Rex used to think that active problem solving and keeping secrets from everyone means you're too busy to instigate a fight. The army gives him a new perspective –just what his dad had wanted. Rex is a good soldier.
However, all too soon, there's a whole new battle he's fighting –like what he's been doing until now can even be considered 'fighting'– and Rex can only hope he doesn't die trying, and his secrets remain his.
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Warning: Rex has a learning disability, and there's internalized homophobia and negativity about his disability as well as verbal abuse. Just a heads up.
This fic has been sitting in my drafts forever, so I'm finally posting it here. It's Optimus/Rex, but slow-burn. And I really mean slow.
Rex loves the army: the army is easy. Put on your uniform, son. Shine your shoes. Make your bed. Load your gun, come on, get to your feet, what kind of soldier are you to fall so easily? Get up, Prola, didn't they ever teach you to run ?
It's everything in between that leaves Rex so goddamn angry, and bored, and empty - spoiling for a new fight. Or a cigarette.
He told Will he was quitting weeks ago; the other man has never much liked Rex smoking. In another way he's stricter than either of Rex's parents ever managed to be.
He has enough respect for Will's rules to wait until he's gone to light up. The air is faintly muggy and hot as he steps outside, flicking his lighter to life, trying to forget all the reasons why he can't resist poisoning his lungs.
The first inhale is always a relief, the nicotine a soothing balm for his jagged nerves. The first exhale just makes him cough.
The heat index peaked at 101 degrees, and it's that muddled bit of midafternoon Rex never knows what to do with when he isn't training. He just wants to smoke and nap through the end of the whole damn day. He's red-faced with his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He's even begun to tan beneath the freckles and the sunburn on his shoulders is peeling like old paint off a garage door. He burns easily, and the back of his brain is telling him it's got something to do with thinner skin and redhead genetics, but the science is a bit fuzzy.
"Epps told me you're still buying cigarettes at Mess."
He grinds to an abrupt stop. Will, Jesus Christ, is actually right outside, which is almost the shittiest thing Rex can think of. Plus Rex is angry and smelling of cigarette smoke, which is seriously not the time to corner him.
From the look on Will's face, he knows it too.
He sits right in front of Rex, and then actually steals the cigarette out of his mouth.
"They say middle children are the worst tattletales," Rex says, settling down next to him and shaking out another cigarette.
Will just holds out his hand, like he actually expects Rex to give it to him.
"They'll kill you, and I genuinely don't like the smell."
"Seriously?"
He rolls his eyes when he sees Will looking at the picture he keeps on him at all times, like a talisman or something. Rex's most prized possession is his dad's lighter and his smokes, and it makes him ache the next time he takes a drag.
"You know, sometimes I wish I did something different with my life," Will says. "A cop or a car salesman or something."
"My dad was in the army," Rex says, blowing smoke from one side of his mouth. "He wasn't there when I was born either."
He tilts his head back, one arm slung loosely across the back of the chair, fingers picking subconsciously at the frayed fabric. He can see the lighter spots on the edges of his shirt where sweat hasn't soaked through yet.
"I always wanted to be an astronaut. Like… be the first guy to see a new galaxy or find a new alien life form."
A deep exhale, filling the air with a hum bordering on a quiet chuckle. Rex turns his head to look at Will, blinking through squinting lashes.
"What?" He laughs, a slow half-smile on his face. "It's true."
"An astronaut?"
"Yeah," he says, because Will gets it even if Rex's dad didn't.
"So what happened?"
He sucks his cigarette down so the cherry glows bright. "I took the ASVAB, you know, this test that tells you what you should be when you grow up? Turns out I'd only bring down the IQ of the whole organization of NASA."
Will slaps him upside the head then, in a way that seems more suited to him than it ever did Rex's parents.
"Fine." His eyes cross as a stray lock of hair falls out of place and catches at the inner corners of his furrowed brows. He blows it away, stretches his legs out in front of him.
"I joined 'cause my life's one big dead end," Rex can admit to him. "One night I'm just having a crisis at three in the morning, in the shower, while mum's bitching to my brother about how she wants at least one of her children to get good grades, get a scholarship, all that shit. ' Because you're gonna make something of yourself '. Dad just saw me as cannon fodder. Same way my mum always did."
Parents give you a hard time about being a kid. They say things like ' when I was your age -" or whatever adults say when they're trying to sound worldly. They're trying to kick you out of the childhood they never had. Once you let go then that's it; you can't go back.
The problem is, when you hear something enough times you start to believe it no matter what. That's how it goes; ' grow up, Tim ' becomes ' grow up, Zach ' becomes ' grow up, Rex '. And then suddenly everybody's old like their parents and standing in the same pair of shoes. And while Rex has no doubt in his mind that he will likely end up the same as his father, it doesn't mean that he always wanted to be like him.
' You're not cannon fodder, you're just too scared to try ,' Zach said, but Rex knows how dumb he is better than anyone else possibly could, so he bat him aside and turned to his dad, dressed in the army uniform.
"Hey. you can still be an astronaut," Will says, smiling, and that is how Will has always been, from start to finish. He is Rex's closest friend, or he is about the closest thing Rex has to one - Rex's never been great at making friends his own age, but for reasons still unknown to him Will always comes in swinging to defend him. Rex couldn't even get mad at him when he flushed his cigarettes down the toilet, even though Rex had to trade a few smokes for a dollar each afterwards. He always lets Rex swipe sips of his beer until it's empty and then gets up and gets another one without ever saying anything. He also got him a box of Bombpops for his birthday.
"You can do anything you want."
Rex doesn't look at him, busying himself with the strap of a gauntlet that doesn't need busying with.
After three years here, he can successfully assemble a rifle in under ten seconds, pretend to understand Figueroa, and judge whether or not pornography has artistic merit. His dreams of becoming an astronaut that Rex convinced himself were a pipedream and melted away like a popsicle in the summer sun of his freshman year are so far away that they might as well be in a different universe.
He wants to tell Will that, but the man's dark eyes bore into him and Rex loses the idea.
"I'll miss the hell outta you, you know that?"
He stubs his smoke out on the armrest of his chair, sending a couple sparks flying onto the ground, then stomps on it with the heel of his combat boot.
Will nagging at him, it won't make it easier to let him go - Rex doesn't know what he's going to do without him, with his dad nagging at him instead, his mother as distant as ever.
"I know I've said it before, but -" He twists a hand up in his hair. "You're gonna be a great dad."
"God I hope so," Will says, rubbing a palm against the side of his nose. The dust caked to the right side of his face smudges, giving him a dark eye.
He flips the picture in his hands over; the kid's got Will's eyes and his nose, an exact replica. The day she was born, all tiny and squishy-faced and red, he'd promised Sarah, between happy tears, that she would never have to stay up late asking her mum when dad was coming home.
"I just can't wait to hold her for the first time."
Will looks at the crumpled picture for what must be the millionth time, like he'll find something he missed before.
The picture is out of date - it was taken two months ago, about a month after they'd been shipped out here, and Will hasn't looked away from it since.
"Soft-ass," Rex says, and hell, as if he himself isn't carrying around a picture of his baby brother in a duckling-patterned onesie.
Zach- shit, it hurts to think about his brother right now, like pressing down on a bruise. He loves that kid more than he's ever loved anything in his life. He misses him. In whatever godforsaken place they'd stationed him, back when the mosquitos and the muggy heat and the nonstop terror had kept him awake at night, he'd used to flick on his lighter and stare at the picture of Zach: grinning wide, his blonde hair gleaming like the sun.
He remembers suddenly, a letter he'd sent his father back home when he was a kid. Take care you don't die or get hurt again .
He didn't write it, of course, his mum did, but he'd put his name at the bottom in big, wobbly letters.
Zach would post letters to whatever dusty wasteland Rex was in, and the letters would sometimes, eventually, get to him, and when they did Rex would try to read them over and over, trying to soak the words into his skin.
The others had teased him, asked if there was a young lady writing him adoring letters and whether they'd sent pictures of themselves. Will had always smiled and bumped Rex's shoulder with his own.
"You're always welcome to come and visit, Rex. You know that, right?"
Rex inhales sharply, breath catching in his chest. He looks stupidly down at the stains on his shirt.
"Yeah, okay."
It's just the nicotine that's got him on edge, his heart pounding against the walls of his chest - but between one exhale and the hiss of the cooler next to them Rex rises to his feet, the itchy feeling for escape taking him two steps backwards. "Uh - okay, yeah."
He reaches for the pack of Marlboros he left on the metal armrest of his chair, instead, and shakes out cigarette number three. One palm pats around his thighs, searching in vain for the lighter that's supposed to be there.
"Sorry… my lighter, uh. I don't got it on me. It's inside. Just -" he already regrets bringing it up, tripping over each word like it's a hurtle in a race. If there's anything the whole Prola family isn't able to digest, it's pity. "I'll be right back."
Once he's certain Will won't follow him, he totters his weight from one foot to another, and then turns around. He almost hits himself with the door as he wrests it open. His bunkmate makes a gruff noise at him, and Rex walks by with his head kept low.
He doesn't quite make it to his bunk before everything around him goes to hell.
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