all, and when The Hand of Merope finally smashes into the Chorus ground,
Grif and Simmons are still holding hands.
Once upon a time, there was a story to go along with Simmons's eating disorder. And like any
good story, there was comedy, missing fathers, existential despair, too much alcohol, a
healthy amount of voyeurism, identifiable reasons, cause and effect. Everything wrapped into
a nice scientific bundle, if you just ignored all the data points you didn’t like. After all,
cherry-picking isn’t bad science: it’s good storytelling.
But that was a long time ago. Back in the good old days, when Simmons thought he could
quit and that every person is only the sum of rationality; reasonable actors; the comfort of an
ideal, a solution, a so-called perfect fix. Back in the good old days, when he still believed the
great creation myths of mental illness.
There are only two things on this earth that move a person to great change: Desperation, and
exhaustion.
These are sometimes known as necessity and insanity.
The morning after they land in Crash Site Bravo, Simmons wakes up nauseous. He nearly
bolts off his pallet with the force of it. It’s no illness with a cloudy head and rheumy eyes, or
even a mild, queasy nausea, but a surging, adrenaline-shot demand to get something out of
his stomach. The problem is that he hasn’t eaten anything in nearly sixteen hours. His
stomach is empty. There’s nothing to purge.
He stumbles into the pseudo-bathroom that Wash set up and immediately hates this little
room. He knows that, like other times in his life when he’s been genuinely ill and his stomach
has required him to excavate it for non-food-related reasons, he’s never been able to get
anything up. More often than not, his gag reflex will be so broken that even his fingers won’t
do anything. Today, his stomach roils against his guts, and he covers his mouth like his
stomach might leap out of it as he washes one hand for sanitation. His fingers still taste like
soap when they go down.
What comes up is, in the no-light single-stalled bathroom, black and thin, like printer ink. He
has no idea what it is. He hasn’t eaten anything even remotely that color or substance. He
hacks, and chokes, and the second gag smells vividly like stomach acid. It smells like rot, like
some dead, wet fungus, but clings to the toilet bowl with the viscosity of dark water.
He doesn’t know what it is, but when it’s gone, he feels like there’s nothing left in his body-not food, not water, not surprise, not guilt, not want, not anything he considers to be himself.
He washes it from his hands and leaves it without remorse in the makeshift, single-stalled
bathroom. When he looks in the cracked mirror Sarge installed on the wall, the dark water is
trailing from the corner of his lip, like he’s bitten a fountain pen clear through and the ink is
leaking from his mouth. The ugly guts of thousand of words dripping down his chin like
blood, leaking through the open wound of his mouth.
There’s nothing left in his body but contempt, now. There is no remorse. There is no reason
or rationality. There isn’t even love. At the hard, irreducible center of him, his foundations
are only contempt; anger; the furious need to squeeze his hands around his own illness and
relish feeling it die. Not for love or revenge or power or approval, but simply because if he
doesn't kill it, it will kill him.
How disgusting.
//end of part 4
//next up, part 5: LOVE IS A FEVER PITCH
Chapter End Notes
hey guys! because my schedule has gotten a lot busier lately, i've found that the quality
of qed has been dropping as a result, and frankly it's just been too much to do while
staying sane. that said, i'm changing the schedule to monthly postings rather than weekly
postings; i'll be posting new chapters (and much longer chapters) on the first tuesday of
the month. it's a long ways away, but that means the next time i'll post a chapter is
march 5th. see you then, and thanks for your patience!
PART 5: LOVE IS A FEVER PITCH
Chapter Summary
"Again."
Chapter Notes
“You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You
send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed
when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you)
I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not
do now.
“Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Search for the
reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest
places of your heart... [...] Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see
and experience and love and lose.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, in response to a young man requesting feedback on his poetry
Captain Richard “Dick” Simmons, male, thirty-one, of the Reds and Blues of Chorus, is
learning how to be a fuck-up. This is just as well, because Captain Dexter Grif, male, thirtyfive, of the Reds and Blues of Chorus, is learning that being a fuck-up is really not the catchall excuse he’s been making it out to be for the last entirety of his life.
At 5:00 AM, Simmons and Grif are collapsed on two dirty mattresses they’ve shoved
together and feeling like death—Simmons because he stayed up late to purge and never
rehydrated and now feels an almost-hangover headache, and Grif because he stayed up late
thinking about Simmons purging. Grif is facedown and has Simmons’s chest pinned with one
arm. Simmons’s metal arm is on the verge of overheating and is beginning to whine. Nobody
moves.
The door bangs.
“Good morning!”
“Fuck,” says Grif.
Simmons groans.
“It’s time to get up!”
“Yeamhmhfm,” says Simmons.
“No,” says Grif.
“We’re getting up,” says Simmons sleepily.
“Let me lie down and die,” says Grif.
“Getting up now,” says Simmons without moving.
“I definitely absolutely believe you, sirs,” says the voice, “but also Agent Washington said
I’m not allowed to come back until I see the whites of your eyes, sirs.”
“We’re getting up,” says Simmons again, and still does not move.
“I’m up!” Sarge hollers from the other side of the room.
“We know,” Grif and Simmons say together.
“Who’s up, says Caboose.
“We are,” says Simmons.
“No you’re not,” says Caboose.
“Ah,” says the unfortunate messenger on the other side of the door. “Yes, see, that is exactly
the thing that I was supposed to prevent from happening, so…”
“Caboose, we wouldn’t be talking if we weren’t up,” says Simmons, still facedown on the
mattress.
“Don’t worry!” Donut chirps. “I’ve been up for thirty minutes already! Gotta get all these
hair rollers out, gotta powder the face, gotta powder the cheeks—all the cheeks, of course,
keep them baby-bottom smooth…”
“Shut up, Donut!” Grif yells.
“RISE AND SHINE, BOYS,” says Sarge into his helmet megaphone. Tucker screams as he
lurches awake.
“I hate you all,” says Grif without flinching. “Man was not meant to be awake before noon.
Fuck you all for actually making me a functional and productive member of society. This is
betrayal.”
“Private Grif—”
“Captain Grif—” Grif corrects, without raising his head from the pillow.
“Private Grif,” Sarge interrupts right back, “you wouldn’t know a functional human being if
one bit you on the ass.”
“Can we not argue before we’ve even had breakfast,” Simmons says.
Sarge goes on: “Not to imply, Simmons, that you’re anything so awful as a functional human
being—”
“Sarge, I swear to god, I will kill you where you fucking stand,” says Grif into the mattress.
“Can y’all shut up?” Tucker snaps.
“That’s not what you said yesterday when you were jumping to Wash’s training,” says Grif.
“Well, I’m tired now! Let me fucking sleep!”
“Tucker is tired because I tired him out,” Sarge says with a dark laugh.
“SARGE,” snaps everyone in the room. Donut cackles wildly.
“At morning training yesterday!” says Sarge. “Get yer heads outta the gutter!” This is
followed by even more ominous chuckling that reassures nobody, even Tucker, who would
know who he has or hasn’t slept with and firmly has every Red on his (very very very very
short) list of Do Not Fuck.
Tucker groans. “This is too early for old-man sex jokes, okay? And like you have any room
to talk shit. I outran you yesterday!”
“I don’t need to outrun Blues! Feet are for pushing pedals on the Warthog to run over Blues
and destroy the environment at the same time! It’s called efficiency.”
“Someone told me feet were for taking pictures of,” says Caboose mildly.
There’s a clatter as Donut drops a hair curler. “What?”
“Yes, he said he liked my large feet and that he wanted me to send pictures to him.”
The entire room explodes into chaos.
*
“Well?” asks Wash when Andersmith comes back.
“Everything is fine, sir,” says Andersmith immediately.
“Somehow the fact that you feel the need to start off with that statement reassures me exactly
not at all,” says Wash.
*
After they’ve all pulled up their big-boy pants and gotten over someone poaching Caboose
for feet pictures, and after Simmons found himself in the peculiar position of trying to
contain the blast radius of that whole mess by arguing against Tucker at 5:36 AM that it was
really only a matter of time before someone did it considering the size of Caboose’s feet,
which gave Simmons the peculiar sensation of dissociating from his body while being
horrendously, awfully aware of what he was doing—in other words, after Simmons suffers a
minor death, afterlife, and resuscitation all within six minutes of waking, Simmons says,
“Alright,” and peels himself up and off the double mattress bed.
The whining of his overheating cyborg arm quiets. Tucker is trying to recover from the Feet
Argument by curling up under his pillow, but Sarge is up and in the Kevlar and looking like
he’s somehow gained converted the mortification of everyone else into adding several years
to his own lifespan. Wash, of course, is long gone and probably beginning the morning
training they’re all late for; Caboose is scratching his thick curly hair with a giant hand while
looking confused at the concept of ‘mornings’ and ‘time’; Donut has already got his face
mirror out and is checking the smudges of leftover mascara along his face.
They’re all still here, after all that’s happened, Simmons thinks in nearly impressed disbelief.
And Grif thinks, with exhaustion and resignation: they’re all still here, after all that’s
happened.
“Alright,” says Simmons again, and shakes Grif until Grif rolls over on his back. By this
time, Grif can’t even pretend to be asleep, so he only glares dully at the ceiling. “We’ve gotta
get up. Let’s go.”
“Again,” Grif groans.
Simmons rolls his eyes, but doesn’t mean it. “Yeah. Again.”
*
Chorus—and Armonia, for that matter—are better suited to some of the Reds and Blues than
others.
Tucker, apparently, is eyeballs deep in his “character-development thingamajig” (as Simmons
calls it), getting “all up in Washingscrub’s grill” (as Sarge calls it) and doing his job well and
being a decent soldier and otherwise becoming “a dirty fucking sell-out” (as Grif calls it).
Sarge is on cloud nine with the war games (or at least this is what Grif tells Simmons, who
hasn’t noticed anything different about Sarge; Grif, meanwhile, doesn’t believe what he’s
telling Simmons in the first place, because there’s a difference between Sarge being gleeful
and Sargey and Sarge, in an ironic turn, half-assing Kimball’s orders). Anyway, Caboose
goes wherever Tucker and Wash go, and between the two of them, Caboose is never alone.
Nobody knows what Donut is doing, except that Donut is a social butterfly and certainly no
wilting flower, and he’s probably amassing a small mafia of gay femme Chorusians as they
speak.
On Chorus, there’s a whole planet full of new people to talk to, things to do, and actual wars
to fight. It’s like a tailored list of everything Grif and Simmons ever wanted while stuck at
Blood Gulch, which is just the exact opposite of Blood Gulch. Morning training that’s
training for an actual, real war. Paperwork that actually says important information. A
meaningful chain of command. Hell, a promotion. Lackeys to boss around.
Grif and Simmons accordingly skip morning training altogether and lurk in an abandoned
motor pool. Must’ve been used before half of the Federal Army got killed against the New
Republic. Now it’s abandoned even in the heart of Armonia. Downsizing is a bitch. (Also the
half-successful genocide of your planet. That sucks too.)
Grif catches up on the rest of his sleep and Simmons does work on a tablet for fun,
reorganizing the same PDF files he reorganized yesterday. The sound of Chorus vehicles and
young people’s boots marching outside sound through the wide-open, empty jeep hanger. The
sun comes up and shines through the gaping, silent hole in the metal roof, casting a small
patch of sunlight a little ways off. There’s still engine parts and broken-down cars rotting
across the motor pool floor. The doors hang off their hinges, like a pair of clichés. The wall
Simmons leans against is caked in rust and shrieks ominously when he rests his weight
against it, so they don’t tempt it to break twice, and Grif puts his head on Simmons’s thigh
instead.
The place looks a little bit like a bomb dropped. After every explosion, Grif and Simmons
have learned, is the peace and quiet of shellshock.
They stay there straight through breakfast and whatever drills they were supposed to do that
morning. Both their helmets beep, but Simmons knows that Wash has the lieutenants in good
hands anyway, and Grif, for his part, isn’t super keen to deal with training teenagers to die.
Simmons isn’t even sure he gives half a damn about Chorus’s war. Not to be nasty, but he’s
pretty sure he doesn’t, uh, care about the whole Felix and Locus thing. Or he cares from a
theoretical standpoint because it sucks what’s happening to Chorus, and he’s a little pissed
Tucker got stabbed, and the Reds and Blues always seem to be getting wrapped up in other
people’s problems, but they’re still pretty firmly other people’s problems. And Tucker got
better, anyway.
Around ten-thirty, Grif wakes up and realizes, in the half-daze of sleep, where he is and that
they’ve both missed breakfast, and wonders if he’s supposed to be worried that Simmons is
skipping breakfast, and then figures that if he’s wondering, then the answer is probably yes.
Simmons has begun playing Galaga on his tablet. Simmons is not worried at all, which is
both his own arrogance and also because he knows the danger zone is more likely to be at
night, not in the morning. Grif resigns himself to disappointment and goes back to sleep.
Simmons is waiting for problems to begin again, but is busier losing by a hair to his own high
score, and for the first time in years, isn’t so much procrastinating on his meltdown as he is
multitasking his own bullshit with the rest of his life.
The sun passes out of the hole in the roof, the little patch of sunlight moves across the
skeletons of old Warthogs, and then Simmons doesn’t have any way of tracking the time. The
abandoned tracks of the motor pool fall into softer shade.
*
Simmons wakes Grif up in time for lunch because he knows Grif would be upset if he missed
it, so they roll into the mess hall at 12:40 PM like they own the place, and definitely did not
skip literally all their duties for the last six hours. “It’s in the walk,” Grif tells Simmons, one
hand on the cafeteria door. “Just gotta be confident.”
“I’m sure I, a person who’s never experienced two ounces of real confidence in my whole
life, will somehow be able to muster up fake confidence so you can eat lunch,” says Simmons
blandly.
“You can channel some of that nervous-asshole-nerd confidence you had from Blood
Gulch.”
“Yeah? Did you want me to email my father now, or during lunch?”
“Method acting is for chumps who don’t know how to act.”
“Yes,” says Simmons. “Like me.”
“Okay, well, fake it until you make it, then.”
“I’ll fake faking confidence until I can actually fake confidence.”
“Perfect,” says Grif. “Let’s eat.”
They take two steps into the cafeteria, before Jensen stands up, waves, and says, “Hello,
sthirsth!”
Fear strikes the heart of Simmons and Grif simultaneously: Simmons because Jensen is a girl
and he’s had a Pavlovian fear of girls hammered into his soul, Grif because Bitters or Palomo
can often be found close behind Jensen, and both Simmons and Grif because they’re both
over thirty, Jensen is seventeen, and Simmons is half-convinced that seventeen-year-old girls
are still obsessed with horses and maybe dolphins, possibly wolves and dragons, with a side
of tarot cards and blood sacrifices; meanwhile, Grif doesn’t like thinking about how Jensen
might die tomorrow, and is so concerned with how dead she might be tomorrow that he
actually has no opinion on Jensen as a potentially living person.
“Quick,” Simmons hisses.
“I’m going, I’m goin—”
“Sthir! Over here!”
“Don’t make eye contact and back away slowly,” Grif says. Simmons immediately,
conspicuously, and nervously makes eye contact. “No! Simmons!”
“There’s social conventions, Grif!” Simmons hisses.
“That’s how they trap you!”
“I—”
“Hi,” says Jensen, one foot directly behind Simmons. Simmons’s cyborg heart attempts to
escape his body through his ribcage.
“Sorry, we’re busy.”
“Oh! Sthorry! I didn’t mean to interrupt!” says Jensen, looking so genuinely sorry that Grif
almost has a feeling approximating regret. And then: “I was wondering if you were okay
thisth morning, because it looked like you were sthupposthed to attend morning training, but
sthirsth never shthowed up?”
“Ah, well,” says Simmons, at which point both Grif and Simmons instantly understand that
Simmons has deeply and irrevocably fucked them both up. Grif wonders if he can feign a
heart attack to stop this trainwreck. Simmons is not thinking whatsoever because his brain
has set itself firmly between fight and flight, also known was fighting by dropping several
text walls worth of flight tactics: “Well there was… lots of work to do, so we did some, you
know, w-work from home, some, um, very c-c-confidential information. Very, u-um, p-ppersonal development, very hush-hush…”
“Yeah, personal development! It was, uh,” says Grif, and then says the first thing that pops
into his head: “a holiday.”
“A holiday, sthir?”
“Yeah. Special holiday. For, um, only us.”
Jensen frowns. “Like a… birthday…?”
“Yes,” says Grif, just as Simmons says, “No,” and then they both glare at each other.
“A once a year holiday, like a birthday,” says Grif.
“But not a birthday,” says Simmons.
“Stho it’sth an… anniversthary…?”
“Yes,” says Simmons, just as Grif says, “No,” and then they both glare at each other.
“It’s like an anniversary,” says Simmons.
“But not an anniversary,” says Grif. “It’s very high level stuff. You wouldn’t understand. Uh,
it’s a special minority thing. You know how different groups have different holidays and
things like that. Except the minority is me and Simmons. We are the population.”
“Stho it’s a holiday.”
“It’s a once-a-year event that me and Grif celebrate,” says Simmons.
“Stho it’s a birthday.”
“No, because nothing happened on this day,” says Grif. “It’s just like, a special day. Where
we get to be by ourselves and do nothing and celebrate nothing, even though nothing
happened on this day.”
“So it’s a… cthelebration…?”
“Yes,” says Grif. “Except the celebration happens every day. Particularly in the morning. And
this is why we’re not available before noon.”
“But you sthaid it only happens once a year?”
“Yes,” says Simmons, just as Grif says, “No,” and then they both glare at each other.
“It happens once a year,” says Simmons.
“Except when it happens more frequently,” says Grif.
“But mostly it happens once a year, because Grif isn’t going to skip morning training that
frequently.”
“What the fuck,” Grif hisses, while Simmons gives him an unrepentant look.
“But if nothing happened on this day, why the anniversthary…?” Jensen wonders aloud.
“Who knows,” says Grif, just as Simmons says, “Well, something happened,” and then they
both glare at each other.
“Something happened,” says Grif relunctantly.
“But mostly nothing,” says Simmons.
“It happened but we’re not sure when.”
“Or how.”
“Or why.”
“Or to whom.”
“Or even what the thing was.”
“But sthomething… did happen?”
“Yes,” says Simmons, as Grif says, “No,” and Simmons says quickly: “It happened in the
Vegas Quadrant,” just as Grif says, “It happened in Valhalla—”
“—Which is closely related to the Vegas Quadrant!”
“—Except when it’s not, so it probably happened in Blood Gulch—”
“—It happened in between.”
“It was very confusing.”
“It was in space.”
“On a spaceship.”
“On the Hand of Merope.”
“But not on the Hand of Merope because that’s not in space.”
“It was a fucking spaceship, what the fuck do you mean it wasn’t in space—"
“—anyway it was very secret and we’re not really sure what happened, but it probably
happened, and it occurred somewhere, at some time.”
“But you don’t know what it wasth,” says Jensen.
“It was something to do with us,” says Grif.
“And presumably how much we despise each other,” says Simmons.
“Except not, because Simmons is a very nice and lenient teammate who will definitely let me
skip morning training—”
“—but actually not because morning training is good for you and you should do your fucking
part as part of this army—”
“Basically it was the beginning of how much of a pain in the goddamn ass this douchebag
is,” says Grif.
“And yet I somehow can’t get rid of him,” says Simmons.
“Stho it happened in the Vegasth Quadrant,” says Jensen slowly.
“Yep.”
“And sthirs don’t remember it very well…”
“Mhm.”
“And now you can’t get rid of each other…”
“Correct.”
“But sthomething definitely happened.”
“Right.”
Jensen squints.
Simmons sweats.
“Sthirsth—” Jensen begins.
“WOW LOOK AT THE TIME WE GOTTA GET BACK TO OUR ANNIVERSARY,” says
Grif loudly, and shoves Simmons towards the food line. “Great talking to you, good talk, no
need to follow up.”
“Oh, okay!” Jensen calls after them, and then in a loud holler across the entire crowded
cafeteria: “Have a happy anniversthary, sthirsth!”
*
“That went well,” says Grif, as they flee with a pair of lunch trays.
“We definitely and absolutely made it very ambiguous as to what this possible anniversary
could be,” Simmons agrees.
*
Anyway, they’re signed up to run the armory in the afternoon. Which Simmons likes because
he’s got experience doing it at Rat’s Nest, and Simmons also dislikes because he’s got
experience doing it at Rat’s Nest, and doubly dislikes because he’s eating lunch here and he
dislikes eating lunch in general, because it feels a little bit like playing Russian roulette and
praying to god that this lunch won’t be a one he winds up purging over, but he’s trying to not
think about it because fixating on it will only make him more stressed and make him more
likely to purge and generally speaking he doesn’t want to go down that rabbit hole if he can
help it. Grif, meanwhile, dislikes the armory on the principle of it being a place where he’s
supposed to actually do work.
They’re still on their so-called lunch break when Sarge comes tearing into the armory and
bangs on the service window like a kid on Christmas morning. “A-HA! So it is you two on
armory duty!”
“Whatever you want from us, no,” says Grif.
“We should at least hear him out before we tell him no,” says Simmons.
“Thank you, Simmons!” says Sarge. “One rocket launcher, worthless dirtbag who is also in
charge of giving me a rocket launcher.”
“Ah,” says Simmons. “No.”
“Betrayal! Mutiny! Simmons, I expected better from your spineless resume—"
“A rocket launcher for what?” Grif said in disbelief.
“Terrible question,” says Sarge. “Good god, Grif, the job description of a rocket launcher is
in the title!”
“No, we mean, why do you need to launch a rocket?” asks Simmons.
“Also a terrible question. The point of launching a rocket is to launch a rocket!”
Grif rubs his temples and tries not to look like he’s trying to strangle Sarge with the Force,
but also if Grif has any predilection to using the Force to kill people with his mind, now
would be an excellent time to discover it. “Even if I liked you—which I don’t, in case we
forgot—but even if I liked you, and even if I wanted to give you a rocket launcher, what the
hell would you do with it?”
“I don’t know if we have report forms for that level of friendly fire,” Simmons adds.
“That’s nonsense!” Sarge scoffs. “Just reuse the forms for Caboose’s friendly fire.”
“There’s no form. He hasn’t had an incident the entire time we’ve been on Chorus, sir,” says
Simmons.
Sarge’s face drops. Actually, it doesn’t just drop; it goes from maniacal delight to sheer
horror.
“I’m sorry, sir,” says Simmons. “But those are the facts.”
“How did it come to this?” Sarge says, almost faintly. “How have we fallen so far? We
haven’t had a proper Red vs Blue war in almost a whole season! Now Caboose isn’t even
killing any Blues! Oh, god, next we’ll actually be competent! There’s nothing preventing us
from becoming intergalactic space war heroes!”
“Sir, we can’t be incompetent all the time, can we? It gets tiring,” says Simmons.
“Speak for yourself,” Grif mutters. “My work never ends. I’ll never retire from incompetence
and honestly, I feel like my career in incompetence is deeply personally rewarding.”
“It’s boring to do one thing all the time, though.”
Grif shakes his head. “You burnt yourself out on being incompetent in Valhalla, is what it is.
You went too hard, too fast. Rookie mistake.”
“Grif, you idiot,” Sarge declares. “This is why you’ll never amount to anything. You can’t
just be incompetent! You have to be spectacularly, expertly, superbly competently
incompetent! That’s why Caboose was a genius! An auteur! An artist! A prodigy in his field!
That boy was an inspiration, and he’s fallen into the trap of actually accomplishing things!”
“Debatable,” says Grif dully. “He’s only stopped killing his teammates.”
Simmons adds, “And considering that his teammates are a Freelancer, the new protagonist,
and a dead AI, it’s not like not killing them is a huge accomplishment.”
“He’s on his way to accomplishing something!” Sarge scowls. “It’s a gateway drug thing. Not
even once, Simmons. It gets ahold of you.”
“The way you’re talking, Sarge, you’d always think we agree on not accomplishing
anything,” Grif says.
“Don’t ever say that to me ever again, Private,” says Sarge.
“I’m a captain, actually—"
“We’re entirely two different animals!” Sarge interrupts. “I am a sleek beast of incredible,
awe-inspiring military accomplishments, that also superbly strike fear into the hearts of
anyone who clings to a conceptualization of rationality and sanity.”
Simmons chews on his plastic fork. “That doesn’t really convince me that we should give
you a rocket launcher, sir.”
“Me neither,” says Grif. “But don’t get me wrong. I’m saying you don’t get a rocket launcher
because I hate you, and I’m in a position of power, and I fully intend to abuse it to be petty
and awful to you in all the ways you’ve been to me.”
“We just happen to agree that this means we’re not going to give you a rocket launcher,” says
Simmons.
Sarge squints. “What happened to you idiots? You two were half a garbage fire just a few
months ago. Thought you two assholes were never going to figure your drama out.
Well, maybe.
Maybe they’re supposed to be on the rocks. Maybe they’re supposed to be holding a grudge,
or they’re supposed to be awkward with each other.
But here they are again, again, again, over and over: in a base that’s huge and unfamiliar, full
of people they’re not sure they like, with a shitty war hanging over their heads. And what else
are they supposed to do? Even if there were other options of people to hang out with, Grif
literally has Simmons’s heart, and his arm and his eye, and half his face.
At some point, they’ve got to give it up: this is the way things are. They’re not going
anywhere. Grif and Simmons aren’t replaceable anymore. Even if they never forgave each
other, even if they never reconciled, even if one of them left the Reds and Blues and tried to
replace each other, they would never be replaceable. They keep doing this, over and over and
over again. And at some point, they might as well give up. They’re not going to escape each
other.
Resignation is not always bad. Consider it a pruning of too many futures, to better commit to
one.
But because Grif is Grif and Simmons is Simmons, they say instead:
“Fuck off, actually.”
“But respectfully, sir.”
“Also fuck you.”
“With respect.”
“You’re not even disagreeing with me,” Grif complains.
“That’s because I don’t,” says Simmons. “I’m just agreeing with you with respect to our
illustrious Red leader.”
Sarge says: “And the illustrious Red leader is going to be given a rocket lau—”
“No,” says Simmons.
*
Wash drops by the armory two hours later. Simmons is counting down the time until he can
go someplace else and stop whiteknuckling avoiding purging and doesn’t even realize Wash
is there until Grif says: “We’re definitely and absolutely doing our job.”
“First of all, if you’re doing your job, the best way to assure me that you’re doing your job is
not to start off the conversation with assuring me that you’re doing your job,” says Wash.
“Second of all, why is Sarge yelling in the hallways that the gay agenda is out to ban rocket
launchers?”
*
“There’sth an agenda?” Jensen asks over dinner, watching the Reds and Blues try to hold
Sarge down from beating Grif and Simmons with his shotgun.
“The gays are more organized than the leadership of this army,” Bitters mutters under his
breath.
“Oh, huh,” says Jensen, and twists around to squint at General Kimball, in a hushed
conversation in the corner of the cafeteria with Wash. “I didn’t know those two thingsth were
mutually exclusthive?”
*
At the end of the day, Grif and Simmons are the ones who stay up the latest. Wash is in bed at
8PM like a square. Caboose sleeps fitfully as always, but that just means he goes to sleep
early, too. Tucker’s exhausted from trying to be a real person. Sarge, being Sarge, runs
nonstop until he hits his old man bedtime, and then collapses. Nobody knows where Donut is.
Nobody wants to ask.
So if Grif and Simmons put their heads together, and speak very, very quietly, they can have
something like privacy in the giant room where all the Reds and Blues have packed
themselves into like sardines. Simmons flips on his helmet light on its lowest setting, spilling
a little pool of light around their mattresses pushed together, while Grif munches through a
late-night snack. Simmons pre-emptively hogs all the blankets before Grif even gets a say.
His feet get cold. Grif is a heathen who can wear socks to bed, anyway.
As time finally ticks later and later into the night, Simmons realizes he has accomplished
virtually zero things. Actually nothing. He did no things productive today, and he has no way
to justify this.
He feels like he limped through the day by the skin of his teeth, and has dragged himself to
the finish line with a shitty score to show for it, and he’s crossed the finish line and he knows
he should feel alright with it, but he can’t bring himself to be. There was no point. No
resolution. No progress. No importance.
Nothing.
He’s got nothing but his life to show for having gotten through today.
And this is enough? Simmons wonders. This is it? This is everything I’m going to amount to?
This is the point?
Grif meanwhile, has no such reflection, because he’s been feeling this way since he was
fourteen years old.
After Grif gets through brushing all his crumbs off onto the floor and relishing Simmons’s
dirty glare, Simmons says softly, “We really should go to morning training, though.”
“Oh, god, why? Why the fuck would we do that?”
“I mean,” says Simmons, hesitating. “Well. I dunno. Why not, right?”
“Why not? There’s a war going on. A legitimate war! There’s a front line where we can die!”
“But we’re already here, and we’re not going anywhere else,” says Simmons. “We might as
well make the most of it.”
“The most of it is staying out of it.”
Simmons grimaces. “Yeah, but we’re, y’know, stranded on this planet. If we ever had a plan,
or an agenda, or an idea of what to do with going back to Blood Gulch, all of those just got
thrown out the window. Seriously, Grif, what else are we going to do besides deal with this
shit?”
Grif lies on his back and scowls at the ceiling. If something can be avoided, Grif thinks that
they should avoid it, because it’s not like avoiding or confronting makes any difference in the
end—everything turns out the same no matter what you do or how hard you try, and if you do
try, it often turns out worse in the end.
But since Grif says none of that, and doesn’t even try to think about it, Simmons just figures
that the conversation is over, and is relieved to let it go anyway, because he doesn’t have
anything much figured out beyond what he just managed to say. Chorus is a dreadful place
that requires you to take every day one step at a time, like the future doesn’t exist, the past
never happened. Simmons has no choice but to take it all one step at a time, and right now,
the next step is to lie down on their creaky pair of mattresses in the middle of the snoring
Reds and Blues on a planet they can’t escape, pull the shitty, smelly blanket over himself and
Grif, and switch the helmet light off.
Soldering Iron
Simmons’s alarm goes off two seconds before there’s a knock on the door, both of which Grif
is going to ignore because he ignored it yesterday, and it didn’t work yesterday but he figures
it’s worth another shot, and maybe another, and maybe just as many shots as it takes until he
either gets to sleep in or dies of old age. Instead, Grif lies facedown on the mattress, smelling
a decade’s worth of gunpowder smoke and sweat soaked into the fabric, and he figures that
it’d be just his luck if every body that’s ever laid on this mattress has left a salt-rime imprint
of their outline, like one of those dead-body outlines in a police crime investigation, and
wonders what kind of outline he’s going to leave when he dies, and if he can get away with
turning off the alarm before Simmons wakes up. The knocking, he can ignore; the alarm, he
can ignore; if Simmons moves his arm, Grif will lose his pillow, and at that point he’d have
to declare that there’s no real benefit in going back to sleep, even though there’s many many
many benefits, just that they don’t include having Simmons to operate as a space heater. The
knocking increases. Grif lies boneless in the early morning, as relaxed as could be, waiting
for Simmons to wake up properly and have the morning peace be ruined, figuring it’s only a
matter of time before Simmons gets fed up with either the knocking or the alarm, but can’t
quite get up the energy to turn off the alarm. The morning will end whether he likes it or not.
The day is just around the corner. He’s going to have to do the whole thing all over again,
going to have to get up and walk around and, god, talk to people, maybe feel things, and then
after today there’ll be another day, and then another day after that, and then another day after
that. Simmons’s helmet alarm starts vibrating. It’s going to fall off the mattress and hit the
concrete floor in a second, and then Grif will really have a problem. Simmons groans, lifts an
arm (not the arm Grif’s lying on), rubs his face; the sound of scratching as his hand drags
down his stubble, so fine and thin and light-colored that Grif didn’t even know he had
morning stubble until a few weeks ago. In a second, Simmons is going to get up, and Grif
will have to get up, and Grif will have to Do The Day, Again, Just Like He Did Yesterday.
The arm that Grif’s lying on doesn’t move. He’s going to move it in a bit, Grif knows. Not
yet. But he will. He did it yesterday. He’ll do it again today. And tomorrow, too. Time to get
up. Again. Again.
*
So it’s at least worth mentioning: the crash happened, and then they fucked around in a
canyon or a bit, and it was kind of shitty, okay, they can all admit that; they went a little stir
crazy in there and may have almost started the robot uprising apocalypse, but nobody knows
except Donut because only Donut speaks Spanish and also if Donut said it happened then
automatically nobody cares.
The thing about being stranded in the middle of nowhere is that suddenly nobody has a
choice about what you can eat. Everyone has rations. And you have rations because if you eat
more than you physically have, then you die. You don’t have a choice. Nobody has a choice.
Wash tells you what to eat, and then you eat it. Like a fun and friendly straitjacket.
Also, Wash was definitely acting like they were all going to dehydrate to death in a matter of
days—which, technically, they would have if they’d run out of water—but they really were
only there for like, a week, tops. The fact of the matter is that they weren’t even there long
enough to settle into a routine or form any habits, and then after that they wound up with that
Felix nonsense, and then they were on the run for a while, et cetera, et cetera. And for better
or worse, they haven’t really been in any place long enough for anything too terrible to
happen vis a vis eating. Simmons might not know what the hell is going on with his mental
health, but without a stable set of daily routines, there simply isn’t even any time to fuck
himself up.
That’s happened before. Simmons sometimes tried to think that uprooting himself and
moving his whole life and destroying all his routines and habitual times for purging will
finally kill the cycle—maybe this time, uprooting everything will finally kill it. He’s not that
optimistic anymore.
Simmons used to always think that Grif was a real downer, being so cynical, assuming the
worst of every situation. Now he figures that it’s just preparation of another kind. (Grif, on
the other hand, used to always think that Simmons was hopelessly naïve, assuming that
actually trying to succeed in the military system would get him anywhere; now he wonders
where Simmons’s endless optimism went, and whether it was as exhausting as Grif
remembers it if Grif now finds himself missing it.)
*
Chorus has mealtimes. Breakfast, every day. Lunch, every day. Dinner, every day. They’re
not great meals. Chorusian farmland got wiped out ages ago. They just happen to have even
preserved foods in packages to last them a good long while, and right now, nothing frightens
Kimball more than the idea of being so amped up and ready to fight a war, only to find out
that they’ll all starve to death before they even get the chance, so she sometimes just doesn't
check whether or not they even have food. (Doyle, on the other hand, did check, and found
they’d all be fine for at least another two years on what they had alone, and then said nothing
about it because he was more frightened of Kimball than he was of starving to death.)
Therefore, because there’s enough to eat with the large caveat that it’s just disgusting to eat,
all of Red team hunkers down at their table in the mess hall with their backs turned to the
Blues and surreptitiously tries to add Splenda to the weird oatmeal thing everyone was
assigned to eat. Sarge is on guard duty. The instant any Blue walks anywhere near them, his
job is to recite the entirety of the Top Gun movie at the top of his lungs, which, everyone
knows, is a “natural Blue repellant,” and also a most-human-beings repellant.
Anyway, Donut walks into breakfast with a pink smoothie.
Apparently, he reverse-engineered a blender (?) out of Lopez’s fingers (??), found “some pink
stuff that will probably not kill me” (???), and then put in the oatmeal-chicken gruel (????)
that they were being served that morning, and apparently is drinking pink freeze-dried
blended chicken for breakfast.
“It’s a health blend?” says Donut. “Everyone’s doing it; there’s entire Youtube playlists about
people’s fancy breakfast smoothies that are like, so healthy for your skin—”
“Yeah, made out of chia seeds and kale and other gross shit man was not meant to eat,” says
Grif.
“And aren’t those playlists four hundred years old?” Simmons adds.
“Seriously, don’t people grow grass out of chia,” says Grif.
“Why are you objecting to chia seeds when Donut just made a meat smoothie and then put
what’s probably some kind of edible make-up into a blender made of Lopez’s fingers?”
Simmons asks.
There’s a faint gurgling noise from Sarge’s direction as Sarge feels an emotion (it was
nausea) and then immediately attempts to suppress it.
“Besides, aren’t most vegetables a type of grass,” says Simmons.
“God,” says Grif. “Simmons, sometimes you say shit like you know what you’re talking
about so confidently that I just forget that you actually don’t know jack shit about anything
except math.”
Simmons brightens. “Really?”
“No,” says Grif. “I am acutely aware that you grew up in a high school locker and only just
peeled your pimply face off the gym floor at all times.”
Simmons lowers his nose to his breakfast bowl and mutters, “Yeah, but with math I can prove
that combining the beds was a superior move, so.”
Grif rolls his eyes and stabs his oatmeal; Sarge appears to have gotten over the threat of
having almost had an emotion and has returned to normal; the only person whose eyes are
wide open at this statement is Donut, who looks positively delighted at this statement. “Sorry,
go back,” he says. “You mathematically proved what?”
“It was a strategic move,” Simmons says adamantly. “There’s more room for both of us on
the bed if we put the bed together and share the combined space.”
“What are you, some kind of dirty communist?” Sarge says.
“Sharing something doesn’t make you automatically a communist,” Simmons says
“It does if you could have bought that space! You could be getting legal tender from Grif
right now for the use and rights to your bed-space! You could have bought his half of the bed!
Better yet, you could be charging him rent! Preferably at such a high rate that he’s barely able
to make payyments but not so high that he has to leave, so that you can continually extract
further payment that will keep him unhappy but unable to change the situation in any way,
shape, or form.”
Grif snatches a slice of bacon from Sarge’s plate.
“Hey! You have to pay for that! Or pay rent on that bacon!”
“Down with capitalism,” says Grif through his mouthful of bacon, and then: “Wait, how
would I pay rent on something I ate?”
“You don’t make the payment, I extract the equivalent weight of meat from your rotten,
thieving carcass.”
“I feel like this was the plot of a Shakespearean play,” says Donut thoughtfully.
“Exactly! And everyone knows that Shakespeare was one of the greatest capitalists of our
time, who definitely endorsed the endless marketization of everything from love to the
military industry!”
“That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about Shakespeare to dispute this,” says
Simmons.
“One of the greatest thinkers of our time who truly understood the permanence and undying
supremacy of the free market and industrialized warfare,” says Sarge.
“That also doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about economics or love to dispute
this,” says Simmons.
“Do we know enough about war to dispute it,” says Grif.
“Considering that we only ever participated in a fake war for no point or purpose? And then
wound up on Chorus which was also a fake war? Probably not.”
“So we just don’t know enough about anything to say jack shit,” says Grif.
Donut pats Grif’s shoulder. “Oh, don’t worry about it. Nobody knows enough about anything
and we all say a whole bunch of shit all the time!”
“Is that supposed to be reassuring?” Grif asks, just as Sarge whips out a pencil and begins
drawing up a rent plan for Grif to use one half of Simmons’s bed.
“Sir, if he’s using one half of my bed and I’m using one half of his bed, doesn’t that come out
to no payment either way?” Simmons says.
“Not if your rate is higher! And your real estate is obviously worth way more by virtue that it
is untouched by Grif-cooties.”
“But he’s been sleeping on it. It’s got Grif-cooties all over it.”
“Yes, but it’s still your bed, and therefore is worth more because your name brand is attached
to it! Whereas the Grif name automatically devalues everything to a negative value by
default.”
“Now I’m a name brand?! Selling what? Who’d want to have anything associated with me?”
“Wait,” says Grif, whose entrepreneurial, conniving, opportunistic ears have suddenly pulled
themselves out of existential angst over the relentless regime of capitalism and have wrapped
all the way around to wanting to maximize the regime of capitalism for his own comfort and
entertainment to escape from petty boredom. “Wait, no, we can work with this—”
“Don’t agree with me, Private Grif, it puts my stomach off,” says Sarge.
“Well, no, listen for a second—if we just rebrand Simmons’s entire angsty, brooding,
troubled nerd stereotype and make him instead a wholesome nerd, we could market his bed
as, I dunno, an idol merchandise kind of thing? Play off the supposed heroics that the Reds
and Blues have done? He’d be good advertising at least for the whole idea; if he’s depicted as
just shy and nervous but otherwise well-meaning, instead of the truth we all know and love
that Simmons is a nasty irritable piece of shit—”
“I’m literally right here listening to you say these things,” says Simmons.
“—then we could make him a posterboy for something like, I dunno—how does advertising
work these days—associate it with the fulfillment of your life and satisfaction with your
career if you get to look at this magical bed—”
“I hate this,” says Sarge. “Capitalism has gone too far. It’s time to pack up and make a
socialist escapist society on the moon, boys.”
Which is unfortunately the wrong thing to say if Sarge wanted Dexter Grif to stop talking,
who is actually delighted with this turn of events: “C’mon, look at how that whole Felix thing
went down,” Grif says, with a huge, shit-eating grin. “People aren’t smart. Sell Simmons
right and we could have anyone thinking that their military career will boom if they just have
something of the magic sauce that Simmons has got in that magic bed—”
“First of all, stop calling my bed magic,” says Simmons. “And second of all, what if I don’t
want anyone in my bed except Grif.”
Donut chokes on his breakfast smoothie.
“But money,” Grif wheedles, and Simmons scowls at him over his coffee until Grif takes the
hint.
“The bed-sharing thing is only a pure math issue,” Simmons insists. “If a twin mattress has
dimensions of thirty-eight inches by seventy-five inches, then a twin area has the surface area
of twenty-eight hundred and fifty square inches. But a human body—”
“Oh, god, he’s back on this again,” says Grif.
“—especially two guys like me and Grif who are large, can’t fit on that sort of surface area
comfortably. Say, if a body needs three inches or more around it to feel like it isn’t falling off
the bed, then a twin isn’t necessarily going to be enough; Grif and I would have something
closer to two inches or so of perimeter—”
“Make him stop,” Grif moans, and Sarge stares at Simmons with a kind of horrified
fascination.
“—so by combining the two beds, we’ll both have four inches of perimeter at minimum.
QED: It’s only mathematically logical to share a bed—”
“That’s not how surface area works!” Grif snaps. “The dimensions are multiplied, not
added!”
“How would you know! You don’t even know how to use a calculator!”
“Because I never needed one! I just do calculus in my head like a normal person!”
“You can’t fool me! Doing math in your head is a myth made up by honors students to make
regular students feel bad!”
“In retrospect,” Donut observes, “it’s really less surprising that you two were already married
and more surprising that you two haven’t divorced yet.”
“What’s so surprising about it,” Simmons retorts. “We’ve basically already divorced, and you
can’t get divorced if you’re already divorced. Therefore we can’t get divorced.”
“And you can’t get married if you’re already married,” says Grif dryly. “It’s basically the
perfect tactic to make sure that nothing happens ever for any reason.”
Donut opens his mouth. “Don’t say things that make sense while I’m upset with you,”
Simmons snaps at Grif, and without a word, Donut closes his mouth, gives Sarge a
meaningful look, and downs the entirety of his smoothie.
*
There’s a fairly standard rotation in which people who are assigned to eat breakfast go in
staggered groups, so that technically only one third of the army at any given time is eating
breakfast. Everyone else is busy doing something or other to make sure they don’t die while
people get grub in their stomachs. There’s a fifteen minute overlap for the guard shift, so the
actual moment of group rotation isn’t a weak point for an attack. The people who’re assigned
to eat breakfast first are required to pick up a gun beforehand (Kimball’s idea, opposed by
Wash and Doyle, who are rightfully concerned about a Feds vs News shootout in the middle
of the mess hall). The list of contingencies go on and on, because that’s what happens when
you’re in the middle of war and people still have to go about their daily lives.
At precisely six-fifteen in the morning, it doesn’t matter if you’re done or not done eating;
you have some place to be and you’re not allowed to eat on your shift, so you have to throw
it away. When Simmons was in college, he used to dream about that sort of totalizing
instruction, telling him precisely where to go and where to be and how to be, without room
for argument or excuse; now that he’s got it, he wonders what the hell he’s doing as he slides
in to the Armonia armory, pulls up a wooden chair, and consigns himself to the first six hours
of his shift with Grif.
That is, Simmons is in the middle of a legitimate, actual, real war.
And he’s going to spend the next six hours waiting.
Like he did in Blood Gulch.
And in Rat’s Nest.
And in Valhalla.
And on the Hand of Merope.
There’s something about where you are that makes you who you are. People say that you can
never go home because you’ll have changed irrevocably and when you go back home it
won’t be the same, and all that jazz about war veterans, right? But Simmons suspects that’s
not true. If you go back to where you came, you’ll become again who you were.
The armory in Armonia is the same as Rat’s Nest’s: a bunch of shelves, piles of shit that
nobody sorted out, a bunch of computer terminals you’re supposed to use to sort out all the
shit, an obscure filing system that the last people who ran this place either didn’t know how
to use or didn’t want to use. There’s a counter and a little window where a line forms for
everyone to check out their weapon of the day. There’s a single-stalled bathroom just around
the way that Simmons has never been in.
It seems like a lot of effort for Simmons to spiral into a hot mess. It requires way more energy
to vacillate wildly between fucking yourself up and trying to repair yourself after fucking
yourself up, than it does to just chill the goddamn hell out. But Simmons knows. It doesn’t
matter how terrible it is to be crazy and fucked up; it’s still better, always, than waiting; and
just then, he gets a message from Jensen about if he’s free at lunch, could she talk to him
about something not super important but it’s just a tiny thing if it won’t bother him at all,
really, and then Simmons sets about waiting for that, too.
*
It’s unbelievable how many times a day you’re supposed to eat. It’s almost a little
unbelievable that not only does Red Team expect to see Simmons at lunch, but his actual
lieutenant wants to see him there. Surely Simmons doesn’t have to actually eat three whole
times a day, and that people will be concerned if he doesn’t?
It’s very fortunate that other people want to see Simmons at lunch, because Grif doesn’t want
to be the person to do it. He doesn’t want to be the person to expect or ask Simmosn to get
better or be better, because his whole life people have been asking Grif to do or be better
without ever giving him a good reason why, and he’s only ever wound up resenting them.
And if given the choice between risking Simmons getting worse and Simmons resenting him,
Grif is one-hundred-percent the coward who will choose the latter, every time.
Because of the way the daily schedule works out, they’ve got twenty-two minutes to eat.
Simmons feels a little bit like he’s taking a timed test. Also, he didn’t study for any of it.
Also, he’s beginning to suspect that there’s no right answer.
When Jensen comes by with a nervous smile and a little wave, Tucker is already doing that
thing again where he lives off juice, popcorn, candy, and cookies. (Tucker eats worse food
than Grif, but nobody makes fun of him for it because Tucker isn’t fat. Simmons knows this,
but not as much as Grif who’s only been salty about it for ten years and has never said
anything because nobody else in the Reds and Blues is fat. Whatever. Grif is trying to be
okay with the fact that some things nobody will ever understand, and he’ll just have to stop
expecting it.) Caboose is eating a plate of pasta, but is also making it into funny shapes while
getting oil all over his fingers. Donut is attempting to color-coordinate his plate, and
Simmons is vaguely concerned that Donut is going to pull out a salt-shaker full of glitter,
which Donut already did once before Sarge confiscated it.
“Uh, don’t mind these guys,” says Simmons, already becoming nervous because he can see
Jensen’s face and she’s such a girl and also a teenager and literally the exact kind of person
who used to shove him in a literal locker when he was a kid, but Jensen beams with her teeth
full of braces, looking at Simmons like he hung the moon in the sky, and Simmons is
suddenly desperate to not have this meal go off the rails. He doesn’t want to make Jensen
uncomfortable. He doesn’t want Jensen to know that he’s a fucking mess at age thirtysomething. He doesn’t—what’s the thing people always say? Kids imitate adults, right? (And
also adults imitate adults?) He doesn’t want Jensen to wind up a fucked-up eater like him.
Anything but that.
Jensen’s got a bowl of soup. Simmons has a bowl of soup. Grif has an MRE and half a loaf of
bread that Simmons knows he stole.
Simmons glances nervously around him at all the fucking clowns he hangs around with, with
their sitcom eating habits, all of which Simmons knows if he imitates, he’ll just look even
more insane than he already does. Jensen picks up her spoon. She glances at the soup, but
doesn’t examine it overlong. She doesn’t pick anything out, and doesn’t push the food
around. She just puts her spoon in, blows on the soup, and puts it in her mouth.
Like it’s that easy.
There’s a model of eating disorder recovery that terrifies Simmons to this day called the
Maudsley model, which often says that the reason why teenagers wind up with eating
disorders is because their parental influence isn’t strong enough, and therefore the way to
solve this is to have the child sit with their parents while the parents breathe down her back
and watch her every move and give her no opportunity to cook for herself or make any of her
own choices and, quite often, force a girl who is unwilling to recover to eat more against her
will. (Which is sometimes necessary, considering the damage some people do because they
refuse to recover, but—hell, Simmons isn’t a philosopher.) Either way, Maudsley is never a
problem that Simmons would ever have had as a teenager, considering that his parents were
oblivious to everything he did anyway, but one of the biggest aspects of ht eMaudsley model
is that the parent is expected to set a good example of what healthy eating is and should look
like. Leading by example, so to speak. For someone who spent almost thirty years of his life
wanting recognition from his father, the very idea of imitating his father—or his mother, for
that matter—kind of makes Simmons wants to tears his own skin off, like that could make
him unthink the very idea.
Jensen salts her bowl of soup by pouring the salt into her hand to measure the amount, then
brushing it into the soup and mixing it. Picks up another spoonful before she’s even stirred it
in all the way. Blows on it.
Hesitantly, Simmons reaches for the salt shaker before Grif can. Pours some onto his own
hand, eyeballing the same amount of salt. Dumps it into his own soup. Grif tries to look like
he isn’t watching this.
“—if that’s alright with you, sir,” Jensen is saying.
“What’s alright with who,” says Simmons.
“Absolutely not,” says Grif.
“Wait, no, say it again,” says Simmons.
“Oh, sthorry, it’sth the bracesth again that’sth messthing me up, isthn’t it? Sthometimesth I
don’t even understhand mysthelf, haha. I just thought it’d be neat to collab thisth way, sthir!
I’m sthur that if we work together, we could really do sthomething with the older
Warthogsth!”
“Uh-huh,” says Simmons, and clears his throat and tries to look like he knows what collab
she’s talking about.
“But if it’sth too much work—”
“It is,” says Grif unhelpfully.
Simmons smacks him.
“Can you, um, walk me through the collab process again?” says Simmons, and then mentally
congratulates himself on translating “I don’t fucking understand anything about anything”
into business-professional-speak.
“Oh, you don’t have to be nicthe about it,” says Jensen mournfully.
“Mhm,” says Simmons, still hoping for Jensen to actually repeat what she said so he can
figure out what he’s agreeing to in the first place.
“I know that Kimball technically sthaid that sthe wouldn’t have anything to do with it, and I
know that you probably don’t want to get in trouble with her…”
“Wait, this is illegal?” Grif interrupts.
“Sthe just sthaid sthhe wouldn’t have anything to do with it, isth all. And if the Warthogsth
blew up, then…”
“If the Warthogs what,” says Simmons.
“I’m not that bad at fixing carsth,” says Jensen sadly. “But it’sth a lot easthier to fix carsth
that already exist, you know? Than to justht build entire new ones.”
“And… why aren’t we fixing the cars that already exist?” Simmons asks.
Jensen doesn’t even give him a weird look, bless her. “Because it was Bittersth’s job,” she
says irritably. “And he doesthn’t want to do it, and General Kimball sthay’sth it’sth more
trouble than it’sth worth to make him cooperate.”
“That’s true,” says Grif. “It’s a legitimate strategy.”
“But if we don’t have carsth, what are we going to win the war with?!” says Jensen.
“Guns,” says Grif.
“We have to get the gunsth to the right placesth to sthoot the gunsth!”
“Long range guns,” says Grif.
“All you want to do is fix the Warthogs?” Simmons asks in disbelief.
“Yesth, sthir.”
“And Bitters won’t even help you do that?”
“No, sthir,” says Jensen, looking sour.
Simmons gives Grif a look. Then he looks down at this soup. Looks at Jensen shoving a bite
in her mouth unhappily. Looks back down at his soup.
Lunch was the first meal he learned to throw up. Odd thing to remember. After lunch,
everyone’s lethargic, and in middle school and high school, recess always came after lunch.
Even now, after this is another shift at the armory, and Simmons could tell Grif whatever he
likes and Grif won’t question it—or Grif would, but Grif wouldn’t say anything—and then
Simmons could go and throw up soup, of all things to purge.
“But I abstholutely understhtand if you have too much work to do,” Jensen says hastily. “I
wouldn’t want to give you even more work than I’m sthure you already have, sthir!”
Simmons opens his mouth. “No, dude,” says Grif. “Don’t do it. Don’t—”
“Actually, I can help you with that,” says Simmons. “I don’t know if I know anything about
cars, but…”
Jensen lights up. “Oh! Thank you, sthir!”
“Have I mentioned I don’t know anything about cars?”
“Thank you stho much,” says Jensen as if she hadn’t heard him. “It really isthn’t possthible to
do any of thesthe repairsth without that soldering iron, and Kimball definitely did expressthly
forbid me usthing it!”
“Wait,” says Simmons.
“I really means stho much that you’d sthtick your neck out for me like that,” says Jensen.
“General Kimball would be furiousth if she knew!”
“Ah,” says Simmons.
“You’re the best, sthir!” says Jensen cheerfully, a huge grin on her face, and picks up her tray
and bounces away like she’s on Cloud Nine.
“Hm,” says Simmons.
“Jensen with a soldering iron,” says Grif.
“Yeah,” says Simmons.
“You really thought that idea through, huh?” says Grif.
“Aren’t you the one who knows something about cars?” Simmons demands. “If you’re so
concerned about Jensen messing up the cars, why don’t you fix the cars yourself?”
“Me, do extra work? It’s like you don’t even know me.”
Ten years into knowing Grif, and for the first time, Simmons’s reaction to Grif avoiding work
isn’t immediate disgust. If anything, he wonders if maybe Grif has a point: Everyone knows
that stress exacerbates your bad coping mechanisms, right? Right? Therefore, it is definitely
bad to put himself in a stressful situation, right? Isn’t Simmons trying to avoid bad coping
mechanisms like spiraling out of control for days on end, and therefore Simmons should
avoid stressing himself out, right?
Definitely Simmons should just do absolutely nothing for days on end in the name of “selfcare,” right? That’s what Grif does.
Funny how it never seems to make Grif any happier.
*
So that’s how Simmons winds up next to Jensen underneath a billion-ton Warthog suspended
from a rusty ceiling, doing work for the army that the army would actually punish them for
doing that Jensen, the overachiever, nevertheless insists on doing anyway, because Jensen is
like some sort of Ghost Of Christmas Past that has come to punish Simmons for being the
way he is.
Jensen’s up to her forehead in grease and she’s getting cranky because the Warthog won’t
cooperate with whatever she’s trying to do, which Simmons really should understand and did
his best to understand, but he’s not a mechanical engineer, sorry. Nothing’s been working out.
She’s melted more than a few wires. She’s really only digging a hole with her own
incompetence, really, and Simmons can’t even stop her before she does it because he knows
even less than she does.
“Well, we can just… leave it alone for now?” says Simmons, knowing that that’s not the right
advice to give but unsure how he knows that, but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t have
anything better to say. On the other hand, if something isn’t working, then you should give it
up, especially if it only gives you heartache. Right?
Like a bad breakup with a shitty boyfriend. But for life circumstances. Put on your Elle
Woods wig and pretend to be donut and give yourself your own affirmation that “you
deserved better than trash like that, gurl” and maybe eat some ice cream (if you can do that
without panicking over calorie content).
“But if I don’t fix it, nobody will!” Jensen says angrily.
“Well—”
Jensen bangs the soldering iron against the Warthog. The whole thing sways in its
suspensions not one foot above Simmons’s head. Simmons feels his soul attempt to jump out
of his body. “Sthorry, sthorry, I didn’t mean… sthorry,” says Jensen hastily. She sounds
hugely guilty, but hell if Simmons can tell beneath her helmet. “I’m not upsthet. Justh
frustrated! If Bittersth would have just helped…”
Her hand on the wrench clenches again. “Wait, okay, what about Bitters?” Simmons asks
before she can hit anything that’s perfectly posed to fall and crush them. (He also takes the
moment to check that his armor is functional and autosealed, because he’s not dying by being
crushed by a car. That’s a Wash way to go, AKA a Blue way to go.)
“I told Bittersth to help me with the Warthogsth and he sthaid no because Kimball hadn’t
required it,” Jensen says, quite (ironically) bitterly.
“Maybe he doesn’t want to get in trouble? Since Kimball didn’t require it?”
“No, he doesthn’t want to do anything,” snaps Jensen.
“Maybe we should take a break,” says Simmons. His armor is telling him that his heart rate
registers at cardio-level strain, which could be from the Pavlovian response to girls, Jensen
actually raising her voice for once in her life, or the car dangling one foot above his face. All
of these seem equally dangerous.
“No, I can make it work—”
“I really think we should take a break,” says Simmons.
Jensen’s head falls back on the floor. She’s still pissed. If Simmons had let her burn out on
her own, she would have come around on her own, but now it just seems like Jensen is pissed
at him for telling her to not be pissed. Great. Fuck. Simmons was not meant to deal with
teenagers. He’s basically a teenager himself, just also thirty-something years old.
“Uh, well, um, I think I need a break,” says Simmons, and scooches his way out from under
the Warthog. Grif’s reclining on a half-broken office chair with his feet propped up on the
armory counter window, reading what looks to be a porn magazine in broad daylight, and
Simmons wonders if it’s too late to beg Grif to go and bond with the teenager instead of him,
except that he knows that Grif also wouldn’t do jack and shit unless Kimball required it of
him, and maybe not even then.
Grif’s trying to look at tits but mostly he’s thinking about lunch. Not his lunch. Simmons’s
lunch. And when that whole thing where Simmons imploded on the Hand of Merope for a
hundred days straight is going to happen again. Because it’s going to happen again, Grif is
absolutely sure of it, and it’s only a matter of time, because people don’t change and Grif
does not expect Simmons to change. Mostly, Grif doesn’t even have expectations for any one
of the clowns that he’s wound up cruising with for the last ten years, because he knows them
and he figures they’re all useless garbage of social refuse anyway, and he really quite likes
the fact that he has nothing to lose by hanging out with these assholes because he can’t
possibly fuck up if he’s already fucked up, correct? So Grif, maybe, is hoping that Simmons
will just hurry it up and get it over with and fuck everything up, so that this way Grif can skip
right past the disappointment and the hurt feelings and just clip straight to resignation and
despair. You get on a ship like Hand of Merope and you know exactly what to expect: you get
on, you feel like you want to die for a hundred days straight, and then you get off at Blood
Gulch and then you feel like you want to die for the rest of your life, and then you die. And it
never gets any better, and it never gets any worse. And if Simmons would go off into his
crazy-person spiral, lurking in his room, staying up all night—Grif remembers that weird
glint in his eye that he’d get when someone brought up food or he’d been awake too long,
remembers that look he’d gotten when he’d punched a mirror in the middle of the night—bad
news in a human body, that’s for sure, but at least you knew what kind of news it was. At
least if Simmons went off on a spiral, Grif could know which direction he was going, which
would be down. Not like Hand of Merope wasn’t a hundred days of wanting to punch
Simmons in the fucking mouth because that dude just couldn’t get his shit together and Grif
wasn’t sure if he was supposed to understand how or what was going on or why he couldn’t
just fucking eat and why Simmons had to make everything a federal fucking issue in his head
to the point that he’d disappear for days; Grif tries to remind himself that the Hand of Merope
was a very special kind of shitty, that he shouldn’t fall into that dumbass thing where
everything’s better in hindsight, if you reconstruct it after the fact. But on the other hand, if
you acknowledge that things have always been shitty, then you might actually wind up
arguing to yourself that the way things are now are better, and then all of a sudden you get
Kai standing in the middle of Blood Gulch saying “Things get better” unironically and
genuinely and that simply, cannot be true, because it wasn’t true then, and Grif can’t expect
things to have changed so that it can be true now.
“What if you hit that little knob over there,” says Simmons, pointing to a little… something
attached to the bottom of the Warthog.
Jensen pulls her helmet off. Her face has the expression of someone trying really hard not to
say something way more sarcastic than the situation deserves. “Have you ever fixed a car
before, sthir?” she says, which, wow, if that was Jensen pulling her punches, Simmons
doesn’t want to know what the actual punch was.
“Um,” says Simmons. “Look. I don’t really know what to say about the Bitters thing. If
Bitters knows something about cars, then maybe we should ask him…”
“He’ll just refusthe,” says Jensen shortly.
Simmons sighs and tells her that’s true, but mostly because he could play out that script with
Grif in his head on command: Simmons asks Grif to do something, Grif says something
caustic about Sarge, Simmons defends Sarge, begin banter about something Sarge did,
Simmons gets off topic and forgets about the thing he was asking Grif to do and therefore
crisis averted, Grif doesn’t have to do work anymore. Simmons snaps his fingers. “I’ll make
Grif do it!”
“Oh! Yesth, good idea, sthir!” says Jensen brightly. “Sthergeant Grif couldn’t say no to you!”
“I mean. He says no to me all the time. About a lot of things. And a lot of important things,”
says Simmons. “Look—HEY! Grif!”
“What?!” Grif calls back.
“Can you do something for me?!”
“Fuck no!”
“Don’t listen to him,” says Simmons to Jensen. “He can’t get rid of me. I’ll wear him down.”
“I heard that! I’m going to leave you one day, mark my words!”
“He’s not going to,” Simmons tells Jensen.
*
Simmons proceeds to ask Grif to do something for him no less than forty-three times until
Grif stops counting out of spite, and then finally, when Simmons keeps it up while they’re
getting ready for bed in the dark, Grif finally throws himself facedown on the mattress and
concedes, because literally what the fuck, Simmons, can you just give it a rest? What is it?
Do you need help organizing your socks again? Did you come up with another weird suck-up
scheme to prove to Sarge tat you’re not a racist? What?
And Simmons has the fucking nerve to look at him while they’re in bed together, in their
cramped Reds-and-Blues shared room with the lights off, wearing matching grimy army tshirts, and say: “I need you to talk to Bitters.”
“I’d really rather you just shot me,” says Grif.
“He’s not that bad.”
“Is he your lieutenant?” Grif snaps. “I’ll be the judge of what’s bad or not, and I guarantee to
you that not only is Bitters a fucking waste of a human being, but he always has been and
always will be.”
“Guys, we’re trying to go to sleep!” Tucker calls from the other side of the room. “If you’re
going to have weird pillow talk involving trash-talking some seventeen-year-old kid, keep it
down!”
Grif shoots Tucker an unpleasant look in the dark room, then turns back to Simmons: “No,
dude, you cannot convince me to talk to Bitters. Not ever. Not for any reason whatsoever.
And what the fuck are you getting involved in Jensen’s shit for anyway? Leave her alone. If
she wants to do things for this army, that’s her business.”
“Isn’t she my lieutenant?” Simmons asks. “Also, aren’t we part of this army, so it kind of is
my business?”
“We’re not really part of this army.”
“We’re not ‘really’ part of anything. I’m not really part of Red Team if you think about it,
because Red Team is fake.
“No, you’re not part of Red Team because you defected to Blue Team that one time.”
“Just talk to Bitters! Literally all you have to do is go up to him and say mean shit about him
until he does what you ask him to, and you already say mean shit about him on your own. All
you have to do it do it to his face!”
“I don’t take orders from Blues,” Grif says.
“I’m not a Blue!”
“We don’t want him!” Tucker calls from the far side of the room.
“And you can’t have him!” Sarge calls from other side.
“Yes, I don’t really want Simon on Blue Team,” says Caboose.
Simmons makes a choked wheezing noise and mumbles “oh ok sure thing Caboose” while
sounding like Caboose just shot his dog in front of him.
“No, we’re not having a whacky Red vs Blue argument at ten at night,” says Wash’s voice.
“Then get us some separate rooms, damn! What do you expect from us when we can literally
hear everything those two goons have to say?!”
“Good night,” says Wash.
“Listen to your leader, Blues,” says Grif.
“Reds don’t even listen to your—”
“Good night,” Wash says angrily, and Grif and Simmons give each other a Significant Look,
still talking shit even silently and in the dark.
Fast, Slow
There’s a knock at the door. Simmons peels his eyes open. He looks supremely awake, just
by dint of his eyes being wide and open. Grif, who has definitely not spent long amounts of
time looking at Simmons’s eyes and his soft, light brown eyelashes, thinks suddenly about
when they’d first installed Simmons’s robotic eye.
They say that eyes are the windows to the soul, except that now Grif’s got one of Simmons’s
and Grif know eyes aren’t windows to jack shit. Simmons’s robotic eye is a rickety piece of
shit colored gunmetal grey and laserpoint red. Grif still wonders if that’s how all of
Simmons’s robotic parts look, because Simmons’s robotic arm is the same shade of gunmetal,
and Grif thinks: Well, by that logic, all of Simmons’s organs might be the same color.
Simmons’s guts themselves might be made of guns. Or maybe the laser-red of Simmons’s iris
really is actually the color of his insides, Simmons is just a show of light tricks in a human
suit, and if Grif looks under his skin, he’ll find that the person he’s practically hitched his
whole life and self and heart to was only a collection of light without lightbulbs.
Anyway, if Grif thought that Simmons getting his eye replaced with a laserpointer would
have made his face any less expressive, Grif was wrong. An eyeball is just an eyeball. It’s
round and sees shit. Turns out it’s the face around the eyeball that actually makes the
expression that people thinks are in eyeballs. Simmons’s face is thirty-five percent metal
grafts, sixty-five percent skin, and a hundred percent mobility to make every single type of
frown that was ever possible. And besides, even if Simmons wasn’t capable of being pissed
off with his face in inventive and irritating ways, Grif can see expressions in Lopez’s face is
he tries hard enough, and Lopez’s face is a helmet, so maybe Simmons’s face doesn’t need to
do anything at all for Grif to see what he wants to see in it.
Simmons’s eyes look wide awake right now and the guy at the door hasn’t even finished his
speil about how if sirs would just actually get up at the alarm like every other human being in
this army then this wouldn’t have to be a federal fucking issue, especially since literally
everyone else doesn’t have this particular problem that requires Agent Washington to send
some unsuspecting rookie scrub to wake up Chorus’s famous disaster heroes, so could sirs
maybe please come out now so that he can go away and stop embarrassing himself standing
outside the Reds and Blues’ door like some kind of stalker fan? Any second now, Simmons is
going to tell the kid that they’re awake and therefore he can fuck off (but in like, Simmonsese, so Simmons will probably say something dumb like yes of course we’re super functional
and very awake and please let Kimball know how prompt and punctual I am), and this way
Grif can pretend he can get away with not getting ready to do this stupid day again, for what
feels like the millionth time. They just keep on waking up, and keep on going to work, and
keep on going to breakfast and lunch, and keep on going to sleep, and keep on having to do it
again the day after. Resistance is futile, which is why Grif does so much of it, if only so that
he can put off the day for ten more seconds.
Unfortunately, Simmons looks very awake and is thinking of basically nothing at all. He’s
way too tired to have thoughts. He woke up half a second ago. His brain won’t be online for
another minute at least. He isn’t worrying about the future and he’s not thinking about the
past. His brain lies completely empty in the dark bedroom, at peace, and he can’t even think
enough to appreciate it.
*
Twenty minutes later:
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN A DOZEN GUNS ARE MISSING,” Simmons shrieks.
“Haha, oh, fuck, I thought you were talking to me,” sys Grif, while Simmons grips the
monitor so hard it creaks. “Dude, lay off that thing. It’s probably just broken or something.”
“It’s not broken! Look at it! It says right there that the guns that were assigned to Squad 40
are all checked out and they’re not supposed to be because Squad 40 is going to be here in
twenty minutes!”
“Just because it says that doesn’t mean that’s true, Simmons,” says Grif without putting his
feet down from where he’s got them propped up on a crate. (It’s never too early in the day to
be too lazy to work.) “Maybe the catalog got fucked up or something. I dunno. Why are you
expecting an Excel sheet to tell you where a crate of guns are? Just use your eyes and look for
it.”
“Because it’s our job to keep track of where a thousand-something crate of guns are and I
don’t have that many eyes and put your fucking feet down and help me look for these guns.”
“It’s just a glitch in the system,” says Grif.
Thirty minutes later, they have found: no crate of guns, no trace of it, and no glitches in the
system.
“We’re probably not culpable for the not-glitch in the system,” says Grif first.
Simmons is dragging his hands through his hair, which gives it a nicely ruffled look that Grif
wants to see all the time. Preferably because he got his hands in there. “Why didn’t you
update the spreadsheet,” Simmons hisses.
“First of all, the fucking spreadsheet wasn’t going to save the guns from being stolen.”
“The spreadsheet is there to tell us when guns get stolen! And if you used the spreadsheet,
then we wouldn’t have to sit around and wonder if it was a glitch in the system or not and we
would have just known from the start that the guns were missing! We could be finding them
right now!”
“Yeah, that’s the other thing—second of all, why are you yelling at me instead of, you know,
going to find the guns, dude?”
“Because all you have to do! Is actually do the job we’re supposed to be doing! Which is to
fucking make sure we know where the weapons this army uses to stay alive is accounted
for!”
Grif scowls. “Either we have guns or we don’t, you know. Look in the fucking storage room.
Are there guns? Great, we’ll probably die anyway.”
“That’s not how it works and you know it—”
“This job is bullshit, dude,” Grif says. “They don’t really need someone to organize this
armory.”
“What?” says Simmons, and then: “No, shut up, I don’t care. Close your mouth! It doesn’t
matter if it’s a bullshit job! There’s guns missing and we would know they were missing with
receipts if I could trust you to actually use the fucking spreadsheet—"
“You’re going to yell at the minor inconvenience instead of the actual problem,” says Grif.
“Because you’re not helping the problem! You’re making it worse!”
“I’m not making anything worse! I just don’t do anything!”
“I KNOW,” Simmons snarls with such vitriol that Grif almost takes a step back. Even
Simmons blinks. Then he scoffs, and says bitterly, “Well, I guess it’s my fault, then, isn’t it? I
should have known that if I was going to walk away from this armory to help Jensen with the
Warthog, of course you wouldn’t do jack or shit while I was gone. If someone took the guns,
you probably handed the guns to them—”
“Hey!” Grif says. “Like I’d give them anything. What’s the point of slacking off if I’ve got to
get up to help a thief?”
“This isn’t—”
“Sirs?” says a girl’s voice.
Slowly, Grif and Simmons turn to look at the check-out window. Framed on the other side of
the metal counter is a group of twelve girls.
“As much as we enjoy watching you guys waste everyone’s time,” she says, “we actually
have things to do. If we could pick up our weapons for today…?”
Simmons begins to visibly sweat. As far as Simmons is concerned, Kimball herself is
standing in front of him, demanding to know why he hasn’t done his job and also is letting
down every authority figure who ever shoved itself into the memory of Simmons’s dad from
a decade ago. He swears it’s just a Pavlovian response. He swears that Pavlovian responses
were proven to extinguish themselves if they weren’t supported or reinforced with either
praise or punishment, and that the dogs did eventually unlearn the behaviors they’d been
trained into. He swears that he believes that that’s true, mostly because he has to and he can’t
bear the thought that he’ll just drop everything he’s ever learned in the last five years at the
sight of a single authority figure for the rest of his life and that he’ll always be this way. On
the other hand, the Pavlovian lizardbrain in the back of his head doesn’t believe that any state
of being exists that isn’t the one he’s in right this second, and that he’ll be this way forever
and ever, and if he dares move past this moment, he’ll just cease to exist as he is altogether,
raising and killing and shedding iterations of himself as he moves forward from second to
second. In sum: Simmons is going to be scared of girls for the rest of his life, but especially
this girl who could rat him out to Kimball and tell everyone that Simmons isn’t doing his job.
“Right! Yes! Your guns!” Simmons chirps. “The guns that we have