AN: This one-shot is being posted as part of "Good Fic Day," an effort to raise the quality of writing here. We hope to encourage more writers to improve the quality of their own fan fiction - spell check, grammar check, keep the gang in character, outline, plot and don't use Mary Sues. Good fan fiction requires effort, and we would like to encourage other writers to rise to the challenge of producing better fan fiction, not only for our readers, but for S.E. Hinton, who created the wonderful book we are trying to honour.
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The war wasn't as adventure-filled as Sodapop had imagined it to be. The paint-brush image of heroic fighting, battling for freedom, wasn't anywhere near the real, harsh truth. Soda had always been a bit of an adrenaline junkie, but all he could ever see was people, some his friends, dying; being blasted off of their own two feet, their shocked expression and wide eyes fading into disbelief as they realized what was happening to them, then dawning into horror as they hit the ground.
He supposed that it would be better to never see it coming at all. Then, at least, they died with the fierce expression of bravery and anger, the idea that their death made a difference. They didn't know they were just another tally for the body count.
Personally, Sodapop didn't want to ever be faced with either situation. He didn't want the last thing he ever saw to be a battlefield, already racked with bodies. That wouldn't be his way to die.
He was too young, anyway. The Army didn't throw away lives, their youth, like that. Did they?
They couldn't. That would be like throwing out food you had just cooked without ever tasting it. That wasn't the way the army operated, was it?
All of the young lives that had already ended had to have been for a purpose. So many couldn't have perished without a purpose. Oh, the individual people knew why they died, but the overall effect it would have? Where was that?
Besides, there couldn't be so much unrest in the camps if there wasn't a purpose to it all. No one could sit still, it allowed them too much time to think about what had happened. And the ones who had the blank eyes and the hard-set stare, they couldn't stop seeing what had happened. Those were the ones who would wake up screaming.
Soda, personally, couldn't sit still at home; no chance of him being able to here. Every chance there was, he was doing something, or looking for someone. He took pride in the fact that he knew most everyones name in his regiment.
He wrote home as much as he could stand to be positive. He never let on that war was as miserable as it actually was. Darry and Pony still had that paint-brush image of it. Soda always had the feeling that Darry could tell when he was lying, anyhow. He had asked them to lay roses on Johnny and Dally's graves when it was the right time. He didn't have to worry about them going to his parents graves, he knew that would be done until the end of the Earth. And he knew it would happen for Johnny and Dally as well, but he still felt like he needed to be there for Johnny and Dally, like he wasn't doing enough just asking about it.
Soda remembered how excited he had been fo find out where Steve was. Soda knew he had been drafted too, but had no idea where; Soda had already been in Vietnam for three weeks by the time Steve got there.
Turns out, Steve was working with planes. Fixing them, mostly, but he was learning to fly with one of the recreational pilots at the airbase. The guy had liked Steve's personality, or how he had been able to fix the glitch in the engine.
Soda was glad that Steve couldn't see all that he'd seen; Steve already had so little faith in the good of the world that if he saw the true extent of the evil, he might crack just like Dallas had.
Steve had taken Soda up in one of the planes he had fixed once, unbeknownst to the pilot who had dropped it off. Soda had been a little bit like a kind in a candy store; smiling like crazy and trying to touch everything in reach.
Soda remembered staring at the ground as they took off and watching excitedly as all the details on the ground shrunk down in size. They had been skimming just under neath 7,000 feet, below the clouds still, when Soda realized he couldn't recognize the land beneath him as Vietnam anymore.
"Steve," he had whispered,"let's fly to Tulsa."
The plane had jerked suddenly after that, and the next thing Soda knew, Steve had pulled up, bursting through the clouds. Soda gaped at it all.
Soft, white clouds spanning as far as he could see. The ground below no longer visible, Soda felt like he was in another world. One without all the horrors of war, without parents dying, parents who had children that still desperately needed them, one without small, frightened, wide-eyed, dark-haired puppies dying after doing something heroically good and honest, a world without tough greasers who had been hardened beyond caring finally cracking. It was suddenly a world where lives didn't fall apart.
That was the only place Soda had found that was still peaceful. It was the only place still untouched by death. It was serene and calm, it allowed him space to think about something other than the nightmares he constantly witnessed back on the ground. It gave him a chance to see that there was still a place where he could see things other than death every time he closed his eyes.
Ten minutes later, they were back on the ground. Soda had been sorry to leave the serenity that being up in the clouds gave him. Back to trying to close his eyes against all the bodies falling.
Soda guessed some of what he was feeling showed on his face. He had come to realize that he couldn't hide his emotions very well anymore. Not with all that he had been seeing lately.
"I know," Steve said, putting a hand on Soda's arm. "It makes me feel the same way. That's why I like it up there."
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"Man, I'm so glad we're not on the front line. That would scare the fuckin' shit outta me." Glen tossed a wrench to Steve.
Steve just looked at him with blank eyes, not hearing the wrench clatter to the floor. He remembered Soda telling him where he was. The front line. In the goddamn open fields and ditches.
"My buddy's up there, man." Steve deftly picked up the wrench and continued working on the engine of the fighter jet.
"I hear there's some damn good soldiers up there. I'm sure he's fine."
"I hear he's one of those damn good soldiers." Steve couldn't have seen it when they were back in Tulsa. But Soda was different here. Harder, meaner, tougher. Vicious, sometimes. "He better be goddamn fine. I ain't gonna go home alone."
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Beneath it all, Soda was scared out of his mind. The orders had been given, and he'd be damned if he didn't follow them, but that didn't stop him from being afraid.
He was thankful for his time in the rumbles of Tulsa; they taught him to be tuff even when he was breaking down from the inside out. Because of that, he'd never show the fear he had.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the guy next to him go down. There was a gunshot wound on his chest.
Soda blinked and stared ahead, determined. He was tired of seeing all the death. The war needed to end – now.
He took out two, trying not to look at their eyes as they fell. If he didn't look at their eyes, he wouldn't remember that they had a family too.
Minutes later, rounds of bullets later, Soda felt a sharp, fiery hot pain in his right thigh. The world seemed to slow as he looked down with hard eyes to see the blood staining his trousers. There was a lot of blood for such a short amount of time, wasn't there?
Soda deftly felt someone catch him as his eyes rolled up into the back of his head.
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The only thing that he was aware of was that he was laying on something soft, a cool material underneath his sweaty palms. He opened his eyes and saw one of the guys from his regiment. James, he thought. Maybe Jimmy.
"I know you didn't want to die out there, man. I couldn't let that be the last thing you see." He smiled, almost apologetically. Soda couldn't figure out why. It was only a shot to the leg. It couldn't be that bad.
Soda couldn't stop his eyes from closing this time, and he was unconscious again.
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Vaguely aware that someone familiar was talking and that there was something warm wrapped tightly around his hand, Soda fought to open his eyes.
It was Steve. He was crying, though, and gripping his had like it was the only thing keeping Soda from floating away. Soda didn't realize that to Steve, that's exactly what it was.
"Greasers don't cry, man." Soda had been able to manage a smile.
Steve looked down at his shadow of a friend. "I don't want to go home alone. Me and you until the end, right?"
"Yeah, man. Till the end."
"Well, the end ain't here, Soda. So you just make sure you don't make me go home alone."
"I won't let you go alone. I'll be there, I promise."
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Steve was silent and cold. He boarded the plane, numbly sitting down and looking straight ahead. Steve still couldn't admit that it was Soda inside the coffin in the back of the cargo plane following the ones he was in.. That wasn't his best friend with the sunny personality and the contagious grin. That wasn't the guy who he'd known since the second grade. It just wasn't.
"You said you'd be here," Steve had whispered, looking at the coffin with dead-pan eyes as he had seen it loaded into the hold.
"I'm sorry, Darry. I told you I'd bring him back and I couldn't." Steve looked at the tree just behind Darry. He couldn't look at him. Not yet.
"You did bring him back. Don't ever say you didn't." Darry looked just like Steve felt. Darry was full of unshed tears, and he looked miserable that he had a reason to shed them again.
"That ain't Soda in there, Darry. It just isn't."
"Steve, there wasn't anything you could have done –"
"I should've been able to do something! It was just a leg wound. It wasn't supposed to be something that small. He shouldn't have been allowed to die that way." Steve backed away from Darry, like he was afraid he was going to get bitten.
"It wasn't your fault." Steve figured it was Darry's last ditch effort to make him realize that no one blamed him.
"Tell Pony I'm sorry. For everything."
Steve turned his back and started to walk away. He had seen the tears brimming in Darry's eyes. He couldn't stand there and watch him cry. Steve had shed his tears, hopefully forgetting how. He didn't want to start remembering, either.
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