Anthills - Part Two of Three - BA
Dec. 3rd, 2011 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonora_conejaPairing: none
Rating: pg-13
Warnings: 9/11
Summary: A fill for this prompt on the kink meme.
BA wakes up in his miserable little Mexico apartment to the news. And, lacking his corporal stripes now, he doesn’t know what the hell to think about any of it.
BA wakes up on 11 September, 2001, exactly the same way he’s been waking up every morning for the past six months.
Waking up to the hot, sweaty, single-room apartment over the garage where he’s been working. Daylight’s streaming through the single, barred window, illuminating the pathetic scene.
The furniture is an odd assortment of shit from north of the border, brought down from yard sales in Tucson and Phoenix, and none of it is anything he ever would have allowed in his life before. Not even when he was living in the Chicago projects with Mama.
His shit is everywhere. Scattered. Clothes and shoes and rolls of cash and guns and spanners and old magazines and dishes the garage owner’s daughter, Maria, hasn’t cleared away from yesterday.
It’s dusty. Lots of dust, swirling in that light.
And it smells like rotten fruit in here, too. It’s a horrible smell. The smell of non-tourist Mexico. The whole fucking country smells like it...
BA rubs a big hand across his face and tries to shake out of his typically troubled dreams, made worse by how much he had to drink last night. He hates the place. Hates the mess. He’d clean up, normally. Or rather, old BA would have cleaned the place up. Corporal Baracus would have scrubbed and swept and organized and polished.
But that’s not him anymore. He’s not used to missing it, probably never will be, but he’s used to not being it anymore, and that’s enough.
Most days.
Then there’s a moan beside him and movement and then BA remembers the evening. The drinking. The bar. The drinking at the bar with the local cartel boys he’s working for.
With, he reminds himself. Not for. Never for. He hasn’t sunk that low yet... right?
But he wonders sometimes.
Is he one of them by now? He doesn’t really know. He’s been trying not to think about that. He normally just drives, makes deliveries, doesn’t ask who or what or why, just where and when. Like that fucking stupid Transporter movie, but with a van and no cute Asian to make up for it all.
But anyway. The evening. The fucking evening. That had led to this kid in his narrow, creaking bed next to him. It’s not one of the town whores, at least. He knows better than that. His Mama didn’t raise an idiot. White boy, too. American. Down with his buddies for a weekend off college, probably. A lot of the ASU and UofA boys drift through Nogales, even if it’s usually not this part of town where they are now.
“Mm, Brad...” the kid says, using the fake name BA normally uses, smacking his lips and reaching a hand up BA’s chest. “Wanna go again? My friends don’t expect me back until noon.”
He slaps the naked, skinny ass of the boy asleep next to him on the narrow, creaking bed. and crawls over his protestations to shake his jeans off the floor and find a clean shirt. “Your friends is shit friends, man,” he says.
“Huh?” confused white boy asks. BA honestly can’t remember his name.
“Bringin’ you down to Nogales and leavin’ you alone?” BA replies like it’s obvious. Because, it is. Whitey still looks confused, so he rolls his eyes and continues. “You could’a gotten raped, man. Robbed, stabbed, killed. All that shit. Happens a lot.”
“Killed?”
“Get your fool self up,” he says, not looking back now. He doesn’t have time for college freshmen, green boy from the fucking East Coast whose only experience with Mexico is watching MTV’s Spring Break bullshit. “And get you’self outta here.”
“Oh, come on, Brad,” the kid says, walking up behind him and tickling a hand up the big man’s neck, pressing his morning wood into BA’s still-naked thigh. “Don’t you want to go again? THat big cock of yours must be hungry...”
BA catches the kid’s hand as it creeps around to the front, and jerks him around. “Go home, man. ‘Fore you get hurt.”
“Fine,” the college boys says, pouting a little as he goes for his own pants. “But don’t think for a second you’re going to just thr...”
And then he stops.
Cell phone in his hand and to his ear.
BA rolls his eyes, and yanks his pants back on. He pads barefoot over to the tiny fridge in his joke of a kitchen, grabbing a beer. “I’ll git you back into town, that what you want, man, but don’t think I gonna...”
“Jesus,” last night’s lay says, and BA turns to face him. The kid’s staring at his phone. “They...somebody flew a couple of planes into the World Trade Center. And the Pentagon. One of the towers collapsed, they’re saying...thousands of people might be dead...” he holds up the phone, like it’s not obvious. “One of my friends left me a voicemail. Look, man, I gotta get back. They just got a call from his dad, and... can you...”
World Trade Center?
The Pentagon?
Who the fuck attacks the Pentagon? The US military? His military, his brothers, his...
BA rushes over to the table, where his own cell phone is charging up. He’s got a couple of people he could call about this, a radio, the TV downstairs in the garage office, but there’s no need. There’s one text message. From Montoya. The asshole who hands out his assignments.
american military hit. wonderful day, mi amigo
BA feels his blood go cold and hot at the same time. Fear. And anger.
Mostly anger.
And then the bottle breaks apart in his hand, glass and booze shattering to the floor.
The kid’s staring at him, and BA closes his eyes.
Fuck.
Fuck
“Brad?”
That voice cuts through his thoughts, and he knows the kid was too drunk and the room too dark for his tattoos to be noticed, and explaining the Ranger, or why he’s so upset, is a conversation he doesn’t want to have right now. So he drags his shirt on and grabs his van keys and his thigh holster with his H&P 9mm.
“C’mon, fool,” he grunts, and jams his feet into socks and his socks into boots. “Git dressed, I’ll take ya into town.”
The kid - he says his name is Evan, and gives BA this embarrassed look when he’s asked - is on the phone with his friends as they drive through the mid-morning, shit-for-brains Nogales traffic. He can’t be hearing much of anything, though, because BA’s got the radio on.
He’s only catching pieces of what’s being said, the AM radio from US-Nogales is mostly piped in from Tucson, and he knows from experience the repeaters aren’t that great down here.
...World Trade Center hit with two planes...
South Tower collapsed...
People jumping from the top floors of the North Tower...
United Flight 93 down in Pennsylvania, calls to family members from passengers...
We’re at the Pentagon, half the building seems to be collapsed, fire out of control...
The President is en-route back to DC now, official White House reports are saying...
...oh my god, oh my god, the North Tower has just collapsed...
BA stops hard at the next light, Evan nearly flying off his seat from the inertia, and he can feel the strain in his hands from his grip on the steering wheel.
...fuck...
His guest from the evening folds his cell phone and slips it back into a back pocket. Some of that sexy arrogance is gone now. There’s only a troubled twenty year old left, staring out the window at one of the better neighborhoods in this shit border town. They’re almost back into the civilized area.
“Are you headed back?”
Huh? “Where?” he grunts, keeping his eyes on the road as the light turns green. That’s one of the nice things about driving. Focus. It needs focus. BA likes things he can focus on, things that work in sequence, predictable things. Off gas, on clutch, shift, slow off clutch, back on gas, accelerate, repeat. “Where, fool?”
“Arizona,” the college boys says, like it’s obvious. “You headed back today?”
Ha. Back to Arizona. Back to America. That’s funny. Except it twists BA’s stomach up into a ball even thinking about it. He hasn’t been back in six months. The cartel would probably
kill him if he tried it now. Knows too much, too many people. They couldn’t get him hooked on cocaine or meth, so they made sure he met everybody in the cartel, right on up to that fucker Tuco who runs this area. If he so much as sets foot back across the border, no matter where he goes, he’ll have his throat slit. And so will Mama.
And it’s not like he could get a real job in the States now anyway.
Especially not the only job he wants.
That’s gone forever.
“No need,” he says, eyes on the road. “No reason for me to go back there.”
“You’re American? But you live here?”
“Yeah, fool.” BA wants to roll his eyes, but he knows the kid’s just talking cause he’s nervous. His privates were like that, back in the day. Some boys just need to talk when the bombs start dropping.
Especially if those bombs aren’t supposed to be civilian airliners.
“This place is a shit hole.”
“You notice that?”
Evan looks over at him, and BA realizes the kid’s staring at his holster. “They just let you carry guns around here, all open like that?”
He grunts, non-commital, and hopes that’s enough of a signal to the kid to shut the fuck up.
“Whatever,” college boy says, and goes back to his window, voice sad now. “That was my friend’s dad. He works at the State Department. Said they’re closing the border to anyone without a US passport in a few hours. I don’t have one. What if...”
“I git you back in time,” BA tells him, a sliver of sympathy for the kid, who sounds miserable. Probably doesn’t know what to do with himself. “Where you’ friends at?”
He gets an address. He knows where it is. And for the rest of the ride, all they hear is the crackle of the radio, bringing them the aftermath of a disaster that BA can do nothing to stop, and nothing to help.
He can’t go home.
Nogales proper. Downtown and shit. Where all the tourist shops and cut-rate pharmacies are. BA hates the place.
He drops Evan off, not exactly at the hotel, just in case the kid doesn’t want his friends knowing he was out screwing some strange man in Nogales. Or worse, getting screwed. Don’t let me catch you down here ‘gain, man, he’d growled at the kid as he left the van. Nuthin’ but trouble and STDs down here.
He’ll be back. 20 year old kid like that, looking for a consequence free lay and cheap, legal booze? He’ll be back. Probably get his fool ass hurt bad. It’s a damn shame.
He heads up to one of the rooftop bars where Americans come to drink. Old retirees from Sun City Vistoso or some shit like that, usually. The people who sold their house in Milwalkee to buy into a retirement community in a part of the country where it never snows. Here for their cheap heart meds and Viagra, give him a scathing once-over.
He’s probably everything they were trying to get away from by coming out west. Young black man, criminal, thug, faggot, undesirable element.
But the place is devoid of Americans today. Nobody. All headed back north when the news came on. So he gets himself a table on the edge. North.
So he can look at the fence as he sips at his Corona.
It’s obvious, even without looking at that fence, where Mexico ends and America begins. Shanties of cardboard and wire stop. Proper houses, with walls of brick and timber sprout up. People on the southern side wear clothes people on the north wore ten years ago. Fuck, even the land looks blighted here.
He may have grown up in the projects, in a no-bedroom apartment with cracking walls, Miss Jenny down the hall a meth dealer, Mr Antwoin upstairs a pimp, everyone else living on welfare, but BA’s seen enough of the world to know that a lot of it’s like Nogales. That it smells as dead things rot in the streets, children sold, sanitation unknown, life cheap. That’s never been America, and it never will be, and on all those missions, through all those shithole countries, he’d found himself loving his country. Wanting to keep it safe. Keep it whole and sound and right, right like no other place he’d ever been was right.
The military had taught him the value of what lays north of that fence. Why it has to be protected. And right now, it desperately needs protecting.
But they told him it wasn’t his job anymore.
They don’t want him.
No matter how much he wants back in...
Huh, BA thinks to himself.
It’s been a long time since he’s thought about Corporal Baracus. About being Corporal Baracus.
He’s been so fucking mad since the MPs showed up at his house that Sunday monring, as he was getting ready for church, with an arrest warrant.
He sips at his Corona.
They’re closing the border. The checkpoints are all shutting down as buildings burn in New York, as the Pentagon lies gutted open, as the President writes speeches.
What are the boys at Benning doin’? BA wonders. Are they panicked? Do they know what’s going on, who’s attacking, why?
Extra police down from the county are at the checkpoints, dogs, bigger guns. Even to commercial traffic. You need a passport to get back into the States now. A passport. ID. Proof you were born there.
Proof you belong there.
That America wants you.
He sips at his Corona.
He came here to get away from prison. To avoid it. He should have only gotten an administrative discharge over the DADT thing. But his boyfriend had said he’d sexually assaulted him. Gone to the fucking police one night, after they’d had amazing sex, and cried and said he’d been sexually assaulted. That Corporal Bosco Baracus had done it. Had done it before. Would do it again, if he wasn’t stopped.
Amazing sex. No condom. BA loves barebacking. He loves trusting somebody enough to be able to bareback. Loves being able to fall in love with a guy.
A guy who’d failed his last physical fitness test. Who was probably going to fail his next one. Which would have been it for him. BA hadn’t cared. He’d...almost, almost loved the guy.
Enough to take him, easy and slow, without a condom.
Enough to leave perfect, incontrovertible evidence for the rape kit.
Enough to get him shamed in court and thrown out and barely avoiding Leavenworth. One of the dorm’s females was able to establish enough doubt in the jury’s mind, testifying that she knew Corporal Baracus was in a consensual relationship with Private Hale, to render a guilty verdict impossible on the rape charge.
Enough to get the civil authorities to brand him a sex offender, regardless.
Enough to ensure that he’d never work a day in any decent American company.
Enough to make him forget everything he’d learned about everything else he’d come to love.
Enough to convince him that he might be able to make it work in Mexico. Leave the past, and just start over fresh.
His sips at his Corona. He needs a new one. The waitress brings it over without even being asked. It makes BA want to cry, that beer. That’s what locals do for the drug cartel fools.
No wonder America doesn’t want him back.
But BA wants to go back. He wants to go back and go into the nearest recruiting office and beg them on his knees to take him back. Do anything. Anything at all to get back to where he needs to be.
There’s a war coming. There has to be. America cuts its balls off in front of the world if it doesn’t strike back against this. They’ll be going to war with somebody.
And the Rangers, his Rangers, are going to be leading the charge into whatever fucking country did this to them today. He wants to be there, in the fire, in the shit, with his brothers, where he belongs.
Doing what he was born to do.
Being who he was born to be.
Getting these bastards who dared attack them today.
BA sips at his beer.
There’s no taste left, so he nurses it. Works it slow as the sun slips lower and lower on the horizon. Until the border’s obscured, and he can’t see the fence any longer, and his cell phone rings.
Time and place.
When and where.
He takes one last look at the border. At home. At everything he believed in.
Everything he still believes in.
For the first time since his discharge over a year ago, BA isn't mad at the Army anymore.
One more chance, God. I swear, I won't fuck it up again, he thinks, feeling hopeless. Feeling empty. How's he supposed to feel today? How?
He sighs, and gets up.
He doesn’t pay. The waitress doesn’t stop him. Just like he's one of the cartel boys. The same assholes who kill children and blow up buildings and terrorize people and...
BA supposes there might be some kind of irony in that.
It just makes him feel even emptier than before.
Rating: pg-13
Warnings: 9/11
Summary: A fill for this prompt on the kink meme.
BA wakes up in his miserable little Mexico apartment to the news. And, lacking his corporal stripes now, he doesn’t know what the hell to think about any of it.
BA wakes up on 11 September, 2001, exactly the same way he’s been waking up every morning for the past six months.
Waking up to the hot, sweaty, single-room apartment over the garage where he’s been working. Daylight’s streaming through the single, barred window, illuminating the pathetic scene.
The furniture is an odd assortment of shit from north of the border, brought down from yard sales in Tucson and Phoenix, and none of it is anything he ever would have allowed in his life before. Not even when he was living in the Chicago projects with Mama.
His shit is everywhere. Scattered. Clothes and shoes and rolls of cash and guns and spanners and old magazines and dishes the garage owner’s daughter, Maria, hasn’t cleared away from yesterday.
It’s dusty. Lots of dust, swirling in that light.
And it smells like rotten fruit in here, too. It’s a horrible smell. The smell of non-tourist Mexico. The whole fucking country smells like it...
BA rubs a big hand across his face and tries to shake out of his typically troubled dreams, made worse by how much he had to drink last night. He hates the place. Hates the mess. He’d clean up, normally. Or rather, old BA would have cleaned the place up. Corporal Baracus would have scrubbed and swept and organized and polished.
But that’s not him anymore. He’s not used to missing it, probably never will be, but he’s used to not being it anymore, and that’s enough.
Most days.
Then there’s a moan beside him and movement and then BA remembers the evening. The drinking. The bar. The drinking at the bar with the local cartel boys he’s working for.
With, he reminds himself. Not for. Never for. He hasn’t sunk that low yet... right?
But he wonders sometimes.
Is he one of them by now? He doesn’t really know. He’s been trying not to think about that. He normally just drives, makes deliveries, doesn’t ask who or what or why, just where and when. Like that fucking stupid Transporter movie, but with a van and no cute Asian to make up for it all.
But anyway. The evening. The fucking evening. That had led to this kid in his narrow, creaking bed next to him. It’s not one of the town whores, at least. He knows better than that. His Mama didn’t raise an idiot. White boy, too. American. Down with his buddies for a weekend off college, probably. A lot of the ASU and UofA boys drift through Nogales, even if it’s usually not this part of town where they are now.
“Mm, Brad...” the kid says, using the fake name BA normally uses, smacking his lips and reaching a hand up BA’s chest. “Wanna go again? My friends don’t expect me back until noon.”
He slaps the naked, skinny ass of the boy asleep next to him on the narrow, creaking bed. and crawls over his protestations to shake his jeans off the floor and find a clean shirt. “Your friends is shit friends, man,” he says.
“Huh?” confused white boy asks. BA honestly can’t remember his name.
“Bringin’ you down to Nogales and leavin’ you alone?” BA replies like it’s obvious. Because, it is. Whitey still looks confused, so he rolls his eyes and continues. “You could’a gotten raped, man. Robbed, stabbed, killed. All that shit. Happens a lot.”
“Killed?”
“Get your fool self up,” he says, not looking back now. He doesn’t have time for college freshmen, green boy from the fucking East Coast whose only experience with Mexico is watching MTV’s Spring Break bullshit. “And get you’self outta here.”
“Oh, come on, Brad,” the kid says, walking up behind him and tickling a hand up the big man’s neck, pressing his morning wood into BA’s still-naked thigh. “Don’t you want to go again? THat big cock of yours must be hungry...”
BA catches the kid’s hand as it creeps around to the front, and jerks him around. “Go home, man. ‘Fore you get hurt.”
“Fine,” the college boys says, pouting a little as he goes for his own pants. “But don’t think for a second you’re going to just thr...”
And then he stops.
Cell phone in his hand and to his ear.
BA rolls his eyes, and yanks his pants back on. He pads barefoot over to the tiny fridge in his joke of a kitchen, grabbing a beer. “I’ll git you back into town, that what you want, man, but don’t think I gonna...”
“Jesus,” last night’s lay says, and BA turns to face him. The kid’s staring at his phone. “They...somebody flew a couple of planes into the World Trade Center. And the Pentagon. One of the towers collapsed, they’re saying...thousands of people might be dead...” he holds up the phone, like it’s not obvious. “One of my friends left me a voicemail. Look, man, I gotta get back. They just got a call from his dad, and... can you...”
World Trade Center?
The Pentagon?
Who the fuck attacks the Pentagon? The US military? His military, his brothers, his...
BA rushes over to the table, where his own cell phone is charging up. He’s got a couple of people he could call about this, a radio, the TV downstairs in the garage office, but there’s no need. There’s one text message. From Montoya. The asshole who hands out his assignments.
american military hit. wonderful day, mi amigo
BA feels his blood go cold and hot at the same time. Fear. And anger.
Mostly anger.
And then the bottle breaks apart in his hand, glass and booze shattering to the floor.
The kid’s staring at him, and BA closes his eyes.
Fuck.
Fuck
“Brad?”
That voice cuts through his thoughts, and he knows the kid was too drunk and the room too dark for his tattoos to be noticed, and explaining the Ranger, or why he’s so upset, is a conversation he doesn’t want to have right now. So he drags his shirt on and grabs his van keys and his thigh holster with his H&P 9mm.
“C’mon, fool,” he grunts, and jams his feet into socks and his socks into boots. “Git dressed, I’ll take ya into town.”
The kid - he says his name is Evan, and gives BA this embarrassed look when he’s asked - is on the phone with his friends as they drive through the mid-morning, shit-for-brains Nogales traffic. He can’t be hearing much of anything, though, because BA’s got the radio on.
He’s only catching pieces of what’s being said, the AM radio from US-Nogales is mostly piped in from Tucson, and he knows from experience the repeaters aren’t that great down here.
...World Trade Center hit with two planes...
South Tower collapsed...
People jumping from the top floors of the North Tower...
United Flight 93 down in Pennsylvania, calls to family members from passengers...
We’re at the Pentagon, half the building seems to be collapsed, fire out of control...
The President is en-route back to DC now, official White House reports are saying...
...oh my god, oh my god, the North Tower has just collapsed...
BA stops hard at the next light, Evan nearly flying off his seat from the inertia, and he can feel the strain in his hands from his grip on the steering wheel.
...fuck...
His guest from the evening folds his cell phone and slips it back into a back pocket. Some of that sexy arrogance is gone now. There’s only a troubled twenty year old left, staring out the window at one of the better neighborhoods in this shit border town. They’re almost back into the civilized area.
“Are you headed back?”
Huh? “Where?” he grunts, keeping his eyes on the road as the light turns green. That’s one of the nice things about driving. Focus. It needs focus. BA likes things he can focus on, things that work in sequence, predictable things. Off gas, on clutch, shift, slow off clutch, back on gas, accelerate, repeat. “Where, fool?”
“Arizona,” the college boys says, like it’s obvious. “You headed back today?”
Ha. Back to Arizona. Back to America. That’s funny. Except it twists BA’s stomach up into a ball even thinking about it. He hasn’t been back in six months. The cartel would probably
kill him if he tried it now. Knows too much, too many people. They couldn’t get him hooked on cocaine or meth, so they made sure he met everybody in the cartel, right on up to that fucker Tuco who runs this area. If he so much as sets foot back across the border, no matter where he goes, he’ll have his throat slit. And so will Mama.
And it’s not like he could get a real job in the States now anyway.
Especially not the only job he wants.
That’s gone forever.
“No need,” he says, eyes on the road. “No reason for me to go back there.”
“You’re American? But you live here?”
“Yeah, fool.” BA wants to roll his eyes, but he knows the kid’s just talking cause he’s nervous. His privates were like that, back in the day. Some boys just need to talk when the bombs start dropping.
Especially if those bombs aren’t supposed to be civilian airliners.
“This place is a shit hole.”
“You notice that?”
Evan looks over at him, and BA realizes the kid’s staring at his holster. “They just let you carry guns around here, all open like that?”
He grunts, non-commital, and hopes that’s enough of a signal to the kid to shut the fuck up.
“Whatever,” college boy says, and goes back to his window, voice sad now. “That was my friend’s dad. He works at the State Department. Said they’re closing the border to anyone without a US passport in a few hours. I don’t have one. What if...”
“I git you back in time,” BA tells him, a sliver of sympathy for the kid, who sounds miserable. Probably doesn’t know what to do with himself. “Where you’ friends at?”
He gets an address. He knows where it is. And for the rest of the ride, all they hear is the crackle of the radio, bringing them the aftermath of a disaster that BA can do nothing to stop, and nothing to help.
He can’t go home.
Nogales proper. Downtown and shit. Where all the tourist shops and cut-rate pharmacies are. BA hates the place.
He drops Evan off, not exactly at the hotel, just in case the kid doesn’t want his friends knowing he was out screwing some strange man in Nogales. Or worse, getting screwed. Don’t let me catch you down here ‘gain, man, he’d growled at the kid as he left the van. Nuthin’ but trouble and STDs down here.
He’ll be back. 20 year old kid like that, looking for a consequence free lay and cheap, legal booze? He’ll be back. Probably get his fool ass hurt bad. It’s a damn shame.
He heads up to one of the rooftop bars where Americans come to drink. Old retirees from Sun City Vistoso or some shit like that, usually. The people who sold their house in Milwalkee to buy into a retirement community in a part of the country where it never snows. Here for their cheap heart meds and Viagra, give him a scathing once-over.
He’s probably everything they were trying to get away from by coming out west. Young black man, criminal, thug, faggot, undesirable element.
But the place is devoid of Americans today. Nobody. All headed back north when the news came on. So he gets himself a table on the edge. North.
So he can look at the fence as he sips at his Corona.
It’s obvious, even without looking at that fence, where Mexico ends and America begins. Shanties of cardboard and wire stop. Proper houses, with walls of brick and timber sprout up. People on the southern side wear clothes people on the north wore ten years ago. Fuck, even the land looks blighted here.
He may have grown up in the projects, in a no-bedroom apartment with cracking walls, Miss Jenny down the hall a meth dealer, Mr Antwoin upstairs a pimp, everyone else living on welfare, but BA’s seen enough of the world to know that a lot of it’s like Nogales. That it smells as dead things rot in the streets, children sold, sanitation unknown, life cheap. That’s never been America, and it never will be, and on all those missions, through all those shithole countries, he’d found himself loving his country. Wanting to keep it safe. Keep it whole and sound and right, right like no other place he’d ever been was right.
The military had taught him the value of what lays north of that fence. Why it has to be protected. And right now, it desperately needs protecting.
But they told him it wasn’t his job anymore.
They don’t want him.
No matter how much he wants back in...
Huh, BA thinks to himself.
It’s been a long time since he’s thought about Corporal Baracus. About being Corporal Baracus.
He’s been so fucking mad since the MPs showed up at his house that Sunday monring, as he was getting ready for church, with an arrest warrant.
He sips at his Corona.
They’re closing the border. The checkpoints are all shutting down as buildings burn in New York, as the Pentagon lies gutted open, as the President writes speeches.
What are the boys at Benning doin’? BA wonders. Are they panicked? Do they know what’s going on, who’s attacking, why?
Extra police down from the county are at the checkpoints, dogs, bigger guns. Even to commercial traffic. You need a passport to get back into the States now. A passport. ID. Proof you were born there.
Proof you belong there.
That America wants you.
He sips at his Corona.
He came here to get away from prison. To avoid it. He should have only gotten an administrative discharge over the DADT thing. But his boyfriend had said he’d sexually assaulted him. Gone to the fucking police one night, after they’d had amazing sex, and cried and said he’d been sexually assaulted. That Corporal Bosco Baracus had done it. Had done it before. Would do it again, if he wasn’t stopped.
Amazing sex. No condom. BA loves barebacking. He loves trusting somebody enough to be able to bareback. Loves being able to fall in love with a guy.
A guy who’d failed his last physical fitness test. Who was probably going to fail his next one. Which would have been it for him. BA hadn’t cared. He’d...almost, almost loved the guy.
Enough to take him, easy and slow, without a condom.
Enough to leave perfect, incontrovertible evidence for the rape kit.
Enough to get him shamed in court and thrown out and barely avoiding Leavenworth. One of the dorm’s females was able to establish enough doubt in the jury’s mind, testifying that she knew Corporal Baracus was in a consensual relationship with Private Hale, to render a guilty verdict impossible on the rape charge.
Enough to get the civil authorities to brand him a sex offender, regardless.
Enough to ensure that he’d never work a day in any decent American company.
Enough to make him forget everything he’d learned about everything else he’d come to love.
Enough to convince him that he might be able to make it work in Mexico. Leave the past, and just start over fresh.
His sips at his Corona. He needs a new one. The waitress brings it over without even being asked. It makes BA want to cry, that beer. That’s what locals do for the drug cartel fools.
No wonder America doesn’t want him back.
But BA wants to go back. He wants to go back and go into the nearest recruiting office and beg them on his knees to take him back. Do anything. Anything at all to get back to where he needs to be.
There’s a war coming. There has to be. America cuts its balls off in front of the world if it doesn’t strike back against this. They’ll be going to war with somebody.
And the Rangers, his Rangers, are going to be leading the charge into whatever fucking country did this to them today. He wants to be there, in the fire, in the shit, with his brothers, where he belongs.
Doing what he was born to do.
Being who he was born to be.
Getting these bastards who dared attack them today.
BA sips at his beer.
There’s no taste left, so he nurses it. Works it slow as the sun slips lower and lower on the horizon. Until the border’s obscured, and he can’t see the fence any longer, and his cell phone rings.
Time and place.
When and where.
He takes one last look at the border. At home. At everything he believed in.
Everything he still believes in.
For the first time since his discharge over a year ago, BA isn't mad at the Army anymore.
One more chance, God. I swear, I won't fuck it up again, he thinks, feeling hopeless. Feeling empty. How's he supposed to feel today? How?
He sighs, and gets up.
He doesn’t pay. The waitress doesn’t stop him. Just like he's one of the cartel boys. The same assholes who kill children and blow up buildings and terrorize people and...
BA supposes there might be some kind of irony in that.
It just makes him feel even emptier than before.
