And when you ask 'em, "How much should we give?" They only answer, "More, more, more, more!"
Song/Skeleton: Fortunate Son Name: Dieter (Dee) Voss FC: Sam Claflin Age: 33 Birthday: January 18, 1940 Gender & Pronouns: Cis male, he Sexual & Romantic Orientation: Heteromantic and heterosexual (let's put a ? on all that, though - while I'm sure he thinks of himself that way, and that he is very genuinely and thoroughly in love with El, I'd say there's some biromantic/bisexual stuff he's keeping very contained. Like most things. The emotional intensity of firefighting and then combat could've created opportunities for him to develop connections and question feelings he otherwise would have left very neatly shelved.)
Occupation: Presently unemployed, former firefighter and laborer Neighbourhood: Willowdale. Dee grew up there, in his parents' house, which he's about to inherit since his mother's passed; a few years before he was drafted he and Elly were living together in an apartment in this neck of the woods. Which she's still living in. And where his things still are. Awkward.
+ : hardworking, determined, devoted, loving, generous - : stubborn, prideful, insecure, disconnecting, bitter
Wanted Connections:
FAMILIAL - Dee has younger siblings (I’m thinking two, 27-30, any gender!) who he kinda mostly raised.
PLATONIC (?) - Old friends from around town, other draftees from Stillwater, musical types to split some healing and hurt with, possibly someone to share a bad habit (or a few).
BIOGRAPHY
tw: parental suicide, alcoholism, wildfires, military, war, injury, drug use
Before the silver nitrate shakes, before the jungle, before Elly and Dee, even, there was that Voss boy. Dee didn’t just have a chip on his shoulder; he had a corpse. His father’s. It was one thing to see all the fire and modern-day brimstone of a thing like Pearl Harbour and come home a little cracked. Maybe that could’ve been forgiven, with sideways looks and the odd whisper. But Dee’s dad didn’t just crack. One hairline fracture at a time, the man crumbled away - from his wife, his children, his friends. And then he shattered. It was Dee who found him, in pieces, and it was Dee, ever after, who went around sweeping up what was left of his mother - a white-knuckled shell of herself from that day on - and his little siblings, hardly old enough to understand the hole that’d just been torn in their lives or the cruel, quick judgements that seeped in to fill it, from their neighbours, their schoolmates, and all the nosy strangers of Stillwater. All the while, the mortgage needed paying. The fridge needed milk, the shelf needed bread. Somebody had to do the practical thing.
So he dropped out, years early, and got down to work. Whatever work he could find, really; the too-short time he’d spent in school hadn’t served him well. Reading was a hunt for sense in words and letters that slithered around in the grass of every page, and writing was just as embarrassingly effortful. Looking at his folks, most quietly - or loudly - assumed the whole family had taken a wrong turn around some bend or other. Maybe the kid had sung along at the veterans’ bar well enough, strummed his way into a few hearts on that guitar his dad had taught him to play, when the old man’s hands weren’t shaking. That wasn’t any kind of practical, though. So Dee sold that damn guitar, and his grandma’s spoons, and his grandfather’s clock. Then… then he tore things down, and built them back up, and patched whatever came apart, learning how he did best: with his hands. And he paid the mortgage. He put milk in the fridge, and bread on the shelf. He did the practical thing.
Until Elly. Eloise Meadows crossed those tracks she’d grown up on the right side of, with her sweet smile and her high hopes, and… Dee hadn’t been known for either of those, himself, but he found them with her. How the hell could he hope to string together the right words for a girl with all those books, though? Maybe he could say something beautiful enough with a little music to help. It wasn’t practical, to save up and buy a used, battered Gibson. Just like it wasn’t practical, at all, to shyly start believing that El might, someday, be bad enough - in the eyes of her ever-watching parents - to chase her own damn dreams… and that he might be good enough for her to take his hand and walk towards some kind of future together, happily.
Was that so crazy, when Eloise kept smiling like that? Kept telling him about all the more she could imagine for herself, medical school and making a difference? Kept reading to him after a too-long day of roofing, curled up in sandy blankets at the beach for a never-long-enough night of them? Kept letting him learn her, with his heart and those callused hands and all the wonder that’d sneak out of his soul, when he let it? Kept singing along to songs she knew and didn’t, frowning and puzzling and laughing as he had her guess which of her favorite poems had turned into that tune, or this one, transformed in the electric space between her pages and his fingers? No - for once, hoping, the most damn impractical thing of all, felt like the only thing to do.
But some ratfink let Dr. Meadows know Dieter Voss had been seen taking a bright-eyed look around at rings. Finally, Dee had thought; finally, he had enough saved up to help Elly along to school, enough of a life to offer, enough of that hope she’d taught him. It wasn’t, though. Enough. Not for her parents, who made that very clear. What the hell would be? Somebody who wasn’t him, seemed like. Wasn’t some day-laborer with a dead coward for a father and a nervous wreck for a mother and no high school diploma. What else could he be, though?
Then the wildfires blew in. And for some goddamn reason - the slap-sharp sting of what Elly’s family had said, maybe, or those textbook photographs of what’d happened in Hawai’i, burning oil on bright water, the horrors that haunted his father to the end - Dee couldn’t look away. It wasn’t the practical thing, to join up with those crews. It was a crazy, stupid, reckless thing, and… sooty and scorched, he wasn’t the boy of some poor bastard who’d drunk to drown his fear of fires. He fought them. Survived them. He’d proven that much to himself, at least. But not, again, to the Meadowses. Before, he’d been settling, unambitious. Now, he was foolhardy, unpredictable. Fine. So fucking be it, as long as Elly and him had a chance at making a story of their own someday. When she was ready. When he had more to give. Enough.
But the Army wanted everything, first. He reread that damn draft letter on his own, painstakingly. Slinking over the Canadian border wasn't any kind of option. Stillwater was Elly’s home, and who could say what that might do to her chances to get into school someday, if she had to drag her transcripts to a whole other country? For what - for him? No. And anyhow… goddamn, but he couldn't stand to sink back into the long, dark shadow of his dad's so-called cowardice. There was nothing for it but, again, the fucking practical thing. Report. Serve it out. When he came home, though, that'd be it; they'd waited so long, already. On her parents. On their savings. On life, to line up just right. They'd be enough, for one another. When he got back from Vietnam.
Meanwhile, Elly would write him. And he'd just find a way to read it all and write her back as quick and well as he could. It'd have to, yeah - be enough. His squadmates helped, soft smiles shining through those hard, tired faces. There were some things, the sweetest, that just had to stay between him and El, close as the salt on their skin after one of those evenings back home by the water. It took days to scrawl those down, between bursts of gunfire, booby traps, and torrential storms. Then there'd be a new envelope, sealed with a kiss. Elly was still waiting.
And her letters stayed beautiful. His, they quieted. The war, when he actually got there - it was every bit as unspeakable as his father’d made it seem, with his fragile, false smiles. Unwriteable, too. He'd never lied to Eloise, before. Never wanted to. But what good could the truth do? Seemed kinder to say less, when honesty would be so goddamn ugly. What else, then? It was easy, at first, to talk about anything else. Eventually, though… he knew all her answers to those questions that went into a wedding, the home they'd make together, the schools she'd been eyeing for ages. And they'd revisited and re-revisited so many memories. El, she'd always had the words for everything; day by nerveshot, shellshocked day, Dee was only more lost for language. He sent his love. Felt like all he had, now.
And maybe it wasn't enough. They were counting his time in double digits when Eloise stopped writing back. Just stopped. Like he'd done something, or hadn't. Or - his siblings would've told him if El wasn't alright. He asked, anyway; they said she seemed well, same as ever. Puzzled, when they broached the subject. It hadn't been so long since she sent her last letter, had it? Maybe not. To her. A couple weeks passed different, in Vietnam. He'd be back to those beaches soon, playing for her. Not soon enough, but soon. Just a little longer. El had waited. So would he, with those kissed-closed envelopes held tight.
Until they burned up, with the rainforest and so many of the friends he'd made and Dee. He was told, by some officer he'd thought was as dead as the rest, that he'd gone back into the napalm; that there were men who owed him their life, their limbs. There'd be a medal in it. Dee just wanted to know if there was any mail. Nothing? Could somebody write for him? No, not in any run-ragged combat hospital. Course not. As if he could've strung together much to say through the ebb and flow of drugs and doctors.
Time, strange as it'd been at war, unraveled entirely between that riverbank and the burn ward. Dee tried not to ask those sad-eyed nurses for much, once he’d lurched back to something like lucidity; if they could just scrawl down a couple lines, when they had the time. Those pitying looks always stung. Like the violent shivers that chased after every soak in silver nitrate, or every slow, demoralizing day of physical rehabilitation. And yet - it was the goddamn mail run that hurt most. Still, still Elly hadn’t answered; those weeks of nothing had turned into months. Into half a year, before he was handed that discharge. Now he’s headed back to what was home, with no idea what’s waiting for him. That house he helped pay down, a little emptier since his mother passed during that long, long hospital stay? His siblings, whose now-parentless pieces might be too goddamn heavy for him to carry? That guitar he used to play? For the girl who’d been the love of a life he used to have? Whole lot of nothing, seems like…
EXTRAS
For scene-setting reference, Dee was burned by napalm in a pattern that reflects what he was doing at the time - fireman carrying another soldier. There are noticeable scars from near his left eye across his cheek, his left forearm and hand, and down his left side, front and back, and leg. His left hand - his writing, fretting, and leading hand - was injured badly enough to limit the mobility of his ring and little finger; the scarring along his cheek, side and leg has also affected his movement. There's some lingering airway and respiratory damage that has affected his voice (and pre-existing smoker's cough) in a way that anyone who knew him before would pick up on. He suffered some "blast eye" and is somewhat sensitive to light and less a little peripheral vision on the left. It's coming up on six months since he was first hurt; he's very much still recovering.
The other soldier? Far as Dee knows, he's dead... but call that another wanted connection!
