Fic: We Were Elemental (1/?) (Crossover)
Apr. 6th, 2012 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crime_and_inkTitle: We Were Elemental (1/?)
Rating: PG-13 (at the moment)
Word count: 2,153
Disclaimer: This is based on the depiction of the characters in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill, The Pacific and Band of Brothers. No offence is meant to the real men.
Characters and pairings: Brad Colbert, Ray Person, Walt Hasser, Nate Fick, Joe Liebgott, David Webster, Babe Heffron, Eugene Roe, various other characters; Brad/Nate, Ray/Walt, Webster/Liebgott and Babe/Roe.
Summary: The final year of high school changes everything, and not always in the way they expect it to.
Notes: I suck at summaries, and titles. The summary will probably be changed. Future chapters will be long, since this one’s pretty much the set-up chapter.
I know the title is the cheesiest title that ever did cheese, but the alternative was worse—and Katy can vouch for that.
Thanks to blakesheltoned, padaguin, sharkhunter and ginnybadger for help with my question about the classes.
Title from Burn This City by Cartel.
Brad’s window creaked open just after midnight, catching halfway up before there was the thud of a fist against the frame and it was slammed up as far as it would go. Brad didn’t even bother to open his eyes, rolling over to face the wall and pulling the sheets up.
“Brad? Brad, are you awake?”
Of course he was awake. If he hadn’t been, the sound of Ray crashing across the backyard and climbing the tree outside his window would have woken him up in seconds. At least he didn’t use a ladder now. That thing had squeaked loud enough to wake his parents and the neighbours.
The floorboards creaked as Ray edged his way across the room – past the desk (walking into the desk chair in the process) and then right across the middle of the room, one of the floorboards giving a squeak that Brad suspected would wake his mom – until he was standing beside Brad’s bed.
Brad opened his eyes and rolled over. The glowing numbers on his alarm clock told him that it was a little after one in the morning. Ray was leaning over him, a bag slung over one shoulder as he toyed with what Brad was sure was a new bottle of Ripped Fuel.
“What?”
“Can I stay here tonight or am going to have to sleep in the tree? It’s a nice tree, but I really don’t want to sleep in it; I’d get splinters in my ass.”
“Why are you asking?” Brad rolled over again, but he waited until he heard Ray cross the room – two steps and a floorboard creaked, another one and the bed squeaked – before he closed his eyes.
Ray had been sleeping at his house since they’d both been young enough that climbing the tree without Mrs Johnson’s ladder had been impossible. Brad had never asked why, but he always let him stay. It wasn’t as if the second bed in his room had any use, anyway—it had just been left behind when his oldest sister, Emma, had left home and his other sister had agreed to swap rooms with him. In fact, Brad was sure that Ray had slept in it longer than Claire had.
“First day of school tomorrow,” Ray said and Brad tried to ignore him. “Did you hear about the road trip the guys who left last year took? They ended up stranded in some hick town in the middle of nowhere, and one of them got offered a twenty for a blowjob. And you call me a retard. I’d never try and get a stranger to blow me.”
“I’m trying to sleep.”
“I’ll give you some Ripped Fuel so you don’t fall asleep in class. Oh, do you remember when Luz fell asleep in Bio last year and Mr Moyles made him run up and down the corridor when he woke up? I think Skip and Malarkey still have the video if you don’t, but I can’t remember if they uploaded it to YouTube because—”
“I’d rather have the sleep.”
“...What?”
“Sleep. I want to sleep tonight, preferably without killing you first. I’ve seen what that shit does to you, and I don’t want it any closer to me than it is when you’re eating handfuls.”
Ray was mercifully quiet for several minutes until—
“Hey, maybe you’ll finally date someone who isn’t a bitch this year. Even for you, Karen was a special sort of hell beast, but I think that’s what happens when your parents are brother and sister.”
“You would know.”
Ray ignored him. Brad was used to it.
“Do you think Joe and David can make it through the year without trying to kill each other again? Last year was pretty fucking close until the last game. If someone breaks their ankle on the stairs again, I’ve got fifty bucks riding on Heffron since he was the one who broke his finger when he got it trapped in the emergency exit doors during the fire drill—or maybe Hoosier’s going to get food poisoning or some shit again, and he’ll fall down the stairs because his luck sucks. What do you think?”
I think it’s half one in the morning and you should shut the fuck up. Brad didn’t plan on saying it until he heard Ray take a deep breath and he could feel the relentless torrent of useless information that he was about to be on the receiving end of.
“Ray. Shut the fuck up.”
Thankfully, Ray did as he was told for once.
Brad woke up when Ray was already in the shower – singing along to the latest song that was stuck in his head, something about love or drugs or both – and dressed quickly. Claire was either still out or she was still asleep because she wasn’t banging on the door and demanding that Ray got out of my bathroom, you fucking retard! as she usually was.
He ran. Down the street and across the park, in the opposite direction from Ray’s house. He narrowly avoided being hit by someone who stepped out from behind a moving van with a box obscuring his face.
“You’re out early,” someone said from behind him.
Brad straightened up, but didn’t turn around. He’d heard the voice around school enough to know who it belonged to, even thought they’d never spoken, much less had a class together—unless homeroom was counted, but it was only fifteen minutes at their school and they’d never done more than pass a pile of newsletters out together on the first day of high school.
Nate Fick: the son of a Homicide detective who had transferred from Baltimore the summer before they’d started high school; liked by most people but didn’t seem to have any set group of friends; had never been seen groping someone after a big game, but plenty people wouldn’t mind being groped by him.
Not for the first time, Brad cursed Ray’s rarely surprising but often disturbing gossip network.
“So are you.”
Nate’s watched beeped, but he ignored it and asked, “Do you do this often?”
“Every morning,” Brad said and his phone started to ring, blaring out some sugary pop song that hadn’t even been on his phone the last time he’d set the ringtone. He knew that because he’d never had to search through the pockets on his windbreaker and sweatpants for a phone that was trying to tell him that he was a firework.
Fucking Person and his awful taste in music.
dude your mom made pancakes
And apparently Ray’s timing was even worse than his taste in music, because by the time Brad looked up, Nate had left.
Ray was slouching at the kitchen table, still eating his first plate of pancakes, when Brad came down from his shower. Well, eating wasn’t the right word for it. More of the syrup was around his mouth and dripping from his chin than was going in his mouth, and he was talking enthusiastically to Brad’s mom the whole time.
“We’re both taking Chemistry and Brad wanted to take Physics as well, but had to settle for Computer Science because not enough people wanted to take the class for the school to run the course, and now he’s going to spend the whole year bitching about it.” He wiped his chin on a paper towel and threw it at Brad, who caught it easily and tossed it in the trash. “Isn’t that right?”
His mom smiled fondly at Ray as she walked past and shouted up the stairs, “Claire, get up or you’re going to miss your bus!” She turned back to Brad and Ray, throwing the car keys Brad hadn’t even known that she’d had to Brad. “I found these on top of the fridge this morning.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Brad said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of Ray running the water to rinse his plate before he put it in the dishwasher. He rinsed Brad’s as well.
“Yeah, thanks, Mrs C—shotgun!” And Ray was out the door and halfway across the lawn without another word, leaving the door wide open behind him.
“There’s no one else here, you backwards hick,” Brad yelled after him.
His mom just laughed. Brad rolled his eyes – careful to make sure that his mom didn’t see him – and said goodbye to her before following Ray. How she could love Ray like a second son when he’d been tracking mud across her floors since he and Brad had been six years old, Brad didn’t know.
One thing he did know, as Ray’s words drifted over, was that he’d have to shut Ray up because there was no way that he was listening to Ray’s singing for the next half hour.
“For service and devotion...”
“Ray, no fucking country music!”
“Are you going home tonight?” Brad asked as they entered the classroom, ducking instinctively to avoid being hit by Malarkey’s paper aeroplane, and then Skip’s immediately afterwards.
Both hit Ray, who picked up the planes and threw them across the room, drawing a shout from Penkala as they both passed within centimetres of his face.
“That’s cheating!” he called. “You can only hit the person who hit you.”
“I wasn’t aiming for you.”
“Then your aim sucks.”
Brad waited until Ray was walking past him, well on his way to starting another all out paper aeroplane war – the one the year before had resulting in two people needing to go to the emergency room and one guy from another homeroom needing an eyepatch for a week – to shove him towards two of the only empty desks.
Their class was small, which was both one of the advantages of living in a small town and one of the disadvantages of living in a small town with a population which was slowly growing. While each homeroom class contained less than twenty people, the lower years had more people. It was nice to go to a school where you could easily recognise people and know how to avoid them, but finding the people you actually liked when the school was overflowing with people younger than you was a nuisance. In fact, Brad had been surprised that it hadn’t been some kid who hadn’t learned to stay out of Ray’s way who had been hit in the eye with the paper aeroplane.
“Can we get this done so that I can send you all off to wreak havoc somewhere I don’t have to work all day?” Mr Ferrier balled up some other stray paper aeroplanes and threw them in the trash. “Be quiet while I mark the attendance sheet and hand out the timetables, and please don’t do anything that I’ll have to file a report about.”
He looked at most of the class at the end. Brad was sure that the only reason Nate got a pass was because he was the only person who hadn’t been involved in any fights or pranks the year before.
Nate was deep in conversation with David Webster, apparently oblivious to the way the two girls a few desks in front of him were whispering and glancing back occasionally. Brad felt a surprising spike of annoyance. It was any of his business who was talking about Nate: they hardly knew each other.
“Has anyone here seen...” Mr Ferrier squinted at the sheet of paper, “Walt Hasser? He’s supposed to be starting today.”
Skip and Malarkey exchanged gleeful glances.
“New kid,” they said in perfect unison.
“Who cares?” Ray stabbed at the buttons on his phone. In response, the phone let out a wail and the screen went dark. “Piece of shit. Hey, Hoosier says that Joe’s got Chem with us this year. Shit, Schwetje’s in my English class. If he asks me how to spell ‘orange’ I’ll hit him with a dictionary—hey, maybe he’ll even learn something!”
“There will be no hitting of other students with dictionaries!” Mr Ferrier said as he walked past, still collecting the last few paper aeroplanes. “Not again, not after last year.”
“I’m snapping that DVD in half the next time you take it out,” Brad informed him, scanning his own timetable. A double period of Chemistry on Thursday afternoons; a double period of English and no Physics (which still irked him) on Fridays; Psychology, Computer Science, History and a Statistics class filled the rest of the slots. A quick look at Ray’s timetable showed that they were identical.
Ray stopped trying to switch his phone back on just long enough to grin at Brad and say, “I’ve got a copy on my laptop now, anyway, and I didn’t hit anyone with a dictionary: it was a thesaurus the size of his fucking head,” before he went back to his phone, humming along to a phone Brad only recognised because he’d seen the menu of that damn DVD dozens of times.
More Notes (or Music in Each Chapter, which can probably be easily guessed in this one, but hopefully later chapters will be a little less obvious):
Ke$ha – Your Love Is My Drug (Ray sings it in the shower)
Katy Perry - Firework (Brad’s ringtone)
Dolly Parton – 9 to 5 (Ray singing in the car)
Katy Rose – Overdrive (Ray’s humming it after talking about Mean Girls)
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 11:03 pm (UTC)2. I immediately pictured Nate's dad as Jimmy McNulty which I have no words for, lol. I love it.
3. Walt is the new kid. D'AWWWWW
I like where this is going!
no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-11 08:33 pm (UTC)2. And now I'm picturing Nate's dad as Jimmy McNulty...
3. :D
no subject
Date: 2012-05-12 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-11 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-11 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-08 12:35 am (UTC)So awesome! I like the sound of this, I love HS AUs
no subject
Date: 2012-05-11 08:42 pm (UTC)