Work Text:
Jim gets no letters from home.
All the rest of them get the occasional letter -- even Dernier, whose family is in hiding -- even Dugan, who's got no one but an old buddy from the assembly lines, whose job it is to design bombs.
At first, they teased Jim about how he hasn't got a girl to write him, until one of them finds the letter from his mother, buried at the bottom of his things, pages and pages of things they've lost, in her distinctive rectangular handwriting (she was so disgusted by the shape of the English alphabet, but too practical to turn down a potentially useful skill). At the end of the letter, she'd written, I do not wish you to believe that we are ungrateful for the new homes that have been provided to us, yet I cannot help but to feel that giving up my son should have been enough sacrifice for any lifetime. Shoganai.
***
In November of 1941, Patrick Morita had just — for all intents and purposes, because he couldn’t legally own the land, but he had a friend… well had — bought an orchard. Pat was Jim’s older brother, was in love and had just got married, had a house and a sweet baby girl and myriad plans for the future, just months before EO 9066. Just a few years too old not to resent everything that was taken away from him, and a few years too young to really have developed that ‘cool-head-main-thing’ mentality. He answered the loyalty oaths wrong and wrong, because that was just honesty.
Pat could not be there as his child wasted away in Manzanar and was buried under the sand, as his wife turned bitter and cruel, behind the fence. Who came back to Fresno, without a home, without a future, and found that his kid brother grew up to become a war hero, alongside Captain America.
"It was never really about fighting for America," Jim tells him, after three bottles of cheap sake and too many cigarettes. "It was fighting against something inhuman and terrible."
(The HC was at Auschwitz, and Jim will never know whether he’s sick or furious or just fucking grateful — at least he had a family to come back to, instead of a mass grave.)
But even that sounds like a betrayal — Patrick's personal tragedy isn’t made any lighter by hearing, ‘it could have been so much worse’, no matter if it is the truth. Four years ago, before the desert and the loyalty oaths and the pasteboard barracks, he would have punched his brother in the face, he would have shouted, how can you care so much about people you have never met while at home your family rots? But his anger is so old now, exhausted and dried up, like his child's cold bones and his wife's smile and his own sorry hopes, thousands of miles away. If he could parse his swirling thoughts they’d be something like, Pay attention, kid — they said we were something inhuman and terrible. And he drops the stub of his cigarette into an empty sake bottle, and he walks out into the night without a word.