Greg Boyington normally enjoyed spending an evening in the Officer's Club on Espritos Marcos. There was always a nurse to romance or a poker game hiding in plain sight in the back room, or if all else failed, some starched-collar bureaucrat to goad into a fistfight.

Tonight, though, he was worried. Moore had ordered him back to the rear area for special orders, and when he and Gutterman and Boyle showed up, informed them they'd be flying cover for a Marine assault on a listening post hidden deep in some cave that they can't hit from the air. Which was routine in and of itself, but he took an instant dislike to the gung-ho major in charge of the operation. Howard Walker was the sort of Marine that Greg could never stand. People called Greg and his squadron a disgrace to the uniform, but in his opinion it was these guys who were the real disgrace. The ones who made Greg ashamed to be in the same war as them. Too stuck on orders above all else, no matter who that hurt, and bloodthirsty. Greg knew people sometimes said the latter about his own guys, but they weren't the kind of wanton killers some of these men became. His kids were soldiers with a job to do, but he knew every single one of them would rather be somewhere else, somewhere they weren't risking their lives and being ordered to shoot down someone else just doing their job too.

So instead of grabbing a drink or slow dancing with one of the nurses on leave, Greg was out wandering the flight line. His planes were fine. Their new crew chief was making sure of that. But he felt a little better out here, nowhere near Walker and his clearly embellished stories of successes. The others seemed just as disgusted. Boyle had left with a nurse, and Jim…honestly Greg hadn't seen Jim since the briefing.

Greg leaned on the wing of his Corsair, staring at the stars overhead. He could fly anywhere in the world with only those stars as a compass. The trouble was, stars tended to get clouded over. And that's when people tended to get lost.

A noise caught his attention from somewhere down the flight line. A sort of soft, breathy sound.

Greg shook his head. Damn kids, thinking the planes were for impressing nurses...Micklin would have a fit if he knew someone was making out in one of "his" birds. But Greg couldn't blame his pilots. They were just kids, and back home (where they all should have been, damn it, they were all just boys) they'd be making out in some field or vacant lot, in the back seat of their car. The planes were the closest thing they got to that out here.

But when he heard the sound again, he realized it wasn't someone breathless from a marathon kissing session, it was a sniffle. Like someone was sick or crying.

Instantly on alert, Greg walked quickly down the flight line to the source of the sound. When he bent down next to the last plane in the line, he froze.

Curled up under the wing of his Corsair was Jim Gutterman, sobbing like a child.

It would hardly be the first time Greg had seen his executive officer break down. Jim spent most of the day after Rafferty got killed down on the beach, and when Greg had gone to find him, the kid hadn't even tried to pretend he wasn't crying. And last month, after he got shot down, Jim had alternated between being as aggressive as a feral dog and as broken as a kicked puppy. Still, Greg wasn't expecting this right now, he didn't think anything had happened in the last few hours that would set Jim off so badly. It wasn't the kind of reaction he would expect if Jim got stood up by a date. Frankly, the kid only ever seemed half interested in going out with anyone.

"Jim?" He asked tentatively, and Jim flinched violently, curling up into himself. "Jim, it's just me."

"Pappy?" Jim asks, voice choked. "What…what're you doin' out here?"

Greg sat down, leaning against one of the blocked wheels of the Corsair. "Didn't feel much like spending my evening within a hundred feet of that stuffed-shirt major." He didn't miss the shudder that ran through Jim at the mention of the other officer.

"Me neither," Jim whispered. He slowly uncurled a bit and sat up against the other side of the tire Greg had commandeered. "If it's alright with you, Pappy, I'm just gonna stay out here for the night."

"Jim, I don't think that's such a great idea. You saw the weather patterns in Moore's office. We're due for a pretty nasty squall."

Jim shrugged. "I can get in my plane if it gets too rough."

"You really must have something against Walker if you can't stand to be under the same roof as him." Greg had known there had to be something more than Jim's general animosity toward spit and polish officers, but this genuinely worried him.

"Yeah." Jim wrapped his arms around his knees and sniffled. "I do, actually. I know that guy. From back home. And if he knows I'm here…"

Greg picked up a handful of dirt and slowly let it fall. He knew better than to push. Jim wasn't the sort to bottle things up too long. He tended to blurt out whatever was going on, even so far as to tell Greg flat-out that he was scared after what happened with Harachi.

"I didn't use to be…well, I didn't get into fights all the time as a kid." Jim shrugged. "Till high school, at least." He laughed humorlessly. "You may not believe this, Greg, but I was a pretty good kid. Momma always said I was the one with the soft heart. Guess it's a good thing she never saw me change."

Greg didn't think he'd ever heard Jim talk about his family before. That part of his life was a closed book. Jim had told him once that he'd been kicked out of high school and stole a car, but he'd said nothing about his family even then. And he was one of the few who never got any letters from back home and never seemed to expect them either. A couple of the other kids were orphans, but they'd volunteered that information to Greg at one time or another, usually when someone they bunked with bought it and they were collecting things to send home to the family.

Jim chuckled again, still without a trace of real humor. "Daddy used to say I'd tear up at the drop of a hat. If I was scared, sad, even angry, didn't matter. Seemed like every time I argued with my parents I wound up cryin' whether I was sorry about it or not. It didn't seem like such a big deal till I got to high school." He picked up a blade of grass from near the tire and started tearing it into tiny strips.

"Walker wasn't the only one who gave me a hard time, but he was the worst. Singled me out right away. He was looking for anyone he could hurt, and back then I was a pretty easy target." Jim sighed, his breaths sounding wet and shuddering. "I could put up with him calling me a crybaby. He wasn't the first or the last to do that, and it wasn't like I could argue with it. But he didn't stop there." Jim sniffled, rubbing a hand over his face. "Finally figured out the only way to shut him up was to fight back. I started breakin' noses when I got called names. Guess that made them decide I wasn't quite as weak and spineless as they thought. So I just kept on fighting. It seemed like the only way I was going to get respect."

Greg nodded. He didn't need specifics. He knew what Jim meant.

"It was just the way things was, back there, Greg. Men aren't supposed to cry." Jim shrugged. "They can get into fistfights and bloody each other's noses and half kill each other over a girl, but they ain't a man if they cry. At least when I was fightin' no one could tell."

Greg nodded. He knew how it was. He wasn't the type to wear his heart on his sleeve like Gutterman, but he knew kids like that. He'd gotten into more than one scuffle over it too. No matter what a kid was, no one deserved that kind of bullying.

It was all too easy to see how it had happened to Jim. Greg had known from their first meeting (which had also been their first fight) that Jim was hiding a hell of a lot of vulnerability behind a lot of bravado and a devil-may-care attitude.

"It was better to be called a troublemaker than…than a faggot." Jim's voice was almost nonexistent. "Just…no one forgot." He swallowed hard. "Everyone already thought they knew me. And…" His voice dropped off into a choked sob. "There was this coach. Figured a kid like me wouldn't cause him any trouble. That he could do whatever he wanted." Jim dug his fingers into the dirt. "He figured wrong. For all the good it did me. Everyone listened to him, and when I wouldn't drop it, they figured it was easier to kick me out than start any trouble with a coach who took their team to State two years runnin'." He shrugged again. "I'd had two years to make them believe I was nothin' but trouble. Wasn't even a contest who they were gonna side with." He sniffled. "A respected member of the community up against a kid from a ranch that was goin' under who had a reputation."

Greg didn't even know where to start trying to deal with this. He'd been pretty sure when he saw the court martial charges that life had dealt Jim Gutterman a shitty hand. He just hadn't realized how bad it really was. He was beginning to think Jim was actually doing a better job than anyone had a right to expect at coping with his past. It certainly explained the kid's tendency to go around slugging superior officers. And his issues with authority figures in general.

"Jim…" There was really nothing Greg could say. There was no way to make this better. No way to say 'I'm sorry your childhood was messed up and you were bullied by a bunch of judgmental assholes and molested by someone you should have been able to trust' without making it sound like pity. And Greg was well aware how much Jim hated to be pitied.

Maybe he'd done the best he could already. Looking past Jim's record and the walls he'd put up to protect himself. Giving him a chance, trusting him in a way Jim clearly hadn't experienced in a long time. Maybe what the kid needed, after the mess his life had been, was to be able to move on. That, Greg could give him. And could keep giving him.

"It's over, Greg. Or it was. Till I heard his name today in the briefing." Jim shivered, wiping snot and tears away with the back of his hand. "He's gonna find me and he's gonna..."

"Oh Jim." Greg rocked back on his heels. "If he so much as looks at you funny he has to answer to me." He sighed, looking up at the sky, which was already covered with a layer of purplish-black clouds. "I'll make damn sure he won't be looking at much at all for a few weeks." He was ready to go blacken both the guy's eyes right then and there, but he wouldn't be much protection to Jim if he got sent to the brig for roughing up a fellow major.

"No, you don't understand, Greg. If he finds out I'm one of the ones flyin' cover, he's gonna take it up with someone," Jim choked out. "He's gonna tell Moore what he thinks of me, and get me yanked from the mission, maybe the whole squadron. You know what they'll do if they so much as assume…"

"I won't let them." Greg would turn the whole Pacific theatre upside down before he would let Jim be hurt again by someone's cruelty and narrow-mindedness.

"But even if all he does is spread it around the guys, Greg, they'll never trust me again. TJ won't want to bunk with me, no one will."

"Jim, anyone who gives you a hard time, I will sort them out so fast they'll be flying yesterday's mission." Greg glanced up as the first drops of rain hit the dust. "You sure you wanna stay out here tonight?"

"Yeah." Jim huddled a little further under the plane.

"Then I'm staying with you." Greg slid down so his legs were protected by the cover of the plane's nose.

"Pappy, you don't have to do that."

"That's not the point." Greg crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the tire. All things considered, he'd slept in much worse places. "You shouldn't be alone tonight."

"What about Boyle?" Jim asked, clearly a feeble last ditch attempt to convince Greg not to go out of his way for him.

"Oh, he's not going to be alone tonight, Jim."

That wrung the first real chuckle out of Gutterman that Greg had heard since they hit the airstrip on Espritos. "He still better be on the runway at oh-six-hundred."

"Yeah, he better."