Chapter Text
Ray never was able to pinpoint exactly what triggered the whole FUBAR mess. It might have been that time at Pendleton when he nearly electrocuted himself to death with a souped-up donkey dick, trying to get it functioning again; that was a definite candidate, but then again it might have been a bad burrito for all he knew. Or maybe it just started, like the whole Middle East invasion itself—hell, maybe the invasion caused it.
In any case, it definitely wasn’t something he’d ever noticed before Afghanistan, but he couldn’t say when the first time was that something unmistakably weird happened. There was a lot of little shit he put down to coincidence at first, or just the fact that he was such a boss fucking RTO (because he was) (but not that good, nobody was that good). Stuff like knowing where the next turn was in the dark even when the NVGs were all crapped out, or getting the comms synced to the right frequency just before they were notified what encryptions to use. Being able to reach for an MRE and toss it back without looking because the jalapeño cheese gave him the runs—you could call it good luck, almost.
Only not, because it mostly fucking sucked.
*
The very first full-blown come-to-Jesus capital-victor Vision: that, he remembers. He wishes he didn’t. He was driving the staff sergeant’s humvee that day, and it fucking exploded. IED, right under the passenger seat, game over—he felt the spray of blood and brains and viscera all over his right side, and slammed on the brakes hard, screaming like a girl.
“What the FUCK, Marine—” the staff sergeant started to say, and Ray turned to look at him, shaking, bewildered. He was whole. No blood, no shrapnel, nothing—was he dreaming or insane?
And then the explosion rocked them again, but from ten yards ahead.
It took a long time for anyone to be able to convince Ray that the first explosion hadn’t happened. He was still scrubbing obsessively at the right side of his face, trying to get nonexistent gore off it, when they casevaced him to the FOB to be treated for psychological shock and tested for Seeing ability.
*
Most of what Ray sees for a long time after that is pretty low-level shit by comparison. But there’s one near the end of his Afghanistan tour that turns out to be another doozy.
“You’re that hick radio savant, aren’t you?”
“Asshole hick radio savant, motherfucker,” Ray says without looking up from what he’s doing, but he’s got about half a dozen wires in his mouth, so it might not be exactly audible. He spits a few of them out. “Get it straight. Who the fuck wants to know, anyway?” He squints up—the sun is blinding, and he can only see the outline of the tall Marine standing over him, haloed in the haze.
“Sergeant Colbert, Bravo, Second Platoon, Team Leader.” The voice is more mocking than reprimanding, but Ray spits out the rest of the wires and hops up to tuck in his shirt, just in case.
“I’m not here to pull rank,” Colbert tells him. “Go about your business, Marine. You asked, that’s all. I was just curious to meet this wonder-boy of Charlie Company I’ve been hearing about. My own RTO claims he can’t keep our comms up for shit ’cause the transceivers are all built out of off-brand Japanese factory rejects from the early eighties, but it sounds like you’re managing. Want to come over and give him some pointers?”
“Fuck, no,” Ray says. “Are you kidding me? An RTO’s relationship with his equipment is intensely personal, Sergeant. It’d be like me walking over and grabbing his junk to show him how to get in a more efficient combat jack. And you boys in Bravo know how to throw a punch, from what I’ve heard.”
Rice, who’s been listening to the whole conversation, calls out, “Don’t even try it, Colbert. I know your thieving ways. Won’t do you any good, anyway—Person can’t teach his skills. He just uses his superpowers.”
Ray tries not to wince. Rice isn’t a bad TL—not that he’s had many to compare him to—but he’s got all the finesse and subtlety of a drunk water buffalo on steroids, and he fucking loves any chance he gets to roll out the whole superpowers bit.
“Yeah, I heard about that, too,” Colbert says, his eyes still on Ray. “I don’t believe in any of that shit, though.”
Ray isn’t sure whether to be offended or relieved. On the one hand, fuck you, Mister Super-Tall Bravo Sergeant. On the other hand, he’s sworn up and down within the full hearing of the whole platoon that the next asshole to ask him to tell their fortune in his crystal ball is going to be eating batteries, and he doesn’t have a chance of taking this Colbert in a fight.
Besides, batteries are in incredibly short supply right now.
Rice is loudly determined to defend his RTO’s and his company’s honor, though. “Oh, he’s a bonafide Seer, all right—they had him over to the FOB at Rhino after he saved the staff sergeant’s life practically the minute we got out here, hooked him up to a buncha wires and shit for ten days before they turned him back to us and said he was legit. Half a percent of the population and we got one here of our very own—I was afraid they’d keep him on the base and use him like a sniffer dog, but we got to keep him for a good-luck charm.” He drops to one knee in the dirt next to Ray and tousles his head.
“Yeah, woof,” Ray says absently. He’s gone back to work on his radio wires to avoid the embarrassment of looking at Colbert during Rice’s speech. The brain experts they’d flown in to Rhino had actually turned him loose with the proclamation that his Seeing abilities were low-level, undeveloped, and too unpredictable to be of consistent use in military operations—that, plus they were clearly unimpressed by Ray’s attitude.
Colbert looks unimpressed as well, when Ray glances up again to see if he’s still there. “I’m not out to steal your rabbit’s foot, Rice,” he says. “Charlie needs him a hell of a lot more than we do, I’m sure. I was just…” His eyes light on Ray again, still mildly amused. “Curious,” he finishes.
“Better’n a two-headed calf in a jar at the county fair, ain’t I, Sarge?” Ray drawls, as hick as he can. “And you didn’t even have to pay fi’ty cent.”
Colbert’s grin turns itself up three shades brighter, genuinely amused now. He peels himself up off the victor he’s been leaning against and comes over to murmur in Ray’s ear, “I’ll pay you in porn mags and Twinkies if you stop by our sector and look at our radios tonight. My RTO takes his shit at twenty-one thirty like a fucking clock.”
“What, fresh porn mags? Not all covered with jizz stains and Bravo drool?”
“Almost fresh.” Colbert claps him twice on the shoulder. “Think it over, Wonder Boy.”
And that’s when it hits.
*
The visions aren’t always triggered by touch, although it’s happened often enough that most of Ray’s company goes out of their way to avoid getting within arm’s reach of him, while a still sizeable minority will take any excuse to throw an arm around his neck or brush up against him as if by accident, no matter how many times he’s tried to tell them that it doesn’t fucking work that way. Most of the visions are vague and soft-focus, anyway, nothing like that first one—sometimes he can hardly tell who they’re referring to, let alone when and where. Not only that, they don’t always come true: the lab coats told him they were representations of events with strong potential to occur, nothing more.
As superpowers go, it’s pretty goddamn useless. Not to mention unsettling. This is the weirdest one yet, though. At least half a dozen different images of Colbert hit him in a mixed-up flash, all of them intense and sharp-focus. It lasts all of four seconds, but it’s like the whole world just imploded in his brain without warning, short-circuiting his senses and stealing all the air from his lungs.
explosion car bomb singing execution-style sun laughing severed blood grin screaming
Ray has learned not to react visibly when a vision hits. Anyone in their right mind would freak the fuck out when a Seer stopped dead in his tracks right in front of them, clutched his head, and gasped “oh, holy shit!”—and Marines in a combat zone tend to piss themselves when you do it. (He may have done it as a fake-out once or twice—a few times, okay, but only to assholes who totally deserved it. Low-ranking assholes. He’s not suicidal.)
This one is a real test of his poker face, though. He’s still kneeling on the ground, bent over the radio he was working on, so Colbert can’t see his expression, probably, but Ray might have made some sound to give it away; he definitely froze up and went rigid for the few seconds it lasted. He can taste the blood, feel the scream in his own throat, and he’s almost positive Colbert was, unbelievably, sucking him off in one of the flashes but he was fucking beheaded in a nearly simultaneous one so Ray’s got a really confusing semi-chub and feels like he might puke at the same time. He forces himself to un-tense, tries to shake it off.
Rice, still loitering nearby, didn’t miss it. “There you go,” he tells Colbert, smugly. “That was it—you saw something, didn’t you, Person? What’d you see?”
“Your mom,” Ray says automatically. “The sergeant here’s gonna give her about fifty orgasms, soon as he gets stateside again. He’s a real pro at fucking your mother, looks like.” It’s weak, but at least his voice isn’t quavering when he says it, he doesn’t think. And it makes Rice come back over and tackle him down into the dirt, which is a good distraction. Ray gets back up just in time to see Colbert walking away, shaking his head.
*
On his way over to Bravo’s sector of the encampment that evening, Ray still hasn’t decided what he’s going to say to Colbert or how—only that he has to say something. One of the images from that afternoon keeps flashing up behind his eyeballs repeatedly (not the BJ, although he’s been thinking of that one, too, with a horrified sort of flushed thrill) and it’s not going to leave him alone until he does something about it, apparently.
When Colbert sees him approach, he lifts his eyebrows and gives Ray a small nod of welcome. “Gentlemen,” he tells his team. “The radio prodigy cometh. Fetch forth the promised Penthouses of welcome.”
Ray looks to one of the other men, a weedy little lance corporal oiling his weapon. “Does your TL always talk like such a fucking nerd?” he asks, in a really loud fake whisper.
“Pretty much,” the kid accedes. “You get used to it.”
“Also: Penthouse?” He addresses Colbert directly this time. “Fuck, homes, I thought you said porn. Don’t you have anything really filthy, fit for a real Marine, or do you Bravo boys always like to jack off to glorified Victoria’s Secret catalogs?”
That earns him a guffaw and a few oh, burns and a get some, little Charlie! from the peanut gallery. He’s not sure how Colbert’s going to take it at first—he’s looking at Ray like he can’t quite believe he’s for real, but then the balance tips and he starts to laugh.
“You’re a piece of work, Person,” he says. “I was warned. Radios are over here, and if the lovely ladies of Penthouse are too chaste for you, I don’t know what to tell you, you’ll have to head down to Delta, I guess—they’re hoarding all the animal-fucking piss-drinking skank mags for themselves.”
Great, Ray thinks, twenty minutes later, when they’re still keeping up a comfortable flow of trash talk over the attenuator cables. Now he kind of likes the big blond doofus, which means it will seriously suck if and when he gets turned into hamburger splatted all over an Afghani marketplace. He gets up abruptly. “These should work now,” he says. “Child’s play, just tell your RTO to strip the cables down again and give the wires a good lick before reattaching them if they give you any more trouble. And, uh...listen, Sergeant?”
“Twinkles, yep,” Colbert says. “You earned them all right—I’ve got a box stashed with my snivel gear, hang on, be right back.”
Ray follows after him. “Keep your Twinkies. The thing is, this afternoon, you know, when you, when I, I saw—”
Colbert does a sudden about face and stares down at him, cold-eyed. “I told you I don’t believe in that crap.”
Most sane non-idiots act this way to some extent, Ray reminds himself. Who wants to know? It’s bad shit. That’s not his problem, though.
“I’m gonna fucking tell you anyway, Sergeant. This part’s a guess: you’ve got a three-day pass coming up.”
“Anyone could have told you that.”
“Whatever, shut up, that’s irrelevant. You’ve got a three-day pass, you were thinking of taking it in Kandahar. Don’t. There, I said it, you don’t believe in it, now you’ll go ahead and do it just to prove it’s bullshit and that’ll fuck me up because maybe if I hadn’t told you you’d’ve changed your mind—Jesus, why am I still talking here. Mission accomplished, solid copy, over and out.”
He starts to walk away. Colbert hesitates, then follows after him. “Hey,” he says. “Hold up. I don’t think you’re a con man, necessarily,” he offers. “You seem like a good guy. You probably actually believe what you’re saying.”
“I don’t even know, man.” Ray walks a little faster, because he actively wants out of this conversation now. “Maybe it is bullshit. Maybe I’m going fucking nuts from licking too many batteries. I don’t care what you do, okay? I didn’t even know you eight hours ago. Why did I even come over here tonight?”
“For porn and junk food,” Colbert says. “Lighten up, Tiresias.”
“Fuck you, I’m not blind.” Ray stops walking and squints back at him. “Being a chick for seven years might not be bad, though…least I’d be getting some pussy, even if it was just my own.” He widens his eyes, mocking Colbert’s expression. “Oh, look—yeah, the hick knows his Greek mythology. I’m edumacated trash, mothafucka.”
“Son of a bitch.” Colbert gives him a slow easy grin, shaking his head in apparent admiration, and Ray’s stomach does a queasy roll. The dude is fucking hot, he’s apparently got some version of a future self who’s not averse to sucking Ray’s dick, and all Ray can see is the version with half his pretty face shattered down to bone and meat.
“Son of a bitch,” Ray agrees. “It was nice knowing you, Sergeant.” He salutes and then practically sprints back to Charlie territory, because enough is fucking enough of this.
*
There’s an explosion in Kandahar five days later, a car bomb. Two Marines are killed. After Ray gets over his initial heart attack when news of the incident comes through, he tells himself to chill. Charlie Company’s peeled off on a separate mission nowhere near Bravo, but he’s certain he’d have heard a lot more about it if either of the KIAs were Recon. It still sucks, obviously, but at least it doesn’t suck with the weight of personal responsibility added on.
Also, the images in his head have faded—that one bad one in particular, anyway, and the others feel less urgent, for now.
He doesn’t actually set eyes on Colbert again until nearly a month later, when the entire battalion is stationed in Italy for ten days’ enforced decompression time at the end of their deployment. “They don’t want to inflict us on our loved ones again until we’ve had a chance to get drunk and fuck a lot of prostitutes and screw all the combat crazy out our systems,” Rice theorizes over watered-down drinks at one of the shitty Italian outpost canteens.
“We might go home and shoot up a mall if we didn’t,” Ray agrees. “I for one most definitely would. Kidding!” he adds quickly, hands up, because as a team leader Rice is some kind of mandated reporter, probably, and right now he’s giving Ray a fishy look. “Sir, I would never shoot up a shopping mall, on my honor. The mall is a sacred space of consumerist worship, which must not only exist but thrive in order for our great nation to function. As a true and decent American, I would only shoot up a school.”
Rice does an honest to God spit-take, spraying rum and cola all over the bar top. “Jesus Christ, Person, that’s nothing to joke about,” he protests, as Ray reaches over the bar for more napkins. “I know you’re the class fucking clown here, but come on.”
It actually was a step too far, probably—Ray’s own combat hangover is taking the form of even worse verbal diarrhea than usual, and he’s about to apologize when he turns away from the bar and finds himself chin to chest with Colbert.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Colbert tells him, staring down at him all serious and about eight feet tall, and it wasn’t just the vision, turns out—his eyes actually are that blue and that piercing. It’s kind of ridiculous. “Can we talk somewhere? Not here.”
“Uh, yeah, I guess,” is Ray’s brilliant answer, and he lets himself be steered out of the canteen and out into the street, where it’s at least marginally less packed with drunk and half-drunk Marines.
Colbert isn’t one for verbal foreplay, apparently. “The car bomb,” he says, as soon as they’re outside. “You saw that?”
“Kind of, yeah.” Ray doesn’t want to say the exact truth, which is that he saw the aftermath of the explosion, including bits of blond sergeant all over the city square. “Were you...there? When it happened?”
“No. I went to the FOB for my three-day instead. I might not have been anywhere near it even if I had gone to Kandahar,” he adds, sounding defensive.
“Maybe not,” Ray agrees. It’s both incredibly good and incredibly weird to see Colbert just standing here, in the flesh and in one piece. He feels like he’s probably staring, but it’s hard to look away; his eyes keep wanting to confirm that this is the real deal. “Fuck, I’m glad you didn’t go, though,” he can’t help saying, grinning like a total idiot, and Colbert looks surprised at first, but then shrugs and grins back.
“Hey, one thing, though,” Ray adds. “Did you, uh, report it?”
Colbert looks blank. “No,” he says. “Report it to whom and for what purpose?”
Ray makes a face. “I’m...kind of supposed to report it, if I have any visions that actually come true,” he admits.
“And you don’t want to because…?” Colbert’s still not getting it. Big and dumb, despite the excellent grammar and syntax, Ray decides.
“Yeah, being a test case in a big government science experiment? Even less fun than they made it look like in E.T., turns out,” he says finally. “I’d rather get shot at, personally.”
“Oh.” Colbert doesn’t seem to know what to say to that, and who can blame him? A seriously crude riposte would probably be the only save for this conversation, Ray thinks, but instead they’re just going to stand there not looking at each other for a million years, it seems. Probably, being a good boy Bravo team leader, Colbert’s going to have to report it anyway, now that Ray’s been stupid enough to alert him to the fact that he was supposed to. At least he has the decency to look kind of sorry about it, but—
“It didn’t come true, though,” Colbert says suddenly, making eye contact again. “Right? You saw me get killed in the explosion. Didn’t happen. Living proof, right here, that you’re a big fucking liar fake who can't predict shit.”
Ray’s mouth is open, he can feel it. He gives a disbelieving laugh.
“Listen, are you planning on re-upping?” Colbert asks him, looking all serious and intense again.
“I...probably, yeah.” Ray had told himself he wasn’t going to make any decisions until he’d been stateside for at least two months, but he feels like he’s under a spell right now. “I mean, yeah. Probably. Yeah.”
“Good,” Colbert says. “Because I want you on my team. You’re going to be my RTO, next time out. Are we square?”
Ray blinks. A lot. “Jesus H. Kristofferson, Sergeant,” he says. “I don’t know. I feel like you ought to get on your knees here, a proposal like that—” He feels himself begin to blush. Colbert on his knees is something he’s still not ready to think about, and yet he’s spent more time than he'd care to admit thinking about it anyway. “I mean, or at least buy me dinner first. Or a drink. I’d settle for a drink.”
“I owe you more than a drink. Not at that dive I just pulled you out of, though. Come on, I know a place. Are you with me?”
Hook, line, and sinker, Ray thinks. Fuck me sideways. “I’ll consider it,” he says. “We’ll have to work on your taste in porn and snack food, though, Sergeant. Hey, what kind of music do you listen to, anyway?”
“You’re not gonna like it,” Colbert promises. “And you can cut the rank for now, okay? It's Brad.”