Chapter Text
After the events in Iraq, Jason did not hesitate to quit the army.
The hesitation that followed and forced him to postpone his decision walked in wearing bright colored hazmat suits and sporting clipboards. The questioning in the on-site facility took hours that bled into days, and by the time their little group was woken up with blaring horns and the whirring sound of helicopter blades, they were all convinced that they would never leave. Rachel held onto Nick as tight as she could. Eric’s jaw was squared, but he was silent. Jason was the first to board the choppers, the first to step into the military base airport, the first to hop on the plane that would take them “home” (a word that sounded so vile he could hardly believe that that was where they were headed).
Home, of course, was not all that.
It was another facility, and more hazmat suits. It was blood tests and interviews and rooms with no windows. He couldn’t tell how much time had passed until he actually saw another human face, not covered by a layer of protective clothing, not hidden behind a monitor or one-way glass.
She introduced herself as Dr So-and-so and she told him they had great news. She told him they finally identified the source of their “shared hallucination”.
She told him it was gas.
By that point, Jason was mad enough to cry.
He doesn’t really remember lunging at the woman, but he does remember the bruises from being manhandled back into his cell – his “personal quarters”, they called it, but he knew what it was. They all knew.
He was a goddamn prisoner and his guards were trying to convince him that all he knew was a lie.
What followed was even more bizarre than the whole ordeal in the temple. Photographs, blood results, data, charts, and graphs that all pointed to there being nothing but a dusty old tomb down in the ground. Group therapy with his old comrades and a vomit of scientific mumbo-jumbo that explained the composition and effects of the gas.
They showed them photographs of the recovered bodies of Clarice, Joey, Merwin.
They weren’t eaten. Weren’t turned.
Joey died from Iraqi bullets, Merwin bled out.
Clarice looked like she starved to death.
The day after their third group session they were allowed to roam the facility “freely”. This meant visit each other, walk up and down their shared hall. Socialize in privacy.
Jason kept staring at the cameras in his room and said nothing.
It was gas, they told him. Gas that made them all hallucinate. Gas that made them believe they were all in grave danger. Gas that had them conjure up vampire parasites from outer space.
Gas.
It was six months later that Jason finally saw the light of day again, being allowed to walk and return to normal life once their readings proved them “stable”.
He didn’t want to know what that entailed. How broken they all were by the end of it.
The night before release, Nick visited. He kept asking about the future, what they were going to do, what options they had left. They would always be watched, they knew that much. The amount of paperwork to sign was massive - not so much a non-disclosure agreement as a deal with the devil itself.
The information about the gas, they said, couldn’t be made known. The public, they said - the public would panic if they knew something so potent existed.
One step out of line, and they would all be back in therapy.
Therapy.
“Hey.” Nick’s soft voice rang out to his right. Jason didn’t bother turning back to face him. Just kept staring at the wall.
“What are you thinking? Talk to me.”
The tiny crack that formed from an impact with an angry fist kept growing in size each day. It became his secret friend, that tiny black lightning among the white concrete. Jason would imagine it swallowing him whole, the whole building crashing down right with it.
He sighed, waving a goodbye to his dear old friend.
“I miss him, Nicky. I miss him so goddamn much.”
They stood there in silence. Nick didn’t have to ask. He knew.
And then they were released.
And then Jason quit the army. No hesitation whatsoever.
In the end, it still came as a surprise.
He was offered the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, a considerable step up from his last position. They offered to station him back at home base. They offered him a team.
Jason said “no, thank you” and walked out the door after failing the psychological examination. Potent signs of PTSD, depressive disorder, generalized anxiety.
Unfit for duty, they called him.
And Nicky felt betrayed.
It came as a surprise to Jason, then, that he decided to stay behind and serve in active duty. He had a strong feeling it had more to do with Rachel’s decision to remain in the army than anything else in particular, but it was still something Nick was passionate about.
Protect and serve and all that-
That is, until fourteen months later he came back home with an injury severe enough it left him paralyzed below the waist.
They called him a good soldier. They said he deserved to retire early.
Rachel quit the following month, and it was the toughest decision of her life.
And Nicky spent the next year of his life near catatonic.
Jason referred him to his therapist.
His first one, not his second. He already quit the second one himself and was looking for a third.
If there was literally anything remotely useful that he had gathered from the sessions, it was that writing was a good way to sort through the bullshit that kept bubbling up his brain like sewage water.
He was never a man of many words.
It was a struggle to bring the pen to paper.
Once he began, though…
Once he began, he found that he couldn’t stop.
He wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote until he filled out nearly forty odd pages with memories from Iraq.
From the checkpoint.
From the temple.
From the worst nightmare of his life.
He poured down on paper everything the shrinks in CENTCOM tried to suppress, to erase, to destroy and burn to cinders. He wrote down every gory detail, every pained breath, every shared smile, every revered touch.
He wrote it all-
And then he stashed the papers in the bottom drawer of his nightstand and never touched them, ever again.
Nine months later he arrived at Nick’s door and asked him if he could write his story - that last battle that made him unable to serve. Unable to walk.
Rachel nudged his side, and reluctantly, Nick agreed.
In another couple months, it would become the first story Jason published in a major journal. It would also be the story that would eventually get Nick country-wide recognition - and a medal of honor bestowed by the President himself.
After that, he did begin to feel better, albeit it wasn’t the story or the piece of metal that cut the deal.
It was the letters he began receiving from thankful citizens all across the fifty states.
And Jason would go on writing.
“Who knew you had a secret talent all this time, huh?” Eric teased him one day. He was the last of them to quit the army, but eventually, even the resident genius crippled under the pressure. He didn’t specify his reasons - Jason was beginning to think maybe he was forced to bail.
He still remained one of the most important civilian advisors for CENTCOM, which begged the question of whether him no longer being in the army was just a technicality.
And despite everything, Eric became a frequent guest at Nick’s and Rachel’s new home. These kinds of things, well - they either drove people apart or brought them closer together. And in their case, not many others could relate to the experience of inhaling metric tons of hallucinogenic gas that resulted in the imagining of the worst hell on earth.
After couple of years of moping, he even found himself a new girlfriend. She became part of the group just as well. Her and Rachel have girls’ night every second Friday.
Jason is sometimes allowed to join in.
And that is because Jason has been discovering things about himself along the way, too.
His first therapist suggested his complete disinterest in women was an understandable side effect of PTSD and that he shouldn’t push himself too hard to get out there again. His second therapist claimed it was downright unnatural and that he should get over himself and try harder to recover. He really didn’t like his second therapist.
His third therapist implied that perhaps his attractions simply didn’t lie with women at all.
It was that same week that Jason found himself hooking up with a bearded bartender in a bustling bar in the city’s downtown.
In all honesty, the realization that he was gay was terrible.
And then he met a handsome writer on his trip to Canada – and then it was no longer terrible.
And then the handsome writer cheated on him eight months later with a drunken college student looking to experiment on his Spring Break, and then it was terrible again - though for entirely different reasons this time.
All in all, Jason has accepted his sexuality with the same grace and dignity that he accepted the rest of the clusterfuck that was the ultimate conflation of his life. That is to say, he got drunk, picked up smoking, wrote, and then threw the pages that he wrote down into the toilet and flushed them.
It clogged up. He had to call a plumber.
An older Egyptian man that cursed at him in Arabic. Something about entitled rich Americans. Jason laughed, and told him to fuck off.
The decision to learn the language wasn’t even his, really. Not at first, at least. He doesn’t remember how it began, but he picked up a few words from Rachel back when they were still in action, and then he picked up some more when they were having dinner back in the States. And then she turned it into a game, a la Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Soon enough, Jason was seeking tutors and taking classes.
His first therapist disapproved. He said it was a bad idea, might put him into a regressive state, trigger his PTSD.
His second therapist - oh, screw her. She was adamantly racist, and all in all made him fall back into his nasty habits worse than he would have on his own.
His third therapist told him it could be healing. His fourth therapist concluded that if he found it something worth pursuing, there could be no harm.
Jason was no linguist, but he tried his damnest. It was the least he could do to keep his mind awake, prevent himself from beginning to lose it yet again.
He used his skills to talk to the Iraqi refugees in the US. He told their stories.
He was a damn good writer.
The first award he ever won was for a story of two soldiers that killed a girl carrying a bag of groceries. Their names, he claimed, were lost to history.
And that night, he and Nick had their first ever serious fight. It wasn’t about the story. It wasn’t about the checkpoint. In fact, Jason couldn’t be sure what it really was about.
All he could remember was Salim’s name, and the taste of copper on his tongue.
He broke up with his then-boyfriend that same evening, when he was no longer so drunk out of his mind that he could hardly string two words together. After a bout of the longest silence in the world, the man only sighed. Said he knew it was coming. Said there was no healing a heart that belonged to someone else.
They hung up, and Jason cried for the first time in six years.
Nick couldn’t remember what the fight was about, either. The next day Rachel and Eric adamantly refused to tell them the details - said if their drunken minds decided to block it out, it was for the best.
Jason apologized nonetheless, and Nicky did the same.
“Do you still miss him?” Nick whispered then, in the quiet of the living room, nothing but the fireplace cracking away in the dark. The clock struck midnight, and the neighborhood dog barked thrice.
“Nah, not as much. Not as much as I used to.”
Nick stared into the flames, a smirk painted on his lips.
“There’s that tell again.”
And so life went on. And on, and on, and on.
It would be two more years until Jason finally got the guts to publish his first novel - eight years since he escaped the fateful nightmare.
The reason was simple enough, really - the end of the Iraq War.
It wasn’t a decision he could very well discuss with others, not with the things written, with the words he put on paper. They didn’t exactly discuss the events of the temple as a group.
Not as though it was a forbidden topic, per se, but the men in suits stopping by at the end of every week in the first few months of their release made conversation difficult. Controlling the flow of information, they called it, asking them the same questions and recording the same answers.
Jason got a couple more visits than was strictly necessary after he became a published author. No doubt the big bad guys at Area 51 were terrified of their secrets leaking out.
He was a good boy, though. Kept his mouth shut. They all did.
And then the visits stopped and they still kept being good. They didn’t talk about it - because when the subject was inevitably brought up, Nick got angry; Rachel stormed out of the room, and Eric grew completely silent; Jason wanted to do nothing but scream and he was well aware that if he were to start, he wouldn’t stop.
So no, they didn’t talk about it. They continued not to talk about it when the book was published.
House of Ashes, Jason called it. He did his Sumerian research.
It was a New York Times Number One Bestseller in the first week of publishing. Every book these days was a New York Times Number One Bestseller. It wasn’t something Jason could be proud of.
He silently kept expecting the men in black to come tearing down his door any minute now.
No one ever did.
The others did not discuss the book with him. He didn’t even know if they read it and he didn’t care (at the very least, Rachel read it; there was a copy on the passenger side of her gray Sedan that she quickly tossed in the back when she was giving Jason a ride back home last week).
It probably did help that it took room under the Science Fiction genre.
Jason’s heart still twitched whenever he passed by a book store. He supposed that most of it, technically, was fiction - just not the parts that mattered.
He had a book tour celebrating the successful launch scheduled for the spring. Fourteen states, twenty seven dates. He was at his limit. His editor was over the moon, and his fifth therapist prescribed a larger doze of Prozac.
It was in another one of the big name bookshops that his mind abandoned his body yet again and began traversing the catacombs of his memory.
He was answering another question about the idea for the alien origins of the vampires in his book.
In reality, he was walking the dusty grounds of a temple buried deep underneath Iraqi soil. The rifle in his hands felt solid; his footsteps echoed across the empty halls.
Someone asked him about the meaning of the archeological crew. Why they all met gruesome, grizzly deaths.
Nicky was setting up a tripwire and Eric was manning the cams. From somewhere deep inside the tent, he could hear Rachel’s calculated muttering.
A question about the main character - a man named Haydar, peaceful shepherd that was swallowed by the earth and forced to deal with nightmares beyond his comprehension. His only goal was to survive.
To see his son again.
They were asking why. Who was the inspiration.
Jason turns around in his mind’s eye, and there he can see him. Wielding that same rusty piece of metal, stained black with blood of the creatures of the night. He smiles at him. Begins to walk closer. He extends his hand, and just like that…
“Thank you. It will be quick, I promise.”
“Right, right. But this is the last one, people! After that, we will proceed with the signings.” His editor announces, clapping way too loud next to Jason’s ear. “So, what’s the question?”
“It is about the ending of the book.” A voice states, and something in Jason forces him to reawaken. It stirs right beneath his throat, makes him sit up taller, but his eyes remain unfocused, far away. “As we know, Haydar is the only one of the group to survive, having witnessed the horrible deaths of his team. He makes it all the way to the surface, only to find out that the monsters, the horrors, and the tragedies were all in his head. Including the people he called friends.”
Jason stares at the table, not willing to look up. Unable to look up.
His hands are cold. Frozen solid.
“Yes, yes, what is the question, please?!” The editor’s voice is shrill. Impatient.
It’s brilliant, that voice is telling them, the ending is brilliant! Subversive! They’ll never see it coming.
“My question is this - what was the point of the struggle, if in the end, none of it was real?”
His hands are shaking and he can’t look up and when he exhales, Jason is certain he can see a white puff of frozen air depart his lungs.
Perhaps it is the decade old dust, settled in from the temple, finally finding its way to the surface. Perhaps it is all the cigarette smoke he let gather over the years.
Perhaps it is his soul, travelling towards a voice it knew too well.
“The point,” He begins slow, uncertain. His throat doesn’t want to work, and his system is on high alert. He is back in Iraq, and bullets are flying over his head. Joey is bleeding out on the ground. He just gave the order to shoot a woman dead. “The point is that, even though everything was a myth, a legend, a hallucination - his pain was real. The emotions were real. The fact that it was all in Haydar’s head doesn’t make it any different.”
“Well, I don’t know,” The voice interjects before the editor can open his mouth to conclude the session, and Jason finally finds it in him to lift up his eyes.
“Wouldn’t you think that such a revelation would break an ordinary man?”
Salim is wearing a white shirt and dark blue dress pants. His jacket is in his hands that he keeps clasped in front of him. His hair is beginning to gray at the temples, but his eyes are bright and young. He’s smiling.
He’s sporting a new beard. It suits him.
“Then it’s a good thing Haydar’s no ordinary man.”
After the Q&A session is over, Jason feels like he can’t breathe. They take five to recuperate, and he throws up into a trash can behind some book stands. His editor hands him a glass of the coldest water this side of the globe, and only rolls his eyes when Jason tells him to bring by the man that asked the final question.
He does as he is told when Jason threatens to fire him on the spot.
And even then, he half expects to be met with someone entirely different - at this point in his life, he’s thoroughly convinced that hallucinating a man he’s met once eight years ago would be among the top ten things he’s most likely to do.
But when Salim steps into the back room, Jason doesn’t waste a single second before throwing his arms around his neck.
“You- But- Why- How?!” is all he can manage, gripping the other man by his shoulders as though letting go would result in him evaporating from this earth.
Salim just laughs - hearty, real. His smile is brilliant and theres just that much exhaustion in it. There is more gray in his temples than Jason noticed previous. He smells like peppermint and spiced cologne.
“I decided it was finally the time for me to tour America.” He smirks, his words floating up and overhead, light, easy. “After all, your great country has much sightseeing to offer.”
Jason can see the plane on him, in the wrinkles of his shirt, in the creases underneath his eyes. This must have been his first stop directly from the airport.
“But here- how are you here?”
“Why, is it so wrong of me to visit a good friend? I wanted to congratulate you on your success!”
The lights reflect against the hardcover copy in his hands. Jason grits his teeth and feels as though he would rather drop down into yet another hellish temple. He doesn’t like the idea of Salim reading it.
He doesn’t like the idea of Salim understanding it - even if that was the only reason he published in the first place.
“I wouldn’t have ever imagined you’d become such an accomplished writer, Jason.”
“Yes, well- It, uh, started out as a coping mechanism.”
“And you’ve done well for yourself. All those people out there, all that press… Honestly, I’m just happy I managed to catch the last date, before the tour was over.”
“The last… Right. Today is the last… Hey, listen…”
Eight years, he thinks, eight years you’ve had to think of what to say when you finally laid eyes on this man again.
But words refused to form, and Jason kept holding out on half a sentence up until his editor announced that he needed to get back in there for signing.
Salim just nodded at him.
“Well, you should get going. I don’t mean to keep your fans waiting.”
And something broke in him, then. Something sad. Something long-forgotten.
Jason clutched at his arm, eyes panicked, heartbeat in his throat.
Don’t leave, don’t leave, don’t leave, his thought were screaming, and Salim knotted his brows. He didn’t step away, didn’t bulk at the sight of a shattered man - stepped closer, instead.
“Jason?” He raised a hand to his shoulder, steadying him.
Solid as a rock. Real. A crowbar flying inches from his head, impaling a horrid monster right behind him.
“Are you alright?”
“Tonight, we will be gathering, at Nick’s and Rachel’s.” He swallows down, breathing. “It’s a small thing, just the closest people, but it’ll be nice. You should come.”
Salim blinks at him wildly, shrinking in on himself. His sudden smile is small, but Jason doesn’t think it’s insincere. He can tell it isn’t.
They never left that damned cave.
“Oh! Well, I don’t know- They aren’t expecting me, I don’t want to intrude-“
“Nah, nah, stop that. The guys will be stocked to see you again. And anyway, we have this thing, everyone’s allowed to bring a plus one. Like a date or- or a friend.” He’s sputtering now, saying nonsense. His hands are shaking and the sweat from his palms is staining Salim’s shirt. “You can come as my plus one. You won’t be intruding. For sure.”
It takes a moment, but he finally gives in. Salim nods, and his smile grows in size.
“Well, alright then, Jason. I will come as your plus one.”
Jason smiles back and for once, it doesn’t hurt. There’s something miraculous about Salim’s presence here - suddenly, he’s eight years younger, and suddenly, the world is much bigger and scarier than ever before.
But he’s not afraid, and neither is the man beside him.
Jason laughs, before heading towards the door.
“Oh and, one more thing.” Salim stops him in his tracks, and before Jason has the chance to doubt him, he’s holding out the copy of the book. “Could you sign? I know I should’ve queued, but since we’re already here, I thought…”
Jason looks at him as though he’s grown another head. Salim shuffles in place, equal parts amused, ashamed.
“It’s- It’s not for me, it’s for my son. Zain. He’s sleeping in the hotel right now. I was hoping to surprise him.”
The book is worn at the edges, the pages scribbled over with a furious kind of regard. It was as though someone studied the text religiously, reveled in every word as though it was a stated fact.
Jason can’t help the tremble in his hand as he tries to make out a message.
“He a fan?”
“That’s an understatement of the year! The boy won’t shut up about you. At this point I don’t know which one of us talks about you more often, him or me.”
The book snaps shut with a particular kind of fervor.
“You talk about me?” He is unable to stop his mouth from uttering the words above the book held in suspense in between them - and he regrets them more the moment Salim’s eyes land on his. A certain expression settles in his features that makes Jason wish he would never utter a single word ever again.
And then the moment is broken, just like that, when his editor screams into the open door.
“Kolchek!”
“I’m coming!” He screams back, voice cracking, and the book with the scribbled message is now in Salim’s hands.
To my biggest fan, Zain. Keep making your father proud. You’re something worth fighting for. Best wishes,
JK
Jason throws one last look at Salim before exiting the back room, and finds something that gives him strength. It is then, he thinks, for the first time in eight years that he finally finds the strength to look forward again.
He thinks, for the briefest of moments, that everything just might turn out to be okay.
“I do. All the time.” Salim tells him, ducking his head away.
His smile is quiet.
And Jason’s own is threatening to split his face in half.