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blood-mocha-latte · 1 year

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so i mentioned this in a post like yesterday and immediately have decided on previewing this monster of a fic about a ship and fandom i have never brought up on this blog before! but, as mentioned again in a previous post, i locked myself out of that blog so...

it seems we are previewing it here!

literally just a vietnam war harringrove au, because i never write anything easy (so the rumor has it), so enjoy this hot mess!

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Steve's been in Vietnam for a little less than five months, and yet the one thing he's certain of about the country is that it is, without a doubt, fucking hot.

His shirt is long gone, probably somewhere in the bottom of his duffle. He'd finally shed his boots after a fierce internal debate about permanent sand in the liners of the jungle boots versus jungle rot, the sun-heated sand like fire ants against his now-bare feet.

They've been off the front line for a little less than four days, all four of which, for some reason, Steve has been obligated to spend on the beach from sunrise to sundown.

Jonathan Byers is sitting a few paces away from him, also fine with just sitting on the sand banks instead of going into the tumultuous ocean, bent over and fiddling with the shoelaces of his own jungle boots.

"Get any good shots?" Steve asks, awkward, having to shout slightly over the sound of the crashing waves and the rest of the shouting unit.

Jonathan looks up quickly, eyes wary, before blinking and turning to drift his hand over the camera case laying in the sand next to him.

"Nah," He says, pressing his lips together in an awkward approximation of a smile before dropping his eyes back down to his boots. "I've gotten photos of the previous three days, and publication doesn't want too many of everyone..." He trails off, lifting a hand from the laces to wave it around vaguely. "They don't want everyone thinking that the guys over here are slacking off."

Steve just nods, turning to look back out at the shore.

He has to pause and think about that for a minute or two. Steve doesn't really think that this is slacking off - according to Hop, the army's been pretty short on men, and they'd been on the front line for a little over three weeks rather than the usual eight days.

Four days of boogie-boarding and beach dwelling seems like more of a reward than slacking off, but, well, Steve isn't smart. He's sure there's things going on behind the scenes that he doesn't know about or wouldn't understand.

While he's staring out where the distant shapes of the rest of his unit are splashing around in the shore, Jonathan moves from fiddling with his boots to fiddling with his camera case, flipping the leather flap of the thing back and forth.

Steve likes Jonathan, he had decided, early on when the other had joined the group. Granted, Steve's only met three embedded journalists, but Jonathan had stuck out the longest, going on three weeks of his apparent seven.

He's lasted the longest, anyway, of the three, and he's quiet, so Steve doesn't think he could be all bad.

"You're not ever gonna go out there?" Jonathan asks him abruptly, and Steve turns again to look at him. "I mean, last day here, might as well..." He trails off again, and Steve hums.

"Nah," He says, and thinks about his parents' swimming pool. "I - have a thing with water. Rice paddy's are bad enough, I'm okay not dealing with the ocean."

Jonathan just nods, and Steve turns his attention back to the shore, where a new wave of hollering has been started up by the guys. Steve only catches the tail end of it, but he sees Tommy Hagan shove a cackling Billy Hargrove into a sandbank.

Billy Hargrove.

Steve doesn't know what he thinks of Billy Hargrove.

To be fair, Steve doesn't often think, but his point still stands.

Hargrove is... something else, Steve thinks, because that's what his mother would tell him about guys like Billy Hargrove.

Ellen's kid got put in the slammer again, stole a pack of Juicy Fruit from the corner shop. That boy is something else.

Steve doesn't really believe that Hargrove is really... bad, per se. He watches out for the other guys, they watch out for him. But... he seems to take a sort of joy in being in Vietnam that Steve doesn't really see.

Steve doesn't think it's dangerous, but he thinks it's... unique.

But again, Steve doesn't often think. Maybe he's rusty at it.

Billy Hargrove has pushed himself off of the bank and has turned his back to the ocean, waving his hand at the boos of the rest of the guys, and is walking towards Steve as Steve works on thinking.

Jonathan notices him before Steve does, but doesn't bother doing much else other than pull his boots closer to him before dropping his attention back to the camera case.

"Got a fag?" Hargrove shouts at Steve as he gets closer, and Steve just blinks at him.

"Huh?" He asks, trying to find a reason that Billy would drag himself out of the ocean, seeing that Steve's at least eighty percent certain that Hargrove lives off of sea water.

"A fag," Hargrove repeats, making an aborted gesture of bringing two fingers up to his lips. "You know, cancer sticks? You ain't goin' out in the water, pretty boy, you've got no reason not to have a pack on you."

"Oh," Steve says, and then has to try and remember where in the hell his cigarettes are. "I think they're back at the reserve trench. Kept getting sand in the pack."

There's sand everywhere, all the time, even when it's pouring buckets and they're squatting in the middle of a rice paddy, because apparently sand is just a permanent part of Steve's life now. He's pretty sure that if he shook like a dog that he'd bear an uncanny resemblance to Pigpen from The Peanuts.

"Well, shit. Why'd I come over here, then?" Billy says, then drops into the sand next to Steve anyways.

Steve says, "I dunno." And leaves it at that.

Billy's been with them for about three months, eighteen clusters of tally marks carved messily into the inside of his helmet, not that he's wearing it now.

((Hagan had told Steve that Billy hadn't cut his hair all through basic and that it had been down to his shoulders, and the reason that Hargrove has that small crescent scar that follows the curve of his jaw is because right before he was deployed one of the drill sergeants held him down and cut it with a butcher knife, and that Billy had bit him.

Tommy had stories like that for everyone in the unit, liked to make it sound like everyone was some big badass from one of those old flicks about the second big one, but Steve thinks that that's all they are: stories.

Tommy tells everyone else a story about Steve where the reason that Steve's over here is because he told his old man that he'd rather fight the Viet Cong with just a stiletto knife than buy his way out of the draft, and that certainly isn't true, so Steve doesn't think the story about Hargrove is.

But Steve also wouldn't believe Tommy Hagan if the guy said that squirrel shit has nuts in it, so he supposes anything is possible.))

Roughly ninety tally marks in Hargrove's helmet, and Steve still feels like he's the newest member.

In reality, he'd been the newest one for Steve, who had only stopped being the green one once Hargrove came along.

All this to say, Steve still has no idea of what to do with Billy Hargrove.

So he just goes back to staring at the shore and practises thinking.

Except for now his concentration is shot to shit, because where Jonathan Byers sort of becomes camouflaged into the background of whatever he's doing at the moment, Billy Hargrove stands out like Day-Glo, and makes Steve just as dizzy.

(Steve thinks, absently, that Billy Hargrove could be a perfect poster boy for the army. He could even see a Hawkins High School newspaper headline for him if he thinks hard enough about it: Groovy new army brat gets to lovin' and killin' in the 'Nam, more on page six.)

“I don’t blame you for not going out into the ocean, Harrington,” Billy says, when no one’s said anything for a few minutes. When Steve glances over out of the corner of his eye, he can no longer see Jonathan and feels a spike of envy. For some reason, he can never escape anything as easily.

“That so?” Steve prompts slowly, when Hargrove doesn’t elaborate. He probably shouldn’t play into Billy’s palm, knows he doesn’t say anything kind for free and hardly ever charges anything, but, well.

He left his cigarettes at the reserve trench, he supposes this is the next best thing.

“That’s so.” Billy repeats him, eyes still on the shoreline. “You need to be sturdy in water, otherwise it’ll pull you under. You never plant your feet, you’d be swept away.”

Steve can’t help but laugh at that. He says, “I’d say I’m pretty sturdy with an M1,” because it’s true. He’s a damn good shot, one of the best in the unit, and being sturdy with a weapon seems more important than being sturdy in the sea.

Billy just hums. “I could be sturdier than you, if I wanted,” He says, and Steve glances at him again. Hargrove still hasn’t looked at him, sharp eyes in vivid contrast to where he sits, lithe and relaxed, on a beach in South Vietnam.

“Do you think so?” Steve asks him, because he’s actually curious. Hargrove is fast, sure, but he sure as hell doesn’t have the accuracy that some of the others in the unit have, people like Steve and Jason Carver.

Billy finally turns to look at him, flashes him a smile that seems more like baring his teeth than genuine happiness. “I never stop thinking,” He tells Steve.

Then why are you here? Steve wonders, but doesn’t say. He supposes it’s not any of his business.

“Then why aren’t you?” Steve asks, instead. “Sturdier, I mean.”

Billy shrugs. “I’d rather be precarious.” He says easily, and settles further into the sand.

Steve envies Billy Hargrove at times, on top of being unsure of what to know of him. To be so certain and so stable that you can afford to be capricious. It’s something he’s unaware of, but seems to be the whole of Hargrove.

“What are you doing all the way over here, anyways?” Billy asks, when it’s been a few more seconds of silence. “You could have come closer to the shore, you know, it won’t bite you.”

You’re all the way over here, too. Steve thinks and doesn’t say. “I have no doubt you or Hagan or Carver or someone else would drag me out into the waves.” He tells Billy instead, because it’s true. “Also, the shore moves.”

Hargrove snorts. “The shore doesn’t move, the tide comes in.” He corrects, and Steve doesn’t interject, although the two seem the same to him. “And not everyone would try to drag you into the water.” He pauses, as if thinking. “Patrick probably wouldn’t.”

“Patrick’s an outlier and shouldn’t be counted,” Steve tells him, because it’s true. Patrick McKinney has to be one of the nicest people that Steve’s ever met; although granted, Steve hasn’t met a lot of nice people. “‘Sides, it doesn’t matter much because I’m not going down there. The lot of you sure as hell aren’t flower children, I wouldn’t trust you with a grenade.”

He’s probably not using that phrase right, because he actually does trust everyone in this rag-tag bunch with a grenade, and has on multiple occasions, but, well. His point stands.

Billy thumbs at his nose and shrugs. “Yeah, well, you ain’t a dove, either.” He retorts dryly, and kicks out his leg to spray sand in Steve’s direction.

“Never said I was,” Steve says evenly, and as he tries to brush the sand out of his hair and wonders if he’d be able to get it out of the waistband of his khakis, he really, really wishes he’d just brought his damn smokes.

#harringrove #stranger things #billy hargrove #steve harrington #and here it is #a preview #a test piece?#i don't know i'm just posting this #enjoy????????????

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