Starstruck
Chapter Two: The More I See The Less I Know
By: Jondy Macmillan
A/N: Oh dear. So everyone wanted a continuation of that first chapter, and I'm afraid you're going to have to wait for it. It was kind of a really long prologue, although I hate calling things prologues. It feels so pretentious, somehow. Anyway, I wanted to try my hand at a 'how Christophe met Gregory and vice versa' fic, and this is what I came up with. The first chapter will be continued in the last few chapters, and I hope you're all not terribly disappointed you have to wait, and will continue reading!
There was a time, once, when I didn't know Christophe.
My father has been a part of the military since long before I began forming memories. A lieutenant-commander, which as I understand it is a decent officer's rank; although not nearly as impressive as a higher pay grade might be, he's been an integral part of my life. Mostly an integral part of it going to shit.
It's mostly his fault that I ended up in the situation I'm in today. In love and royally screwed, I mean.
Somewhere in the dark ages, my dad was stationed in the UK before beginning a tour in the Gulf. While there, he got my mum to spread her legs like a low class hooker, and I'm pretty much the result. I don't begrudge mum her hour of fun, but many are the days I wish she hadn't decided to track my father down. Sure, it all ended well for her. She got the dream; the house, the picket fence, the dog, and the kid. Dad was nothing if not an honorable fellow.
Good for mum, like I said. Horrid for me.
I've had to deal with the repercussions of my conceiving all my young life. It wasn't bad at first. Ages one, two, and three, I expected moving from house to house was a part of daily life. Around age four I got suspicious, and by the time I turned five, I'd figured it all out. My parents denied me a normal life. They moved me from base to base without ever giving me a say in whether I actually wanted to be a Navy Brat.
I had no constants. There were the less than exemplary schools I attended, which never quite seemed to be able to keep up with my fluxuating curriculum. I must have relearned my multiplication tables at least five times. My mother tried to educate me on the finer points in life; literature and etiquette and things you don't learn at tables full of men sporting flattops and drinking pitchers full of Bud every night. Most nights she'd wrangle me into eating at home with supplemental dinner table lessons while dad visited the local eateries; cafeterias fancied up or down, but never quite masking the broods of squids, jarheads, flyboys, and well-muscled soldiers occupying them. He wouldn't come back well after oh dark hundred, and he'd always be fully sloshed.
Sometimes he'd tell me stories when he was like that. Stories about his time in tomcats, flying side by side with falcons in their bulky, inefficient bombers. Now son, he'd say, they're phasing us out. It didn't matter for him anyway. His eyes were shot to hell, and no one wanted a Navy pilot with crap vision.
He has a dirty mouth, one my mum tried impossibly hard to censor, but it never seemed to stop him. It made him friends, I suppose. Cussing in the military is some kind of pastime, and my dad's a master. In fact, if I were going to pinpoint how I met him, the guy that fucked my life every which way, that fateful day when I was six; I'd say it occurred because of my dad's foul language. Living on a military base isn't always a social death sentence. And just because you happen to be a 'brat' doesn't mean you band together with your neighbors in a desperate attempt at solidarity. I barely knew most of my neighbors' names, and few of them had children around my age. Most of the time I played by myself, except when an older kid would take pity on me and decide to do a day's charity work.
My dad was on leave that particular day. It was autumn, if I recall correctly, but it didn't feel much different from summer or winter. We were in a particularly sunny area of Southern California, where the seasons often seemed frozen in time. It was a nice change from Dad's previous stint in Kansas, or the aggravating months before that where the weather was fine but I couldn't speak to a soul since I didn't understand Korean.
At any rate, dad was home, drinking on our front porch. Our house was remarkably identical to the all the other houses on the street, which happened when you lived on a base. Uniformity was the name of the game.
He was drinking, which wasn't a particularly advisable thing. Even on leave, the military expected my dad to be able to handle whatever they threw at him. If he'd been at the local pub, it would've been perfectly acceptable, but alone on his porch in broad daylight was an offense, however questionable. It became a question of morals when he spotted a car driving by, towing a U-Haul and sporting a United States Marine Corps sticker.
"Here come the devil-dogs," he muttered, "Polluting our street."
I glanced up at him warily. Dad had no problem with Marines, per se, but as an older sailor, he had a deeply instilled rivalry that was once supported, even encouraged, by the old regime. At that point the government had only recently begun it's 'let's all work together for a brighter tomorrow' campaign, and my father was having trouble adjusting. So basically, he thought it fitting to yell obscenities off the porch towards the car. Which, it being a breezy, comfortably cool day outside, proved to be a blunder. The angry driver of the car opened his door, steaming mad. He bounded up onto our porch, and here, it's a testament to my father's prowess, had a spitting curse-word showdown that would have put most of the other squids on the street to shame.
Once more, my dad reigned victorious. Not only that, but he'd made a new friend. The Marine parked his U-Haul in the driveway three houses down and came right back over. With his wife and son.
The man, Mr. DeLorne, I liked. He was tall, thin, but with the amount of muscle one expected from a military man. The woman, Mrs. DeLorne, I didn't. She was a sallow faced shrew. Despite all my mother's attempts to entice her into a conversation, she steadfastly refused, clutching the cross that dangled around her neck. Eventually I learned it wasn't because she was unfriendly that she acted so, although in time she would grow to be the woman I'd judged and loathed. No, at that point, she had trouble understanding English, being fresh off the boat from France, much like my mother once upon a time.
Then there was the boy.
I'll never forget him, standing there, scrawny and unnaturally tall for a six year old. His eyes were leonine, and his hair was short, but stuck up everywhere, like he'd recently been on the receiving end of an impromptu crew cut gone awry. He was the fiercest little boy I'd ever seen.
I was instantly infatuated.
"Son," my dad placed a hand on my shoulder, "This is Christophe DeLorne."
"Christophe," I tasted the name, rolling it on my tongue. Decisively, I held out a hand, like mum had taught me to, "I'm Gregory."
He glared balefully at me. I'd never met someone so caustic before. It was fascinating; a break from the constant boredom of normalcy that I once took for granted.
"I reckon my son's not takin' to yers," Mr. DeLorne drawled, his voice honey sweet and Southern as could be. The realization that the DeLorne's were French hadn't quite sunk in, not having heard Christophe or his mother speak yet. The reality of his father's Baptist heritage and French ancestry would long confound me until much, much later.
"Boy's a spitfire," my dad replied easily, taking a swig of beer. He offered one to Mr. DeLorne, who accepted with a 'don't mind if I do'.
"Daddy," I tugged on his shirt, "Why is he being mean?"
"Well I don't quite know," my dad replied with a smirk, "Why don't you ask him?"
I should have known then by the mischievous glint in my father's eye what was going to happen.
I took a tentative step towards Christophe, raising my hands in the air. I recall thinking to myself that perhaps this boy wasn't belligerent; he was just hard of hearing. At such a young age, common sense hadn't been beaten into my head yet, and what I did next seemed like the optimal solution. I stepped up to Christophe and put my lips to his ear. He regarded me out of the corner of his eye with a piercing, warning look.
"I said hel-lo!" I yelled, straight into his eardrum, "My NAME is GREGORY!"
It wasn't the brightest idea on my part, I'll admit.
Next thing I knew, I had Christophe's tiny fist in my face.
No stranger to throwing down, as my father had taught me that defending myself was always key, I retaliated. I punched him in the gut, the ribcage, and all the places that made my mother shriek and squeak in horror. Even Mrs. DeLorne was yelling in heavily accented English, and the only words that I could make out were 'Non', 'Stop', and 'Please'.
Meanwhile, our fathers were doing something entirely different.
"I'll wager my son is going to kick your son's ass."
"You're on, Frenchie," my dad rejoined. He was delighted to hear Mrs. DeLorne's accent, I think.
I pinned Christophe down with my body, wailing on his face with my hands and elbows. He jabbed me with his knee, squashing my vital points and assuring he had the upper hand in our grappling. I struggled to regain my advantage, lashing out with everything my six year old self had.
In the end, it was declared a tie. Our mother's pulled us kicking and screaming, apart.
That was how I met him. That was how our relationship started. With violence. Little did I know one day it would end the same way.
I never got to say, thanks a whole fucking lot, Dad.
A/N: Yes. Mr. DeLorne is a hick- I acknowledge the surname is French, and will eventually get to him having French ancestry and the schematics of how he met the decidedly French Missus. Just not yet. There will be two or three more chapters detailing the years leading up to Gregory's fifteenth/sixteenth, which is when the romance that leads to the beating to a bloody pulp begins. Necessary back story, you could call it. Anyhow, I apologize for the brevity of this chapter- the next few should be a bit longer.