#31: fic: The One Where Ray Person Time Travels, R

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Title: The One Where Ray Person Time Travels
Fandom: Generation Kill
Pairing: Ray, Brad - Gen
Rating: R for language
Disclaimer: The characters here are based on those portrayed in HBO's fictionalised mini-series.
Word count: 4,500
Summary: Sort-of crossover with this. It was like having asthma, excluding the nudity, brushes with the law, and being chased by angry grandmothers with sticks for being an exhibitionist pervert. So maybe it wasn't like having asthma at all.
Notes: Huge thanks to forochel, amazing enabler and beta.


The first time Ray time travelled was when he was five and about to be crushed by a falling bookshelf in the Animals section of the local library. There was an uncomfortable jolt like he was about to be sick, and suddenly he was standing in the kitchen at home while a strange man stood by the refrigerator drinking milk straight from the carton. Ten seconds later he was lying flat on his back in the library again, opening his eyes to the sound of Macie Billington screaming.

"It's okay, I'm alive," said Ray, getting up quickly and glancing around. He was halfway across the room from where the shelf had collapsed. Poking out under the pile of books was a flannel shirt that looked very much like the one Ray's mother had put him in that morning.

Macie Billington was still screaming. So were Lionel Chang and Vanessa Paterson.

It was then that Ray noticed that he was naked.

"It's all right, the most important thing is that I'm alive," Ray told them reassuringly, "you don't have to be afraid."

For saving his own life, Ray earned a six-month ban from the library and the nickname "Pee-pee" Person.

The official name for Ray's condition was 'Chrono-Displacement'. Ray's parents called it 'God's strange little gift', although after the public indecency incident of 1994 this name was amended to 'Josh's Problem', and later, 'Lord have Mercy'.

Ray didn't call it anything in particular. Since the age of five he hadn't known any different - he would end up naked and disoriented in all sorts of fucked up places and fucked up times, and would be just another day in Ray Person's fucked up life. Older versions of himself taught him how to pick locks, steal clothes and run from the police; how to give them bullshit names and hope hard that he would snap out soon, like falling from a nightmare and waking up in another dreamscape.

It was like having asthma, excluding the nudity, brushes with the law, and being chased by angry grandmothers with sticks for being an exhibitionist pervert.

So maybe it wasn't like having asthma at all.

Ray was debating about the merits of vegetarianism when he experienced that familiar feeling of vertigo, a sudden disconcerting dip like the floor had vanished from beneath his feet. He ducked out of the room with a quick apology, flew down the hallway and vanished, leaving his best trousers and his new oxford shirt in a crumpled heap on the ground.

He appeared in what he recognised as the shitty apartment he would own about seven to ten years in the future, before tripping on the carpet and knocking his head on a side table.

When he came to again his future self was standing over him with a glass of water and a banana.

"Couldn't you at least give me beer?" asked Ray, taking the water anyway. "And what is up with the banana?"

"Let me guess," said future Ray. "District tournament, 1997?"

"Yes."

"We kicked their asses," his future self told him, grinning, and Ray noted that even at twenty-four or twenty-eight there was still that mournful look about his eyes whenever he smiled. The difference was that his future self had somehow learned to wear that sad expression in a way that didn't make him look like a loser.

His future self was cool. He always refused to tell Ray anything more, but he was fit and looking hard and Ray had no fucking clue how he would ever get like that.

"I thought you weren't supposed to tell me these things," said Ray warily.

"Well, I'm telling you this," replied his future self. "We kicked ass a lot when we were sixteen. In debates, that is."

"I don't see how that can happen if I keep travelling out in the middle of a speech," said Ray.

"This is the part where I give myself the two greatest revelations of my teenage years," said future Ray. "This is going to change our lives."

"I can see a paradox just waiting to happen," said Ray dryly, "but go on."

His future self cleared his throat. "First revelation: pot makes us time travel."

"Fuck off."

"We had a joint before the debate, remember?" said his future self, looking rather smug.

"Yes, but-"

"Don't do that any more. It fucks up our time cycle even more."

"What is this, our period?" asked Ray, rolling his eyes, but he was already starting to feel sick again, like the walls were somehow drifting closer and farther away at the same time.

"Revelation two," future Ray was saying, "Ripped Fuel."

"What the fuck-" Ray began, but he was slipping out again, appearing back in the hallway about ten metres from where he had left his clothes.

After putting his shirt and trousers back on, he entered the room again and kicked the other team's asses. Then he walked over to the local pharmacy on the way home and purchased his first bottle of Ripped Fuel.

Ray was very good, but the others thought he was high all the time.

The day Ray graduated high school, he slipped out in the middle of the Principal's Address and found himself three months ago, teaching a seven-year-old version of himself how to climb through the Billingtons' kitchen window.

"Do you still remember the rule about kitchens?" he asked himself.

"Don't break anything," said seven-year-old Ray.

"And?" Ray prompted.

"And try to get something to eat," the boy finished.

"You're a good kid, Josh," he said, patting him on the head before hoisting him up to window-height. "Right, to the food, then. Got to love the Billingtons."

Later, when they were sitting in Ray's mother's back yard finishing a bag of cheetos, seven-year-old Ray turned to him with orange dust all down his chin and mumbled, "You're really cool, Uncle Ray."

"You think so?" asked Ray, tipping the crumbs from the packet into his mouth and getting most of it down his front.

"You teach me stuff," said young Ray. "Like surviving and things."

"It's all part of becoming a man, my friend," Ray replied, beaming down at his seven-year-old self, who lurched forward a little bit before vanishing completely into thin air.

He found that he couldn't remember the moment when he realised that Uncle Ray was actually a future version of himself, but he did remember deciding not to call himself Josh ever again. It had been strange, realising that he would grow into the guy he had practically hero-worshipped as a kid - quick, talented Uncle Ray, who knew the neighbourhood like the back of his hand and who had been the first person to tell him that being naked was okay.

Ray had glimpsed many different versions of himself in the future but he didn't like to think about whether he had any choices at all, when it came to the rest of his life. His future self had been the one to cheerfully introduce the idea of "giving each other a hand" when jerking off; the guy who had been crazy enough to tell a sixteen-year-old version of himself about the wonders of Ripped Fuel and persuade him to stop smoking weed in the same breath. He had also been a picture of almost arrogant competence: Ray in the future was a survivor, in more senses than his seven-year-old self could comprehend when he had mentioned that word. A survivor of what, though, remained a mystery to Ray.

It was only when he was heading back into the house (where, presumably, his self from three months ago was in his room reading back issues of The Amazing Spiderman) that Ray remembered the USMC recruiter who had spoken to him briefly some weeks back. Do something with your life, the man had said, but Ray had given it hardly any thought because he already had Vanderbilt and the scholarship laid out in front of him.

Time travelling made a lot of things that were eventualities seem inevitable. Ray knew for a fact, for example, that in five minutes he would go upstairs and watch porn with himself but vanish just before the video got good. He knew that would happen and didn't mind that it would happen. College, though, was something he could change.

Do something with your life, the man had said, and though Ray knew full well that most of it was bullshit a small part of him wondered if he might do just that - fuck the plan up a little and see where that took him.

There was a clattering from nearby; his neighbours were coming out to their back yard. Ray opened the door and slipped quickly into the kitchen because Mrs Merkel didn't like it when young Josh ran about with no clothes on. When he got to his room his past self had already fallen asleep on top of Dangerous Habits.

"Wake up, man," said Ray, tapping himself on the shoulder. "Let's watch some porn."

When he got back, his mother was standing over him with his graduation gown in her hands.

"Hi Ma," said Ray, beaming groggily up at her. "I'm joining the Marines."

The Limp Bizkit gig was a mistake.

For the rest of his band members it bore minimal repercussions - sure, they sucked so bad that someone slugged Johnny in the face while they were scrambling offstage, but they didn't have to relive it about thirty times at various points in their lives.

The time travellers Ray had heard of - well mostly just that hippie librarian who had written a book about it - seemed to be pulled by some sort of strange chronological gravity towards major events in their lives, like their mothers dying or the chick they'd later get married to. Every time Ray time travelled, on the other hand, there was a forty per cent chance he returned to that Limp Bizkit gig. It fucking pissed him off.

He was finishing a physical fitness test - literally almost finished with his fucking four mile run - when he felt a familiar, sick jerk in his gut that made him instinctively dive off the path he was running down, leaving the fifty pound weight vest and his PT gear and shoes scattered in the nearby shrubbery. He reappeared in the middle of his band's third (and final) song, stark naked and feeling really fucking murderous in the middle of the crowd.

"Bastard shit cunt," Ray spat, pushing his way past some tall fat dude who had sweated all the way through his shirt, "I'm going to fucking kill something."

Fucking Johnny, going on about how they were going to make it big. Ray had gone through months of shit just to finish that test and now he was stuck here listening to this fucking racket all over again. "Fuck off," he shouted, barrelling his way towards the front, "these guys fucking suck and I'm going over to fuck them up!"

"You do that!" someone yelled, shoving him forward. "Fuck their shit up!"

By the time Ray reached the side of the stage he was sick with rage and drunk on the noise and the crowd and the sheer, furious impotence of his situation.

"Dude, this man's naked!" someone shouted gleefully, but Ray paid the guy no attention. He charged up to himself and Neil and Johnny as they were getting off the stage and hit Johnny in the face as hard as he could.

"You fucking suck!" Ray yelled, still livid, but before he could throw another punch he was stumbling backwards and landing between two long tables in the empty mess hall.

Fuck. Fuck. He'd managed to fuck up his test and give his best friend a black eye in the same day.

"I'm such a fuckup," Ray groaned.

"It's a good thing I'm not, then," said a voice nearby. It was himself, wearing the PT gear he'd misplaced.

"You finished the test?" asked Ray, sitting up.

"I was all the way in front, you flabby piece of shit," said older Ray disparagingly. "As always, it has to be Uncle Ray to the rescue."

"Fuck off," said Ray. "Now can I have my gear back?"

"Not even a word of gratitude?" asked his older self, breaking into a grin. "A man after my own heart."

"Thanks, man," said Ray grudgingly.

"Just doing us a favour."

This was the reason why Ray Person dared to go to war:

Two days after he finished BRC he appeared in the empty hallway of his high school and glimpsed himself at age forty, aged and wiry and wandering buck naked down the corridor.

"Ray?" Ray ventured, not quite believing what he was seeing.

His future self looked over, and winked.

With the Ripped Fuel- and time-induced headache pressing into his skull and the sound of mortar fire pounding in the distance, it was that image of himself that he held on to. Somewhere, in the future, he was alive; losing hair and gaining a bit of a belly, eyes more melancholy than ever.

It made him as close to fearless as he could possibly be.

Ray first met Brad Colbert in Afghanistan. At that time Brad had already earned the title of Iceman and walked around with an air of calm condescension that only served to fuel the legend that surrounded him. Ray, however, was not the sort who endeavoured to bask in someone else's glory, and made no effort to get to know the man beyond the perfunctory greetings.

There was one occasion, though, during a lull in the fighting, when Ray ran into Brad while attempting to obtain some batteries for his team.

"Person, right?" said Brad. For his height, his voice was slightly higher than Ray had expected. He didn't think Brad would appreciate him pointing that out, though.

"Yes, sir," Ray replied.

For a long moment Brad looked as if he wanted to say something important to Ray. Eventually, though, he managed a sort of half-grin that came across more awkward than friendly.

"Stay frosty," Brad told him.

"Yes, sir," said Ray.

Iraq was different. There were some things that didn't change, like the fact that the Marine Corps was a shithole of incompetence and retardery, but at least Ray was now Corporal Ray Person and RTO to probably the best Team Leader in the entire battalion. The bad thing, however, was that Ray was time travelling a lot more.

In Afghanistan the Ripped Fuel had done its job and kept him firmly in the present. There had only been one occasion in his entire tour of duty where he had time travelled - he'd appeared in his mother's living room ten years into the future and spent a quiet afternoon watching cooking programmes and consuming large portions of leftover meatloaf. It seemed, however, that years of dependence was causing Ray to develop a tolerance to ephedra.

The first time he time travelled in Iraq, he went back to that physical fitness test he thought he'd failed and completed the fucking thing, only to reappear right in front of an exploding portable stove.

"What the fuck were you doing there?" Rudy shouted, genuinely surprised.

"Fuck," Ray spat eloquently, clutching at his face. He had just run four fucking miles and broken into the mess hall back at Pendleton just to make sure that his eighteen-year-old self got his PT gear back and now half his face was burned off.

In the rush to make sure that Ray was not badly hurt nobody seemed to really care that he had been wandering about naked in the tent.

Brad was pissed; they could tell not just from his choice of words but also the way his eyes went cold and his lips thinned into a hard line. They didn't get NJP'd though, because the LT had apparently covered for the platoon, but it was this sort of thing - this sort of accident - that had Ray thinking twice about why he was there. He'd seen himself in the future, but there was no telling whether any of the others would live till that age, or if his condition would be the cause of any irreparable mishaps in the future.

"Be careful," Brad said suddenly, while they were waiting outside the PX for the reporter to get their supplies. It was slightly ridiculous, but Ray somehow got the feeling that both of them knew exactly what Brad was referring to.

He ate more Ripped Fuel. He tried to focus on the present. He got through the days hunched over the steering wheel while making up shit about NAMBLA and bitching about everything from the retardery that characterised their chain of command to Justin Timberlake's hippie-faggot ways. Brad tolerated Ray's constant babbling with unexpected forbearance, and the reporter and Trombley just assumed that this was a constant state of being for Ray. Driving at night was a bitch: his helmet and NVGs pressed his migraine in like a vise, and every rocket flash and barrage of gunfire made his vision twist and flicker like he was about to be yanked out of the space he was occupying, leaving a driverless humvee at the head of the column.

On the fifth day of the invasion, Ray travelled again.

They had just dug in for the night and Ray was in the middle of fiddling with the radio when he felt himself slipping away. Before he could attempt to get out of the humvee, however, he found himself in the back yard of a beautiful house that he had never seen before, complete with trampoline and neatly trimmed shrubbery.

For a long moment he just stood there, amazed by the feeling of grass under his feet and the sight of yards of wonderful green lawn stretching out in front of him. No house in Nevada looked like this, as far as he remembered.

He must be dead. That was his first thought. One of the Hajis had actually managed to fire an RPG accurately and he was now in some sort of middle-class, dick-sucking commie faggot hell.

There was a boy in this hell. The boy was slipping out through the glass doors at the back of the house, and was now headed towards Ray with an expression of faint exasperation on his face. He couldn't have been older than thirteen, and looked unnervingly familiar.

"You're back," said the boy, seemingly unfazed by the fact that a strange man was standing stark naked in his back yard.

"Have we met?" asked Ray.

The boy looked sharply up at Ray. "So this is your first time, then," he said, less a question than a statement. His eyes were very blue, and there was a distinctly Nordic look about him.

"My first what?"

"Your first time here," the boy replied.

"Wait," said Ray, because this wasn't happening - this wasn't - this couldn't be -

"I'm Brad Colbert," said the boy.

"Oh... fuck," said Ray. "Oh, fuck."

The boy - thirteen year old Brad fucking Colbert - merely shrugged. "Well, that was pretty much my reaction as well, the first time I found out that a naked, mentally unsound retard was going to make regular appearances in my back yard throughout the rest of my formative years."

He even talked like Brad.

"Fuck, this is so fucking surreal."

"You're the one who time travels," Brad pointed out, "I don't think you have a right to call anything surreal."

"Wait, so I don't just land here once?" asked Ray.

"You're not supposed to tell me anything about my future," Brad told him calmly. "That's what you said the last time."

"There was a last time?"

"Also, here are some clothes."

"Fuck," Ray repeated. "Fuck. I'm naked. I'm naked and talking to a thirteen-year-old version of Brad Colbert in his back yard."

"Clearly," said Brad, every inch the Iceman even in his youth. He handed Ray a pair of shorts and a Hawaiian shirt before adding, "I'm actually going on fourteen."

"This is some messed up pedo shit," said Ray.

"Trust me," said Brad, "if you try anything remotely pedophilic I will fuck you up."

"In your future," Ray told him cheerfully and spitefully, "we are very good friends."

"You're just fucking with my mind," Brad replied with great confidence. "There's no way in hell that's happening."

"You just wait," said Ray, hopping slightly as he got into the shorts.

"Don't bother with those shorts," Brad told him.

"Enjoying the view?" asked Ray cuttingly.

"You're going to vanish very soon," Brad replied, and sure enough, Ray was falling forwards, the lush green of the Colberts' back yard fading into the unsettled darkness of the shithole where they'd set up camp.

Ray opened his eyes and found himself inside a ranger grave that he did not remember digging, disoriented and very fucking traumatised. Traumatised enough that he gave an undignified yelp of terror when Brad unceremoniously dumped Ray's MOPP suit and gear on top of him.

"Holy fuck, Brad, you were thirteen," whispered Ray, clutching at the MOPP suit. "You were fucking thirteen."

"Ray," said Brad, crouching down next to Ray. "I hate to break this to you, but you totally fucked up my childhood."

"Oh my fucking god," said Ray.

"That's about right," Brad replied wearily.

"Fucking- fuck."

"Why the fuck do you sound so traumatised when I am clearly the victim here?"

"That's because I've read the fucking book and I know what happens," said Ray with great vehemence. "The one written by that hippie cock-sucking Communist of a librarian who creepily visits his future wife when she's like, fucking twelve and convinces her that they are destined for each other or some shit like that. And the point is that I refuse to be lifelong soulmates with Brad fucking Colbert."

Brad was silent for a very long time. In the darkness it was highly possible that he was laughing.

"Oh my god," Ray repeated, "I just mentioned 'lifelong soulmates' and 'Brad Colbert' in the same fucking sentence."

It made sense - Brad had been covering for Ray ever since Afghanistan. What didn't make sense was why the fuck Ray kept travelling back to Brad's childhood.

"It could be worse," offered Brad, "you could have travelled to Trombley's childhood."

Three days later, Ray time-travelled right back to their last night in Camp Mathilda. It took him a couple of seconds to orient himself again and get a bearing on his surroundings, and when he managed to figure out his location, he cursed involuntarily. He was in one of the officers' tents, barely two arms' lengths from the nearest reclining figure.

It was the LT. He was awake.

For a long moment Ray just crouched there, hoping that the LT would dismiss this as a dream and go back to sleep. The LT merely continued staring at Ray, however, his eyes impossibly wide in the dark.

"...hello," whispered Ray, after a full minute of willing himself to return back to Al Hayy again. "I am a vision of the desert."

The LT blinked. "Person?" he asked.

Ray was fucked.

"Not a man," he continued lamely, "but the oracle of the... sands."

"Cut the crap, Corporal," hissed the LT. "What the fuck are you doing in here?"

"It's a long story," Ray told him, "but first I need to get out of here."

"Where the hell is your uniform?"

"I left it... in the Humvee," Ray replied truthfully.

"There had better be a good explanation for this, Corporal," said the LT.

Ray was beginning to feel nauseous - he was going to slip out at any moment now. "Actually," Ray continued, "you might want to speak to Sergeant Colbert instead. Trust me on that."

"Corporal?" the LT repeated, but Ray was already vanishing.

"So the LT knows?"

"He was concerned that you weren't going to be combat effective," said Brad. "I assured him otherwise, that morning, but I think it's quite impossible not to sometimes worry about the fact that the only thing really stopping this platoon from meeting an unhappy, time travel-related end is your pathetic dependence on ephedra."

"And dip," said Ray. "Don't forget the dip. Also, some nights I go back in time and give myself a blowjob. It has a very centering effect when I'm back on the road."

"Ray, do you have any idea how much of a fucked up piece of sci-fi whiskey tango you are?"

"I've taken auto-fellatio to a whole new level, homes."

"You are one sick little son of a bitch."

"Actually, I've only done that once," said Ray, after a pause.

Brad raised an eyebrow.

"All the other times, I ended up in your back yard."

Ray wasn't really afraid of dying. He was afraid of other things - mostly of fucking up his job, of the other guys getting hurt as a result. He hadn't realised that there was one other thing he was terrified of, until it happened.

He rolled back into his ranger grave after coming back from a slightly runny shit one night, only to find someone already inside it.

"Fucking hell," Ray spat, about to kick up a fuss about Walt sleeping in the wrong grave again, when he realised that the other person was naked and terrified. Also, he was Ray.

Ray at fifteen was kind of scrawny, with hair that fell into his eyes and curled down over the nape of his neck. Ray at fifteen had been pretty fearless already, but mortar fire and the sand and shuddering chill of Iraqi night-time was an entirely different thing. He was shivering, lying as still as possible in darkness of the hole he had presumably just time-travelled into, and Ray suddenly remembered very clearly what it had been like, to be walking home one moment and appearing in this unknown hell the next. He remembered wondering if he was dead.

They didn't speak to each other. His teenage self was too afraid, and Ray wasn't sure what to say without scaring him even more or opening up the possibility of having to deal with questions he simply couldn't provide the answers for. Instead, he settled into his ranger grave and squirmed around to face teenage Ray, placing his hands over Ray's ears and trying to communicate for all he was worth that this was a bad dream, that this would pass. He knew it wasn't; that he would come to choose this nightmare over all others - but at age fifteen this reality still lay far ahead of him.

Fifteen-year-old Ray stilled at the touch, his breathing slowing slightly as they lay there silently for what seemed like an age. After an eternity of waiting and willing, the younger Ray gave a lurching groan and vanished.

Ray remained awake in his grave for a very long time that night.

Time slowed and stretched and snapped back into place, and suddenly the invasion had ended. By then, Ray had gone back twice more to when Brad had been ten and fifteen. The day he realised that he had been the one to teach Brad how to do his first sleeper hold, Ray had been thoroughly obnoxious about it for a whole twenty minutes until Brad decided to demonstrate the hold quite ruthlessly and adeptly on him.

The lack of Ripped Fuel made Ray feel off-kilter and unsettled, something that didn't go unnoticed by Brad.

"Where the fuck did you go?" asked Brad, like the fucking psychic motherfucker he was, and Ray mumbled something about the Marines and shit-holes because he was tired; tired of talking and focusing and trying to make sure he stayed firmly fixed in the present. When the vertigo came and he slipped out again, he was almost relieved.

("I'm joining the Marines," said Brad at age seventeen.

Of course you fucking are, thought Ray.)

He reemerged in the present to observe another version of himself tackling Fruity Rudy to the ground. At times like these, Ray liked to wonder where the fuck his sense of self-preservation had gone.

But it was as if he was an image on a television with a lousy signal; as his other self stormed off the field almost crying from helplessness and rage, he felt himself being jolted away again.

"Ladies, let me introduce you to this handsome young man here," another Ray was saying. "He's my third cousin. As you can see, he's arrived with no clothes on, and he's just as frisky as I am."

"Feeling better?" Brad asked much later. He was still holding the drink Ray had handed him.

"Oh yeah, homes," said Ray. "I just came from that strip club incident."

"What strip club incident?"

"The strip club incident of 2004," Ray clarified. "It's an adventure still waiting to happen... five more times."

Every now and then, time dealt Ray Person a good hand.

End

Notes:
forochel contributed the line fucking psychic motherfucker; she also wrote this hilarious chatfic about Walt sleeping in the wrong grave that I am hoping she'll post in the comments. ♥

The entire concept of Ray's time travelling was taken from The Time Traveler's Wife, so all crimes against the laws of physics ('it's not even science fiction!') are Audrey Niffenegger's. :D