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mindcracklove2018-02-28 11:19 pm
challis_2070) wrote in mindcracklove2018-02-28 11:19 pm
Perfidious Albion, Chapter Seven
Next chapter! Known to me as the -too much talking- Chapter! :D
Link to Chapter Six- https://mindcracklove.dreamwidth.org/1181536.html#cutid1
Pyro whistled to himself as he set the table for breakfast. He wanted to do a proper fry up (and had checked that the place had the stuff to do that), so he had set his alarm to make sure he’d be up in time to do it properly but without having to rush to get it done before the morning news.
It was mildly odd to be living in someone else’s house when they weren’t there, but he and mamaí had stayed at her family’s house before when the family hadn’t been there, so he decided this would be something fairly similar, though they didn’t actually know the people. They did meet them, the first day they were here. They came just as they were leaving, so that worked out pretty nicely. That family was very nice. They took the fact that mamaí was using a walker very well and let her know there was a slight step-up into the kitchen but that they thought she’d be okay with it.
He blinked slowly as he watched things frying, putting the parts that were done into the warmed oven to keep them until it was all done at the same time. He’d already gotten syrup and such out and ready on the table, and he managed to get the coffee pot to start working, though he personally didn’t much care for the stuff. They’d bought orange juice, so he’d pulled that out as well. Probably everything was good.
“Dia duit ar mhaidin, mic.”1 Lasairfhíona blinked at him as he abrupted whipped around to see her standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Oh! Dia is muire duit, mamaí.”2 Despite the slight distraction, he managed to not burn the eggs entirely. “Ah, good! They didn’t burn.” He didn’t like them when they burned, or really even when they got terribly dark. They tasted better when still slightly runny, after all.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to distract you.” She shrugged slightly at him in apology and moved slowly over to the table, pulled out a chair at the end, and sat herself down, since it seemed her son wanted to make breakfast on his own. She hated using the walker, but she’d make an exception today, so that she wouldn’t be quite as slow, but for now, in the house, she’d use a cane instead.
“It’s okay, I figured you’d be awake around now, anyways. That’s why I started breakfast when I did!” He grinned at her as he shoved eggs onto a platter. It was nice to be able to cook for other people, sometimes. He preferred to make his own food, but cooking for people who appreciated it, that was also very nice.
“Heya Lasairfhíona, Paul.” Tom said as he stepped in and looked at the table where Lasairfhíona was already sitting. “Oh. Are you making breakfast for all three of us Paul, or did you want me to help somehow?” By help he meant more, do you want me to clean up afterwards, but he could do that anyways, he reckoned.
“Oh oh no, it’s okay Da. I’ve got it under control.” Mostly under control. “Erk erk erk, stop over heating damn it.”
“Is the stove being fussy?” Presumably, as Paul didn’t normally make unhappy sounds at a stove unless it was being ornery. He would have made breakfast for all of them if he had been awake earlier, but he and Lasairfhíona had been…talking…and so had slept later than usual.
“Yea, it’s nothing at all like the one at home, this one is an electric induction stove.” He grumbled as he pulled the pan off the stovetop again and poked at the dials and knobs in an effort to make it stop burning everything. “It likes to run hotter than I’m used to, whups.” He shuffled the food off the pan and onto a plate, before turning off the stove entirely. “On the plus side, breakfast is done now, in any case.”
He gathered up the eggs and sausages and everything else and brought it all over to the table before grabbing the coffee carafe and bringing it to the table as well. He sat down similar to how he had the other day over at his uncle’s house, with his back to the cabinets, with one parent on each end of the table.
“I thought it might be nice to have a nice fry up when all of us were together.” He waved his hands around the table, trying to indicate at the food without knocking any glasses over in the process.
“Oh, thank you, Pól.” She smiled at her son while her husband helped dish out the food to everyone. They rarely got the chance to all eat together, regardless of what meal it was, and today, they’d be getting, hopefully, all three meals together!
“Yes, thank you, Paul.”
They all sat around the table, quietly thinking to themselves for a while before anyone spoke up.
“So, uh. Da, how has erm…work…been?” He wasn’t entirely certain what to say, they were rarely all at the table together any more. He did like knowing how his parents were doing in return, since they always wanted to know how he was doing in school and such.
“Uhhhh…it’s been…fine.” While he and Paul would sometimes talk about work, he, on general principal, didn’t talk about it with his wife. Neither of them really wanted to get into it that often. But he was told to try to be more open with them, so… “Apparently the base doesn’t get many people who were assigned to Northern Ireland. I think most people start there and then go over, but they don’t get assigned back there. There is one person who was there recently, but the lieutenant has asked us to uh, leave each other alone. Not sure why, really.”
Pyro looked slightly uncomfortable at the news. “Ah say, your lieutenant didn’t mention what this other solider er…called himself, did he?”
“Um, yes, he did. I think he was calling himself as Sergeant BTC, why?”
Pyro groaned slightly and dropped his head against the table before sitting upright. “Do you want the long answer or the short answer?”
“Any answer, really.” Please have an answer this time.
“I met him when I was here like the month and a half ago that was. We had um….we had met before.”
“Before? Before where? At home?” Oh god please don’t have let him been one of the people from three years ago.
“Yeaaaaa, at home. Not at the house, hummmm, there was a protest.”
“Did he hurt you?” If this soldier had made his son upset, then it was likely…
“No, no. Um, someone else hurt him. Um, not sure what it was, but there was a lot of fire. I um, there were sandbags, so, I threw one open and on him. Apparently, he had been trying to find me since then. I wish he hadn’t. It was a shit protest, I got injured as well, I mean, and it was just completely shit.” He grimaced slightly at his rambling. He also wasn’t quite sure why they automatically assumed that the soldier had attacked him when they had met at home. He hadn’t said he had.
“Oh, uh, this was the protest where your aunt Saoirse found you and took you to the clinic and you were…really out of it?” Understatement of the year, Tom, understatement of the bloody year.
“She didn’t find me. I found her. Her place wasn’t far from the protest site. I stumbled over there, and knocked on the door. I remember her opening the door and her shoving me in the car, but not much after that. I remember more of what happened prior to that, actually.”
“So um, what exactly happened? I only have our own reports to go on…” Which he had kind of basically stolen from the lieutenant.
“And I only know what you told me and what the news reported, which was kind of terrible…” She swore she was always the last to know anything around here.
“That was…basically it. It started out a completely normal and peaceful protest. Some kind of godawful sound came from behind where the police and army was, and then all hell broke loose. Someone threw something at said soldier, I saw him, I threw the bag of sand over him and it pushed him back towards some other soldiers. I remember getting hit with something, twice, and I made my way to auntie Saoirse’s house.”
“What…were you hit with?”
“Didn’t…didn’t the doctors tell you?”
“No, they said you were injured, and that you’d recover, but not specifically what happened. Just that they might not report this because they were concerned for your privacy…oh. You were shot, baby, weren’t you??” Lasairfhíona paled considerably at this realization. So much had happened to her baby and she had never known. And there was that time before then, when he was twelve, oh lord. So much stuff she had no idea of.
“Auh, yes. The doctor said, from what I remember, that one shot was a rubber bullet and caused hideous bruising and bleeding where it broke the skin, and the other was a normal bullet which was lucky to not hit anything terribly important but was the reason I barely remembered what happened after I got to auntie’s place. She said that was because the adrenaline had worn off and that it was good that I had gotten to my auntie’s place when I had.”
“Oh holy shit.” Command had lied about what ammo had been there, then. They claimed that if anyone had been shot with live rounds, at any protest, that it was clearly the work of the IRA or related ‘scum’, and that was….probably not the case, since there was no evidence of IRA involvement at that protest. Or very many protests at all. He personally thought that the IRA sat back and videoed the violence for propaganda use rather than start it themselves. They had more than enough to work with without having to kick it out themselves, after all. That would explain why the doctor didn’t want to report it, the army would have tried to destroy all evidence of misdoing on their part. Shit. Destroying evidence in this case would have included…shit.
“Is something erm…more wrong, da?” Beyond the obvious.
“There shouldn’t have been any live ammunition there…”
“It was a protest, there shouldn’t have been, I know. But the doctor said it was most likely from an army gun, she said she had seen them before?” He had been terribly confused when the doctor had said that. He thought all guns were basically the same.
“Yea, it’s a different round, though of course people do try to recreate it to um, cast suspicion, and so on. Though that’s waaaaay less common that command would have you believe.” Probably close to non-existent, but it wasn’t impossible that someone might try. Or you know, just let the army shoot people themselves. Damn it all. He was entirely sure he had never shot anyone…though that might only be because he was primarily a mechanic.
“Right. Um. Look, I just want to finish breakfast and not think about things I can’t change.” Better to leave the past in the past.
“We really do need to talk more, I do think, but…yeah. A bit much for now.”
-----
“Hello, BTC. How are you doing today?” The counsellor waved him into the room and indicated which chair he should sit in.
“About as well as can be expected when you have to see a counsellor, I guess.” He knew that the counsellor wasn’t evil or anything, but it damned well felt that way, sometimes.
“We aren’t some kind of boogeyman, BTC.” His patients rarely believed him.
“For most of us, you might as well be.” He just couldn’t shake that feeling.
“BTC. You are aware that we’re also soldiers, right? Not just counselors or therapists. We had to go through the same training you did.” He sighed slightly and rubbed his temple with his left hand.
“Hm. I thought most of you were civilian contractors?” Not that he thought about it very much, just what other people had talked about the counsellors being.
“No actually, mostly conscientious objectors.” Most people didn’t ask, but well.
“Oh.” He had never thought to ask one of them. It made sense though, he knew the army didn’t let you get out of it just because you objected. Maybe it should. Or maybe, you know, not get stuck in some stupid decades long sort of war like thing.
“Course, the other option is medic. Many of us do that as well. Some help as you’re injured, some like myself, help after you get injured.” He had been a medic before, as well, but that was neither here nor there.
“I had no idea.” He was starting to think he should ask more questions, sometimes he might even get answers.
“Most people don’t ask.”
“Oh. That’s not very nice, I guess.” Trying, trying very hard to be polite and consider what other people might feel about something.
“It’s okay. And besides, we all need to practice empathy, it’s kind of…beaten out of one while in the military.” Well, military usually thought it got in the way. Which was a terrible way to view the world, really.
“I guess so. Not sure how I can practice being empathetic while also trying to not be an uh, cunt, and getting privileges revoked…” He had managed going out to the supermarket, but well, it could have gone better. He hadn’t gotten anything revoked, but instead, they moved the appointment time for this up a bit.
“Carefully and slowly, carefully and very slowly.” And more frequent visits at least to start with, but he’d realize that sometime later, probably.
“And um…” Did he mean he was going to get homework or something? He had no idea how counselling really worked.
“Basically, you’d get homework.” Meditation techniques, orders to go deal with larger groups of people, etc. And discussions on what to do if he ran across people he has had difficulty dealing with in the past.
“Oh. Well then. I can probably work with that.” Most certainly could, of course he could deal with it. There wasn’t really any other option, after all. Had to learn to deal with this.
Translations, notes, etc
1 Good morning, son.
2 Hello, Mother (first part is said in response to someone saying Dia duit to you)
Link to Chapter Eight- https://mindcracklove.dreamwidth.org/1182601.html#cutid1
Link to Chapter Six- https://mindcracklove.dreamwidth.org/1181536.html#cutid1
Pyro whistled to himself as he set the table for breakfast. He wanted to do a proper fry up (and had checked that the place had the stuff to do that), so he had set his alarm to make sure he’d be up in time to do it properly but without having to rush to get it done before the morning news.
It was mildly odd to be living in someone else’s house when they weren’t there, but he and mamaí had stayed at her family’s house before when the family hadn’t been there, so he decided this would be something fairly similar, though they didn’t actually know the people. They did meet them, the first day they were here. They came just as they were leaving, so that worked out pretty nicely. That family was very nice. They took the fact that mamaí was using a walker very well and let her know there was a slight step-up into the kitchen but that they thought she’d be okay with it.
He blinked slowly as he watched things frying, putting the parts that were done into the warmed oven to keep them until it was all done at the same time. He’d already gotten syrup and such out and ready on the table, and he managed to get the coffee pot to start working, though he personally didn’t much care for the stuff. They’d bought orange juice, so he’d pulled that out as well. Probably everything was good.
“Dia duit ar mhaidin, mic.”1 Lasairfhíona blinked at him as he abrupted whipped around to see her standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Oh! Dia is muire duit, mamaí.”2 Despite the slight distraction, he managed to not burn the eggs entirely. “Ah, good! They didn’t burn.” He didn’t like them when they burned, or really even when they got terribly dark. They tasted better when still slightly runny, after all.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to distract you.” She shrugged slightly at him in apology and moved slowly over to the table, pulled out a chair at the end, and sat herself down, since it seemed her son wanted to make breakfast on his own. She hated using the walker, but she’d make an exception today, so that she wouldn’t be quite as slow, but for now, in the house, she’d use a cane instead.
“It’s okay, I figured you’d be awake around now, anyways. That’s why I started breakfast when I did!” He grinned at her as he shoved eggs onto a platter. It was nice to be able to cook for other people, sometimes. He preferred to make his own food, but cooking for people who appreciated it, that was also very nice.
“Heya Lasairfhíona, Paul.” Tom said as he stepped in and looked at the table where Lasairfhíona was already sitting. “Oh. Are you making breakfast for all three of us Paul, or did you want me to help somehow?” By help he meant more, do you want me to clean up afterwards, but he could do that anyways, he reckoned.
“Oh oh no, it’s okay Da. I’ve got it under control.” Mostly under control. “Erk erk erk, stop over heating damn it.”
“Is the stove being fussy?” Presumably, as Paul didn’t normally make unhappy sounds at a stove unless it was being ornery. He would have made breakfast for all of them if he had been awake earlier, but he and Lasairfhíona had been…talking…and so had slept later than usual.
“Yea, it’s nothing at all like the one at home, this one is an electric induction stove.” He grumbled as he pulled the pan off the stovetop again and poked at the dials and knobs in an effort to make it stop burning everything. “It likes to run hotter than I’m used to, whups.” He shuffled the food off the pan and onto a plate, before turning off the stove entirely. “On the plus side, breakfast is done now, in any case.”
He gathered up the eggs and sausages and everything else and brought it all over to the table before grabbing the coffee carafe and bringing it to the table as well. He sat down similar to how he had the other day over at his uncle’s house, with his back to the cabinets, with one parent on each end of the table.
“I thought it might be nice to have a nice fry up when all of us were together.” He waved his hands around the table, trying to indicate at the food without knocking any glasses over in the process.
“Oh, thank you, Pól.” She smiled at her son while her husband helped dish out the food to everyone. They rarely got the chance to all eat together, regardless of what meal it was, and today, they’d be getting, hopefully, all three meals together!
“Yes, thank you, Paul.”
They all sat around the table, quietly thinking to themselves for a while before anyone spoke up.
“So, uh. Da, how has erm…work…been?” He wasn’t entirely certain what to say, they were rarely all at the table together any more. He did like knowing how his parents were doing in return, since they always wanted to know how he was doing in school and such.
“Uhhhh…it’s been…fine.” While he and Paul would sometimes talk about work, he, on general principal, didn’t talk about it with his wife. Neither of them really wanted to get into it that often. But he was told to try to be more open with them, so… “Apparently the base doesn’t get many people who were assigned to Northern Ireland. I think most people start there and then go over, but they don’t get assigned back there. There is one person who was there recently, but the lieutenant has asked us to uh, leave each other alone. Not sure why, really.”
Pyro looked slightly uncomfortable at the news. “Ah say, your lieutenant didn’t mention what this other solider er…called himself, did he?”
“Um, yes, he did. I think he was calling himself as Sergeant BTC, why?”
Pyro groaned slightly and dropped his head against the table before sitting upright. “Do you want the long answer or the short answer?”
“Any answer, really.” Please have an answer this time.
“I met him when I was here like the month and a half ago that was. We had um….we had met before.”
“Before? Before where? At home?” Oh god please don’t have let him been one of the people from three years ago.
“Yeaaaaa, at home. Not at the house, hummmm, there was a protest.”
“Did he hurt you?” If this soldier had made his son upset, then it was likely…
“No, no. Um, someone else hurt him. Um, not sure what it was, but there was a lot of fire. I um, there were sandbags, so, I threw one open and on him. Apparently, he had been trying to find me since then. I wish he hadn’t. It was a shit protest, I got injured as well, I mean, and it was just completely shit.” He grimaced slightly at his rambling. He also wasn’t quite sure why they automatically assumed that the soldier had attacked him when they had met at home. He hadn’t said he had.
“Oh, uh, this was the protest where your aunt Saoirse found you and took you to the clinic and you were…really out of it?” Understatement of the year, Tom, understatement of the bloody year.
“She didn’t find me. I found her. Her place wasn’t far from the protest site. I stumbled over there, and knocked on the door. I remember her opening the door and her shoving me in the car, but not much after that. I remember more of what happened prior to that, actually.”
“So um, what exactly happened? I only have our own reports to go on…” Which he had kind of basically stolen from the lieutenant.
“And I only know what you told me and what the news reported, which was kind of terrible…” She swore she was always the last to know anything around here.
“That was…basically it. It started out a completely normal and peaceful protest. Some kind of godawful sound came from behind where the police and army was, and then all hell broke loose. Someone threw something at said soldier, I saw him, I threw the bag of sand over him and it pushed him back towards some other soldiers. I remember getting hit with something, twice, and I made my way to auntie Saoirse’s house.”
“What…were you hit with?”
“Didn’t…didn’t the doctors tell you?”
“No, they said you were injured, and that you’d recover, but not specifically what happened. Just that they might not report this because they were concerned for your privacy…oh. You were shot, baby, weren’t you??” Lasairfhíona paled considerably at this realization. So much had happened to her baby and she had never known. And there was that time before then, when he was twelve, oh lord. So much stuff she had no idea of.
“Auh, yes. The doctor said, from what I remember, that one shot was a rubber bullet and caused hideous bruising and bleeding where it broke the skin, and the other was a normal bullet which was lucky to not hit anything terribly important but was the reason I barely remembered what happened after I got to auntie’s place. She said that was because the adrenaline had worn off and that it was good that I had gotten to my auntie’s place when I had.”
“Oh holy shit.” Command had lied about what ammo had been there, then. They claimed that if anyone had been shot with live rounds, at any protest, that it was clearly the work of the IRA or related ‘scum’, and that was….probably not the case, since there was no evidence of IRA involvement at that protest. Or very many protests at all. He personally thought that the IRA sat back and videoed the violence for propaganda use rather than start it themselves. They had more than enough to work with without having to kick it out themselves, after all. That would explain why the doctor didn’t want to report it, the army would have tried to destroy all evidence of misdoing on their part. Shit. Destroying evidence in this case would have included…shit.
“Is something erm…more wrong, da?” Beyond the obvious.
“There shouldn’t have been any live ammunition there…”
“It was a protest, there shouldn’t have been, I know. But the doctor said it was most likely from an army gun, she said she had seen them before?” He had been terribly confused when the doctor had said that. He thought all guns were basically the same.
“Yea, it’s a different round, though of course people do try to recreate it to um, cast suspicion, and so on. Though that’s waaaaay less common that command would have you believe.” Probably close to non-existent, but it wasn’t impossible that someone might try. Or you know, just let the army shoot people themselves. Damn it all. He was entirely sure he had never shot anyone…though that might only be because he was primarily a mechanic.
“Right. Um. Look, I just want to finish breakfast and not think about things I can’t change.” Better to leave the past in the past.
“We really do need to talk more, I do think, but…yeah. A bit much for now.”
-----
“Hello, BTC. How are you doing today?” The counsellor waved him into the room and indicated which chair he should sit in.
“About as well as can be expected when you have to see a counsellor, I guess.” He knew that the counsellor wasn’t evil or anything, but it damned well felt that way, sometimes.
“We aren’t some kind of boogeyman, BTC.” His patients rarely believed him.
“For most of us, you might as well be.” He just couldn’t shake that feeling.
“BTC. You are aware that we’re also soldiers, right? Not just counselors or therapists. We had to go through the same training you did.” He sighed slightly and rubbed his temple with his left hand.
“Hm. I thought most of you were civilian contractors?” Not that he thought about it very much, just what other people had talked about the counsellors being.
“No actually, mostly conscientious objectors.” Most people didn’t ask, but well.
“Oh.” He had never thought to ask one of them. It made sense though, he knew the army didn’t let you get out of it just because you objected. Maybe it should. Or maybe, you know, not get stuck in some stupid decades long sort of war like thing.
“Course, the other option is medic. Many of us do that as well. Some help as you’re injured, some like myself, help after you get injured.” He had been a medic before, as well, but that was neither here nor there.
“I had no idea.” He was starting to think he should ask more questions, sometimes he might even get answers.
“Most people don’t ask.”
“Oh. That’s not very nice, I guess.” Trying, trying very hard to be polite and consider what other people might feel about something.
“It’s okay. And besides, we all need to practice empathy, it’s kind of…beaten out of one while in the military.” Well, military usually thought it got in the way. Which was a terrible way to view the world, really.
“I guess so. Not sure how I can practice being empathetic while also trying to not be an uh, cunt, and getting privileges revoked…” He had managed going out to the supermarket, but well, it could have gone better. He hadn’t gotten anything revoked, but instead, they moved the appointment time for this up a bit.
“Carefully and slowly, carefully and very slowly.” And more frequent visits at least to start with, but he’d realize that sometime later, probably.
“And um…” Did he mean he was going to get homework or something? He had no idea how counselling really worked.
“Basically, you’d get homework.” Meditation techniques, orders to go deal with larger groups of people, etc. And discussions on what to do if he ran across people he has had difficulty dealing with in the past.
“Oh. Well then. I can probably work with that.” Most certainly could, of course he could deal with it. There wasn’t really any other option, after all. Had to learn to deal with this.
Translations, notes, etc
1 Good morning, son.
2 Hello, Mother (first part is said in response to someone saying Dia duit to you)
Link to Chapter Eight- https://mindcracklove.dreamwidth.org/1182601.html#cutid1