Work Text:
“I’m a sniper,” said the scrap of a kid.
“Are you now,” John said. He didn’t care.
Later, in Iraq, he watched the scrap of a kid take down four people, one after the other. He didn’t seem to blink at all. It made John think of bowling pins.
He sat across from the kid in the mess tent a week later and said, “You’re good.”
“I better fucking should be,” said the kid. “Otherwise you and your grunts would be dead.” The boy’s mouth quirked, but he looked a little scared. John could have harmed him (killed him) easily.
John said nothing, just grinned a little.
“I’m Gutterson,” said the scrap. “What’s your name?” He held out his hand, grubby, with gun calluses and bitten nails.
He ended up bunking with Gutterson. He didn’t exactly have a choice and he didn’t (couldn’t, wouldn’t) complain. Gutterson didn’t talk much, but then he didn’t bother John much either. They seemed to have an unspoken agreement to leave each other be. And he was a fucking crack shot, so it worked.
Some of the others though, didn’t like Gutterson too much. He was replacing their first (and well loved) sniper, Booth. Booth had left mysteriously, transferred to another division. Gutterson was an Army Ranger like Booth and unlike Booth, he wasn’t the most popular.
Gutterson didn’t miss, though, and he could hold his alcohol, so they left him alone. For a while.
Then Gutterson, no, Tim, Tim, staggered back to his bunk. At first John, trying to get some sleep, thought that he was just drunk. But there was a wheeze to his breath that wasn’t right and the way he moved; small, conservative movements, suggested he was in pain.
John lay there for a bit, waited to see if Tim did anything, go off to triage tent or even just got supplies out of his pack and fixed himself up. Instead, Tim just lay in his bed and wheezed and didn’t sleep. John didn’t either.
They were all his men, under his command. Gutterson was technically under his command too. ("You have to look out for your men in the desert, boyo.")
“Alright,” he jumped down from his bunk, welding the torch in one hand. “What happened to you?”
“Eh, sir,” Gutterson, no, Tim, frowned at him in the torch light. He had a black eye, caked dry blood by his right ear and wasn’t breathing very well. At all.
“What happened?” John fairly barked.
“Nothing, sir.” Gutterson’s face was stiff. He was a Ranger, not a Green Beret. He had been brought in to be a sniper and he needed to fit in. He couldn’t snitch. For all Gutterson knew, John might’ve been in on the fight. Might've encouranged his men to rag on the new guy.
“Your ribs?”
“Um...just bruised, I think, sir.”
“Cut the sir crap. Why didn’t you go to the medical tent?”
“It’s nothing.” Tim’s face was mutinous.
“Like what beat you up, that was nothing.”
“Yes sir.”
He told Gutterson not to call him sir. John dragged him to the triage tent, one hand between his shoulder blades to stop him escaping.
Two weeks later, Gutterson limped. Right leg, someone had done something to the knee. His ribs were alright, but his knee clearly wasn’t.
John’s men still pissed about in training, shoved Gutterson around. Gutterson said nothing, his mouth in a thin, hard line the entire time.
If John said something, the abuse would be more underhand, worse. The heart of the matter was: Timothy Gutterson wasn’t Special Forces. He had been brought in to replace Booth and he knew where Booth had gone. And he wouldn’t say.
John never asked. (Don’t ask, don’t tell, his mind supplied, a sad attempt at humour. It was wrong, though: if Booth had been dishonourably discharged, they would know.) Most likely Booth was working sub rosa, moonlighting for the Company.
A month later, John lay in his bunk listening to silence of the Iraqi desert (to nothing at all), when Gutterson came in, cradling his left arm.
“Dislocated?” John said to the roof of the tent.
“Yes sir.”
His boots thump-ed on the canvas-covered ground as he jumped down from his bunk. “Need help fixing it?”
“Yes sir.” Tim looked off to one side (embarrassment that he could be hurt, irritation at what was being done to him).
“Funny, isn’t it,” John said as he rotated Gutterson’s arm carefully. “How it’s your left arm.”
Gutterson hissed through his teeth. “They know that they rely on me to keep the way clear. I can’t do that if my right arm is screwed up.” Then he froze. (He had implicated John’s men.)
John said nothing, just kept rotating the arm until it clicked back into place. He made Gutterson take some over-the-counter ibuprofen that he had stashed in his pack, washed down with water from his canteen.
Afterwards they sat shoulder to shoulder on Gutterson’s bunk, silence between them as dry as the base air. Eventually Gutterson said: “You do performance reviews, don’t you?” (At least he’d dropped the sir thing.)
“Yes. What about it?”
“Nothing.” Gutterson picked at a loose thread in his BDUs.
“You know,” John said carefully, “if I say that you’re not fit for this, the Rangers might take you back, but the Special Forces won’t take you again.”
“I can put up with verbal shit, and my kit going missing” – John didn’t know that was happening and seriously, what the fuck, the man's kit – “but almost cracking my ribs and dislocating my shoulder are a step too far. And you’re the only nice one here.”
John said nothing. Anger made him quiet and so Tim went on.
“I don’t care,” Gutterson said, “but I didn’t sign up to be pushed around by some of my own. I owe you though, so I’ll finish this tour – less paperwork.”
“Like hell you will – if you try to finish this tour, you’ll be dead.”
John knew how it worked out here, among the sand and the sun and the bullet casings (and the blood). One blind eye turned away or even two. The men, his men, wouldn't feel remorse. They weren't trained to. They saw it like a logical sequence: sniper doesn't fit in? Get rid of him.
John didn't see it like that.
“Alright.” Gutterson’s shoulders slumped (relief). "Thank you."
“And you don’t owe me anything. You would do the same.” It’s not a question. They are not 'brother officers', not the same rank, but still. It is something one does: watch out for a friend (is Gutterson a friend? John doesn't know).
If you ask Tim, he will say that he is not sentimental. But.
But.
There is a picture stuffed between many other pictures (of Rangers drinking, laughing, arm in arm), of two men squinting at the camera, the backdrop tents and sand. One has black hair, the other brown. Neither are smiling, it doesn’t look particularly special, the two of them. But for Tim to have kept the photo, it must mean something.
If you look closer, you will see that both have the Special Forces patch on their BDUs. If you ask Tim, look at Tim’s file, there is nothing to denote that he ever was Special Forces, ever worked ‘sub rosa’. He will say that he never was Special Forces. But. But.
A few months and multiple successful ops later, Gutterson got re-assigned to another unit with ‘better use for his talents’. John never saw him again.