'JR' Sully (jrsully) wrote in spinningcompass, @ 2015-04-11 08:53:00 |
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Entry tags: | !closed, jake sully, ~jr sully |
Who: JR and Jake
Where: Sully House
What: Two veterans sharing the horrors of war.
When: Saturday morning
Rating: High for explicit talk of warfare
Open: No
Status: Completed narrative.
JR stretched and sat up in bed, pleased to have gotten a solid night’s sleep. There hadn’t been any nightmares for a change and he’d slept like a log. The birds were singing outside his window and the sun was just beginning to poke its head above the horizon, might as well get up and get a pot of coffee going. That thought in mind he rolled out of the rack, then slipped into a pair of sweatpants and a sleeveless t-shirt before making his way out of his room. He snagged his lighter and pack of smokes along with his phone on the way out, to give him something to do while the coffee brewed.
Before long he was in the kitchen and fiddling with the coffeemaker. He really needed to get one of those old fashioned percolating pots that he’d used back in the 40s. In his opinion brewing coffee with modern drip machines just didn’t give it the same flavor, it was weaker. But with a bit of grumbling and cursing the buttons on the electronic gadget he got the thing working and stepped just outside the door for a quick smoke.
***
Jake woke up with the sun. Well, his eyes cracked open a bit, and he automatically sat up and swung his legs out of bed. Something wasn't quite right, he thought, but he was far too bleary and sleep-addled to notice just yet. Padding over to the dresser, he fished out a pair of shorts and pulled them on, before stumbling out of his room and down towards the kitchen. There was coffee, he could smell it, and that would help clear the fog in his mind.
He was in the kitchen, rooting about in the cupboards for his mug, when the auto-pilot switched off. Last thing he remembered, he'd been in Laura's secure basement, spending most of his time as a cat. How the fuck had he wound up back in Tommy's house? Was Izzy going to string him up for apparently sleepwalking back to his own room through some of the most top-notch security he'd seen? "Oooh, fuck me," he muttered, looking all round and getting an eyeful of early morning sun as he did so.
Wait!
It didn't hurt. His eyes didn't hurt, not beyond the usual "stop looking at the sun, Skxawng" kind of hurting. And oh, thank Eywa, he wasn't hungry for anything other than coffee. He rummaged through the cutlery drawer and found a fairly big knife and held it up so he could look at the blade. He could see himself! He had a reflection! He even checked his pulse, and sure enough, he had one. "I'm not a vampire!"
***
"Haven't been in over a week." JR commented as he came back into the kitchen from his smoke break and overhearing his uncle's comment. His uncle who was an adult again apparently. He almost regretted that fact, considering how much Jake had gone through in his life and how happy he'd been as a little kid. But it wouldn't be fair to the man in front of him now, nor to Aunt Neytiri. Not to mention the little boy who’d only wanted to go home to his mom, dad, and brother. "You were five instead and I got to introduce you to the wonders of the ocean last weekend during a trip through a door to 1939 Havana. I knew Earth in your time was garbage, but radioactive seawater? I didn't remember that detail."
"It's good to see you grown up again, Uncle Jake."
***
A week? He ran a hand through his hair and watched JR approach as he spoke, trying to remember anything of his week of being a tiny kid. There were faint memories of a beach and ...shells? And something about a forest? But it was fuzzy. "Radioactive? Uh, some spots were, but I reckon that was something your grandad told Tommy and me to keep us from going near the water."
"It's good to be grown up again," he admitted, "although I still ain't quite in the right body." He glanced down at his arms and chest as he spoke, noting all his scars and tattoos in their usual places, and then looked down at his legs. Healed, and not a wish in sight! Fucking outstanding. Although being Na'vi would have been far more preferable. He looked back up at JR after that and grinned at him. "It's real good to see you, man. How's it been since you got back?"
***
"At least you're able to walk," JR pointed out, something he was well aware wasn't possible for his uncle in human form normally. It was a little strange seeing him as a grown man and human, most of the time growing up the older of his two uncle Jakes was Na'vi.
He grinned back at him. "It's good to be back and seeing everyone. Not gonna lie though, it's been kind of a rough adjustment to being back on the island and in the 21st century. I cussed a blue streak when I saw the Spire and realized I was back."
***
"Yeah... Yeah, that's one of the very few things I liked about the past few weeks, the walking" he admitted as he rubbed at the back of his neck, still feeling beyond guilty for what happened with Tommy, and half-expecting Izzy to burst in and kick him out. He couldn't help but nod at JR's next words, though.
"I'll bet. Took me forever to get it sorted, and I didn't have all that timetravel bullshit you've got going on as well."
He suddenly realized that his mug would be down in one of the bottom cupboards, and bent down to get it. Sure enough, there it was with the rest of the stuff he'd had Tommy move down. He lifted the mug out and set it on the counter, waiting for the pot to fill.
"Everyone treating you like spun glass?"
***
JR nodded as he took a mug down from the common cabinets. “Something like that. I kind of snapped at Juliet the third day back when she was being too clingy, so I can’t blame them.” It had been a full on shout in a command voice that would have made drill instructors green with envy. “I scared her.”
He swapped the pot out for his mug and let it fill directly from the drip, then replaced the pot on the warmer. A sip was taken and he exhaled in satisfaction. “God I needed that.”
***
"I stopped counting the number of times I lost it with your dad," Jake admitted once JR had gotten his coffee, carefully keeping his eyes on the coffee pot and not looking anywhere else as he spoke. "I nearly... He couldn't..."
He trailed off after that, before looking round at his nephew. "It's gonna happen again, which nobody wants to hear, but it is. Juliet's gonna ask the wrong thing at the wrong time, or Tommy's gonna make some stupid fucking comment, and you'll lose it. But it also gets better." He reached over for the pot and poured himself a mugful of coffee. "It just takes time."
***
“Yeah.” He didn’t really want to hear it, Jake was right. But he could hear the truth in his uncle’s words. “I’ve been trying hard to keep my cool around everyone, and sometimes I’ll just go out in the woods or stay in my room. At least the island didn’t bring me back when I was in the middle of the fighting, I think I really would have lost my shit if it did that.”
JR wasn’t sure how to say that he hadn’t wanted to come back. He’d missed his family terribly, but he’d built a life for himself in the 40s and was moving forward with it when it had all been ripped away.
***
Having gone through just that, being dragged home mid-tour, Jake just nodded and drank some coffee. "When I'm Na'vi, I wouldn't thank you for a coffee," he said quietly, watching the bubbles spin, "but when I'm tawtute, I don't think I could cope without it. Weird, huh?" He took another mouthful, and set his mug back down on the counter, before tilting his head and studying his nephew.
"Y'know, I'm not always good with words, and I'm not saying I know exactly what you're going through because it's different for every one of us, but I'll listen any time you need to talk. Even if it's the ass-crack of dawn, and I'm out at the weyr. If you need me, let me know. And, y'know, I've done some crazy fucked-up stupid shit in my time, so don't think you need to hold back or censor anything."
***
“Have you ever killed someone rather than let them surrender?” JR challenged, setting his cup down and staring levelly at his uncle. He had. “Ever pry gold teeth out of somebody’s mouth while they’re still alive?” He hadn’t done that, but he’d come very close on Peleliu. “Ever seen someone killed because they couldn’t stop screaming and were giving your position away to enemy artillery?” It had been an accident, they’d just been trying to shut the guy up, but it still happened.
Everybody was saying they were there for him. Sure uncle Jake came closest out of anyone on the island with the possible exception of Gatsby since he’d been on the western front in the first war, but could he really understand?
“I still see one of my best friends getting his head blown off almost every night.”
***
Jake just looked straight back at his nephew, meeting his challenge head-on. "Yes, no and... not exactly, no…” he replied, wincing reflexively as JR described what had happened to his friend. He didn’t want to turn things into a pissing contest, but he did want JR to know he had some sort of idea what he was going through. Sighing, he looked all round before deciding to tell the other man something he’d never even told Tommy before. “Uhm. I don't know what you already know, what I've told you in the future. I was First Recon, so, first on the ground, get the intel, make it safe, you know how it goes. Venezuela was... it was fucked up. I mean, it was World War III, but there were also cells of terrorists, eco-terrorists, everywhere, and they were... not right, they were batshit. A group of them destroyed the Marianas Trench to stop RDA from mining there and the tsunami, it wiped out almost every city on the Pacific coastline, Hawaii was fucked, and they called it a victory."
"We couldn't take any chances, not even... We, uh. Any settlements we found, gone. Everyone in them. Men, women, kids, babies, fuck it, even the rats, all killed. It was the only way to be sure. Some of us couldn't cope. Most got jobs off-world or... one guy ate a bullet." Jake paused after that, absently wiping at his face, before lifting his mug of coffee again and just holding it. His eyes had gone slightly unfocused as he spoke, but then he was looking back at JR again. "I was in for the long run, though. I was gonna go career. And then I led my men into an ambush, got shot in the chest and lost everything. Men, legs, career, all as dead as those fucking villages."
***
That caused JR to simply stare at his uncle. He'd heard stories, but most of the time they had to do with Pandora or short descriptions of life in the Corps. What Jake was describing sounded even worse than fighting the Japanese, who'd been determined to make the Americans bleed dearly for every spec of ground taken. That had been against enemy soldiers though, he'd not fought a guerrilla war.
"Jesus." The exclamation was quiet but no less heartfelt. He stared absently at his coffee cup and picked it up to take a deep sip of the caffeinated goodness. It was too early to go get drunk but he was sorely tempted. "That's fucked up Uncle Jake. You never went into the details before, mostly you talked about the guys you knew and the crazy shit you pulled. I knew you'd been in combat, obviously, but you didn't like to talk about it." Which as a combat veteran himself now he completely understood.
"I was going to go career too."
***
"It ain't exactly light conversation," he admitted with a shrug, "and I think Tommy would have done his best to gut me with a rusty spoon if I'd even thought about telling you any of it. Which, y'know, I'm not a complete skxawng, I wouldn't... I haven't... I don't think Aaron knows even half the shit I've done. Your dad definitely doesn’t."
He drank some more coffee, before setting the mug down and stretching as tall as he could, until his spine cracked a couple times. "I'm sorry the Island decided to shit all over your plans, man," he began, before something occurred to him and he looked back at JR with a slightly wild (wilder than usual) look in his eyes. "I studied military history, even before I enlisted; it was the one thing I read about, like how your dad studies... all kinds of shit, I dunno, everything, but yeah. I read about military history all the fucking time. You. You made military history. You were in my books. I saw your name, I saw where it said 'Sgt Jacob R Sully, USMC', I wanted that for me because it was almost my name... Jesus, JR, that was you."
***
“You must have really studied like dad then,” JR responded, his own eyes a bit wild. “They practically gave out bronze stars with the ration tins. I wasn’t anything special. Guys like Basilone were the ones who should be in the history books, I just did my job.”
He stared down at his coffee cup again, then looked up at his uncle. The whole thing was like out of the fucking Terminator. He never would have considered the Corps without growing up hearing the stories Jake Sully told about his time in the service, and apparently his uncle never would have joined the military if it weren’t for his own service in World War II.
“I need something stronger than coffee.”
***
"You think Mitchell'd let us in, this early?" he wondered, entirely seriously. Tommy and Izzy had fuck all in the way of decent alcohol in the house and he was Na'vi more often than not, so he didn't keep any there either.
He drained his coffee, and walked over to put the mug in the sink before going over to JR and putting a hand on his shoulder. "I already told you, there was no 'just' about anything you did. So you didn't fire a machine gun for 3 days, non-stop. You were there, you did your job and you did it so damn well... I am so fucking proud of you, tsamsiyu, you got no idea how much." He moved his hand after that, and placed it over JR’s heart. "Oe tswasyayon ngahu."
***
JR put his own hand over his uncle’s, his vision clouding over due to watery eyes. "Thank you, Sa'semä tsmukan. That means a lot, coming from you.” He’d looked up to the man his whole life, hero worshiped him every bit as much as he had his father but in a different way. He knew he would never have his father’s ability for science or his peaceful nature, but he had the same drive his uncle did. For whatever reason he’d taken after his uncles on both sides, the ‘crazy ones’ his mother fondly called them.
He would never get his father to say the words his uncle had just uttered, though he would always long to hear them. Hearing his uncle say them, well, it was the highest form of praise he would ever likely hear in his life.
***
Being mindful of JR's coffee, he gave him a quick one-armed hug and then stepped back. "I meant it. If you can't sleep, if you need to hit things and yell at them, if, if you're feeling like, I dunno, like everyone's just making noise and you can't bear it any more, you gotta get outside, whatever it is, whenever it is, I don't care. If you need me, let me know."
He yawned afterwards, the caffeine still not kicking in, and stretched again. "Fuck, I need a shower or I'll never wake up," he muttered, and padded off towards the door before looking back round at JR and quirking a small smile at him. "And do me a favor, JR? Stop smoking as soon as you can, yeah? That shit'll kill you," he said as he walked out into the hallway and headed back towards his room in search of a towel and some clothes.