Klaus had no idea what in the holy fuck had just happened. He was sober, shaking with withdrawals, and scrambled from a marathon torture session, and then things really got weird. Explosions, people screaming at one another, gun fire. He figured out what was going on right around the moment when someone shoved shoved a rifle into his hand while someone else started forcing him into a pair of trousers.
Apparently being half-naked and showing up out of nowhere wasn't even a little bit unusual. Then again, he was confused and covered in blood in the middle of an actual war zone. There wasn't a damn thing unusual about that at all.
A strange man showing up in camp in the middle of the night wasn't unusual either. It turned out, men went missing all the time. Medics prescribed amphetamines, then soldiers popped them like candy, wigged out, and disappeared into the jungle. When they came back to a different camp, well. Every company was short on bodies. The CO would report the wanderer back to command, and rather than try to reunite him, he was part of a new squad until they were back at company HQ. A bloodied, bruised stranger showing up in the middle of the night was a weekly occurrence. As long as he spoke English, nobody cared where he came from or where he was supposed to be, because it meant one more gun on the side that was covering your ass.
Klaus had never used a gun, but it was easy enough to figure it out. Point the hollow end at the jungle, pull the trigger, and create a few new ghosts. It was exactly as barbaric and primitive as old Reggie had derided it as being. If he could see Klaus now.
The fighting didn't calm down until the first glimmer of morning sun started to peek up from the horizon. Klaus sat shaking in the mud, looking at the dead bodies torn apart and mangled. At least half of their side was dead. God only knew how many on the other side. He'd seen war movies, and knew that something was supposed to happen now, but he had no idea what. Was he supposed to be cleaning up? Retreating? Going into the jungle to chase out any Vietcong stragglers? The movies always jumped from the fighting to the next bit, where soldiers were marching to their next mission. Klaus figured that it was the army (maybe?), so sooner or later someone would shout an order and tell him what to do. He wasn't expecting someone to plop down in the mud next to him. Klaus watched him for a moment, trying to take in as much as possible. He'd already figured out what had happened. Hazel and Cha-Cha weren't carrying around money or gold or anything special. They were time travelers, just like his dear darling baby brother. Once he got his heart rate under control, he'd grab the briefcase and figure out how to go back home.
And then his new friend pulled out a joint. He lit it, took a hit, and passed it to Klaus.
"Thanks," Klaus said shakily. He hit it like it was a cigarette, burning the back of his throat. He managed not to cough his lungs dry and passed it back again. Another two or three hits like that, and he'd be fine until he could get back home and get a real fix.
"Shit," he said. Because what else was there to say?
"No shit," his new friend said. His dark skin was smeared with mud and blood, making his eyes seem supernaturally white by comparison. This man had Seen Some Shit, and he sat here smoking a joint with a man he'd never seen before. Klaus looked over his other shoulder, expecting to be met with rolling eyes or an angry glower. But he wasn't. Because Ben wasn't there. Klaus had managed to hold it together up until that moment. He was used to chaos and carnage. Reginald's training had turned all of them into emotional black holes when it came to the heat of battle. His training hadn't once touched on how not to panic when you suddenly realise that you stole a time travel device from a pair of psychopaths and zipped yourself back to 1968, leaving the only person who ever cared about you behind, because he's dead and dead people can't time travel.
"You're fresh on the ground, aren't you?" Klaus' new friend asked.
Klaus nodded. What else could he say?
"Lucky for you, we're supposed to be getting out of here today." He handed Klaus the joint and got up. "You look like you need it more than I do." He left with that, going to take care of whatever duty he needed to tend to.
By the time Klaus finished the joint, which he did in record speed, he felt steady enough to get up and find his way out. People more experienced than he was were already busy piling the dead and wounded into trucks, while others tore down to relocate to whatever new fresh hell they were heading to next. He found the tent he'd materialised in, and dug his briefcase out from under the cot it had been kicked beneath. He wasn't the only one in the the tend though. A medic was tending to a man who could not stop shaking. Klaus watched as reflexes were tested and questions were asked.
"Here," the medic said, opening his pouch and pulling out a small packet. "Take that. You'll feel better." He pressed the packet into the soldier's hand and got up to tend to the rest of the unit.
"Could I get some of that?" Klaus asked mostly as a joke.
The medic paused long enough to pull another one from his pouch and toss it over to Klaus. "Doing all right?" he asked.
Klaus nodded and looked down at what he'd been given. "Much better now, thanks," he said. He had absolutely no reason to be taking codine, but he wasn't going to argue about it. In fact, if they were going to toss it around like that, maybe Klaus could delay going home for just a little bit.
Everybody saw ghosts, and everybody took every drug they could find to make them go away. A day in the jungle turned into a week. A week turned into two. Klaus hadn't been on so many drugs at once in years. And he never felt better. You didn't have a drug problem in Vietnam; you had a condition. Surprisingly there were few people telling him what to do. As long as he didn't OD, stuck with the group, went where he was told, and pointed his gun at where he was told to point it, the COs didn't give a single shit about what anybody did during a rare moment of down time. Klaus had friends who didn't treat him like he was a moron, because everybody was drugged up and confused all the time. Everybody had something or someone they were angry at, and firefights let all that raw rage come out in a completely unhealthy but cathartic way that Klaus had come to like entirely too much.
Also, movies fucking lied. Not just about the war, but about the people there. He'd seen plenty of movies where draft dodgers would go to the board claiming to be cross dressers or queer or whatever else that might get them deferred. He'd never seen more guys giving each other handjobs outside of prison. He was pretty sure most of the guys there were straight, but when the options are your hand or someone else's, someone else's is always better.
And then, they were in Saigon. A two week furlough that was more about letting everyone drink and fuck themselves into a stupor before they turned their guns on one another than it was rest and relaxation. There was no rest and relaxation in a war zone. You were either balls to the wall fighting, or balls to the wall partying. Saigon was where Klaus had realised that while most of his friends were straight, he'd been dense as a brick and confused honest flirting for… something else. Or maybe he'd been doing so many amphetamines he just simply hadn't noticed. But in the dim light of the bar, he finally noticed.
Suddenly, a month turned into two. Then three. Maybe when all this hell was over, Klaus wouldn't go home at all. He thought he might take Dave home with him, but the 70s were right around the corner. The 70s sounded fun. A hell of a lot more fun than showing up back home and introducing his siblings to his new boyfriend, anyway.
And then they were ambushed and cut off, and Klaus was screaming for a medic over gunfire and explosions. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fucking fair.
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