Fic: I Figured Out What We're Missing (Generation Kill)

[crime_and_ink]

Title: I Figured Out What We’re Missing

Rating: PG-13 for swearing.

Word count: 1,233

Disclaimer: This is based on the depiction of the characters in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill. No offence is meant to the real men.

Characters and pairings: Ray Person.

Summary: Back when it happened, they called it the apocalypse, but Ray thinks that’s bullshit because the apocalypse ends everything and it doesn’t end, it just keeps getting shittier.

Note: For the square ‘post-apocalyptic’ on my au_bingocard.The first in the Goodbye to the Sky ‘verse that’s going to have at least two fics in it (probably more focusing on other characters). The next one will include Walt, Brad and Nate.

When it happened, they called it the apocalypse, but Ray thinks that’s bullshit because the apocalypse? It’s the end of the world and that means that everything’s supposed to stop after that and, since Ray himself was born after the apocalypse, he’s pretty sure that the apocalypse was a lie.

It was a fucking disaster—not that that’s saying much now, not when there are people being born without bones and with their skin peeling away like they’re fucking onions, and every other week there’s something in the newspapers about a guy blowing a building full of people to pieces because the species is dying, or some such shit.

But that’s what they called it when they first happened, before they saw what was happening.

There are photos in some of the newspapers, lots of the older books, of cities with skylines that aren’t obscured by smoke, fog and something that’s called a cloud but never moves.

“Bullshit,” Ray says in the middle of one of his classes – seventeen, he’s seventeen and, if they still existed, he’d be thinking about maybe want to join the Marines or the old police force, and he still sort of thinks about it because he’s read the books and it sounds better than waiting to die in a town in the middle of nowhere – and the teacher scowls like he’s saying something she doesn’t want to admit to hearing. “People aren’t dying because we fucked up, they’re dying because some bastard got his hands on something he shouldn’t have and was too much of a retard to put the child lock on the fucking box.”

The words are the same ones he’s heard a thousand times before, since two weeks after he started at the high school (the old one burned down and, no, he didn’t have anything to do with it, it was all the chemicals in the walls and basement and the water, or maybe the bad wiring that’s everywhere) and it sounds like a sigh when she says, “Go to the principal’s office, Mr Person.”

“Open your books to page fifty-two,” he hears her say as he leaves the class.

He gets three weeks of detention: it’s worth it.

The thing Ray always remembers is that everything went black—or at least that’s what the history books say. Maybe people don’t remember, or didn’t see it, and so they just say that everything went black. He never saw it because he got the title of coming after and he’s never seen half the things that are mentioned in the older books.

Everything went black and the world didn’t end: no one’s seen the sky for black and grey clouds since.

His mom knows, of course, knows from the way he seeks out books that aren’t supposed to be read now, the reports he writes for school assignment and the way he makes the bullies’ hackles rise, that he’s already gone.

She hasn’t been out of the state since everything went black.

“I was your age when it happened. I went to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, and when I woke up, the sky was gone,” she says on his eighteenth birthday, handing him an envelope.

It’s not what Ray expects it to be, because he expects it to be a card or something

School finishes in a month: the bus ticket is for a week after he graduates. It’s an open return.

“I don’t want it to be the same for you,” his mom says by way of explanation.

The guys at school talk about the world like it’s somewhere that they’ve really been, instead of something that they’ve only read about in books—and not even the good books, they’ve only read the sanitised versions: the ones that leave out the mass murders that followed the blackout; the failure of everything people had been beginning to rely on; the way the world ripped itself apart and countries separated until people from other cities rarely strayed far from where they were born.

There was none of the advancement people pretend there was, and Ray stands in front of his class with a handful of note-cards that he doesn’t even glance at in one hand.

“There’s no fucking point in staying here,” he says, gesturing outside with the card and ignoring the horrified expression on the teacher’s face, the hesitance and fear on his classmates’ faces (they don’t look at him and they try not to listen, and Ray’s used it by now). “Everything they tell us, it’s all lies because they can’t fix it and it’s easier to watch us if we all stay in one place. On the plus side, if they want to kill us, they’ll only have to take aim and fire because almost everyone’s too retarded to think about running. Natural selection at its best.”

By the end of the debate – he wins, and he knows it’s only because his argument was solid and the guy he was up against was almost crying by the end, because no one else even thinks about leaving, and that’s pretty fucked up because isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Isn’t that what all the books – the ones his teachers would probably doubt that he knows exist, would never expect him to read – say? A messed up dream of getting in a car and driving until you hit a town, meet someone and realise that you’re stuck in the ditch? You’re not supposed to know you’re stuck before you’re even out of school.

When Ray gets home he’s a bruise on his throat and a cut above his life eyes – keep your fucking mouth shut and stop talking about things that don’t happen – because it’s always the same story, always the same guys waiting for him when school gets out.

Whatever. It’s not like they’re ever going to get past the city limits.

There was a guy, Kyle, or maybe more of a boy, because they were sixteen and stupid – too shit for brains to work out anything that didn’t involve someone touching our dicks, he said – but it was only once (he swears) and it ended a week later when the guy left town.

Ray doesn’t even remember his last name. He just knows he got beaten up for that too, because one of the bastards in his class saw them one night.

”Fuck you,” he snapped, and he already knew that they’d broken a rib and that his lip was going to sting like a motherfucker for days, blood all down the front of his t-shirt and, okay, it was more of a groan than a snap and they were already gone. “Fuck you all.”

Kyle gave him a map that his family had picked up on their way across the country. Half the cities on it don’t exist anymore, but Ray’s marked the ones that do with red ink.

One of them has a thick ring of blue ink around it as well.

Years before he was born, everything went black and then the sky was gone. The horizon isn’t visible, hidden by the dark clouds that don’t move, but the bus speeds towards it, heading into nothing, or something, whatever lies beyond that cloud, beyond the city limits.

Ray drums his fingers against the window and doesn’t wonder where he’s going. He’ll get there in the end.