Fic: Discovery 56738 (Generation Kill)

[crime_and_ink]

Title: Discovery 56738
Rating: G
Word count: 529
Disclaimer: This is based on the depiction of the characters in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill.
Characters and pairings: Ray Person, Walt Hasser.
Summary: Walt tries and fails to ignore Ray.
Note: For the prompt ‘oceanographers’ on my au_bingo

“Walt?”

He presses his eye against the eyepiece a little harder. Brad and Nate will be back in a few hours with the latest supplies, as well as batteries for the equipment that need them. s

“Waaalt?”

All Walt has to do is ignore Ray and not let him get started on one of his rants or explanations on why being a marine biologist sucks ass, or how everything they’re examining and going out to search for is going to rise up one day and take over the world as revenge for years of people dumping toxic shit in the water.

All he has to do is outlast Ray’s attempts to get his attention, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

“Waaaaaaalt?”

None of the cells look unusual or particularly unique. Walt switches the slide for the second without taking his eye away from the eyepiece, the technique honed by years of practice and almost a year of trying (and failing) to ignore Ray. Ten months of the expedition have gone by, but there’s probably going to be another year after the next two months are up, especially since they’ve managed to find things. Nothing huge, just a few little things and some parasitic fungi.

“What?”

“If we find anything, do you think they’ll name it after us? The Colbert-Fick-Hasser-Person whatever the thing is, or will the MEP take all the credit for it?”

The Marine Exploration Project takes credit for everything the marine biologists that work for it do, Walt almost reminds Ray, but stops himself before he rises to the bait. Saying that will mean that Ray will launch into a monologue about how the MEP are assholes who couldn’t find the bathroom, let along the fucking ocean, without a map and probably don’t even know how to calibrate their own microscopes or prepare slides because they’ve been sitting in their officers for so long. He’s heard variations of that particular rant enough times, so he neatly sidesteps the issue.

“What about that thing we found last month?” Walt asks, reluctantly moving away from the microscope and turning to look at Ray. He mentally searches for the nickname they gave it, but comes up blank. It was something Nate had to delete from all the official records, which means that Ray was probably the one who came up with it. “56738?”

Ray’s sitting with his feet up on scanning equipment worth thousands of dollars with one of the bags that are kept on the boat in case someone gets seasick – Walt hadn’t understood that until he made the mistake of starting an expedition with a hangover – on his head. It’s been cut to look like a crown. The remains of a melted McDonalds milkshake is dripping off his chin, landing on his t-shirt.

“The Sea STD? I don’t want them to name that thing after me. It looked like the bastard kid of syphilis and that blue waffles shit holding on to a dick!”

Walt decides to consider himself lucky that Ray’s not drawing the Sea ST—56738 on the walls. He goes back to his slides and hopes that Brad and Nate get back soon.