TITLE: Just A Nightmare?
AUTHOR: VIDZ
DISCLAIMER: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc of the TV show JAG are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author of this fic. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
WARNINGS! Graphic descriptions, war topic, major character death. Don't read if you don't think you can handle that.
This story is based on real-life photographs I saw just recently.
SUMMARY: It was just a nightmare, wasn't it? Or was it?
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She's pressed against the wall of an apartment building's entrance. As usual with these buildings, the entrance/door itself is 3 yards further into the building, creating a small cubby-hole between the front-face and what is left of that door.
Her husband is silent as he does the same as she: checking if the coast is clear, just in the other direction. They've been hiding here for 5 minutes, since they sought shelter from the sporadic shelling. It stopped soon, the soldiers manning the weapons having no concrete target, their only motive just to indiscriminately spray death and punishment in the residential districts to the people living there. The sounds of fighting can still be heard close-by but nothing that appears iminently dangerous. Still...
Her husband turns to her "Okay, let's go."
She gathers courage and nods before they dash across the street for safety.
They're almost to the trees and bushes on the other side of the parking lot when an explosions leaves her ears ringing and her body flying through the air. She lands with a muffled oompf, registering pain in her face as it rubs against the rough pavement, shredding skin.
Dazed she picks herself up to continue her run, but screams as fire spreads up her legs and she falls like a rag-doll. Looking down her eyes blow wide and a scream tears out as she sees only two bloody stumps where her shins were.
Looking around wildly she notices her husband on the ground right next to her and tries to wake him up so at least he could get to safety. Rolling him on his back she quickly turns her head so she wouldn't vomit into the gaping hole that was once his abdomen. Blood and guts are everywhere and the smell is truly horrible.
It slams into her, he is dead.
Her husband is no more, just a collection of bloody flesh laying before her, his sightless eye staring into the distance. The man with whom she'd bound her life, man with whom she's spent almost 30 years, through times of happiness and times of misery and poverty, her best friend, member of that small circle of people who meant everything in the world to her, the man she promised she would stick with through sickness and health, till death does them part.
So it has, for he is now gone.
Gone.
She is too much in shock for the enormous grief to settle into her, not that she'll live long enough for that.
These wounds she knows she won't survive. There's no help in sight, no ambulance, no doctors, no hospital. She doubts she'd have a chance even if her country was still working as it did. She doubts she would even want to.
She has no reason to live anymore. What's the use? Her husband, the last member of her family, is dead.
She thinks of her daughter and baby grandson. The last they heard of them was 3 days ago when her daughter called, saying she was going out to look for her husband who failed to return from his water and food run. Their pleading didn't stop her. They searched for them, but found nothing except for fighting and bodies of civilians. Killed by the very people that should've protected them or by the mercs that helped them. They gave up then, both knowing the truth, even if they didn't speak it outloud. A large part of them died inside.
Sounds of booted footsteps break through the fog of pain and weakness that's taking over and she musters the will to look up. Three men are approaching her with arrogant swaggers and sneers on their faces, all carrying weapons. She recognises the symbol on their T-shirts, they are in her country to kill. To kill civilians, to cause as much suffering, agony, pain and destruction as they can. To take out their blood-thirsty sociopathic urges on people that never did anything to them.
One of them steps up to her, laughter on his disgusting sneering visage as he first spits on the body of her husband. Then he pulls a telephone out of his breast-pocket. She struggles to prop her right hand under her to sit up straight, curling her useless legs beneath her and looks up at him with all the contempt, disgust, revulsion and hatred she feels for him and his ilk as he takes his photo.
His buddies are cheering him on as he pockets the small machine and then turns around. As he's about to make his first step he stops. Her sluggish brain doesn't even register it, the whirl and the vicious kick he delivers throws her on her back. Her body was already engulfed in horrific pain where blood was still being delivered screams even more and she coughs blood, knowing he broke her ribs.
Blood loss, injury and pain rob her of her strength and she can't do more than lie there waiting for her end to come, as she feels the precious liquid leave her body through the two stumps that were her legs just 10 minutes ago.
As she feels herself slipping further into the abyss her mind replays better times from her life. Her parents, her childhood, school, meeting her future husband for the first time, falling in love, marrying, welcoming their only child into the world, her first steps and words, first day at school... She recalls their daughter's wedding, the bright smiles on the faces of her daughter and new son-in-law.
The tears in her own husband's eyes as he watches his baby-girl sign the document. She recalls the joy they all felt when her daughter announced she was having a baby and the sleepless night as they waited for the news from the hospital. These happy memories are her shelter from the real life in which her husband is lying dead next to her, her daughter, grandson and son-in-law lying who-knows-where and she about to join them in the eternal sleep.
How did it come to this? Why? Why couldn't they just be left alone and live the life as they wanted to?
She doesn't feel herself gasping for breath as her brain doesn't receive enough oxygen anymore. She knows it's arrived, she's too weak to even twitch and darkness has almost completely taken over her mind.
Her last thought is the picture of her family just less than a year ago and then there's only blackness. No light, just blackness.
Loren launches herself upright in bed, terrified scream tearing out of her throat as she grasps blindly around in the dark of her room, for what, she doesn't know. It's a kind of terror, despair and grief she's never felt before, still partly in that woman's skin.
When awareness returns she sags as ragged breaths escape her and drops her tear-filled face into her shaking hands. She's bathed in sweat from her nightmare, one that had upset her more than any other before, but doesn't have the strength or will to move. It was just a nightmare, she comforts herself as she settles back into bed.
But thoughts and worry won't leave.
Was it really just a nightmare? Or was it perhaps a foreshadowing of the future? Then again, she didn't recognise any of the people in her night-terror, not even the place looked familiar. No, no it won't be in her future.
True, it probably, hopefully, won't happen to her, but she has no doubt it will to someone else. Then again, aren't we all part of the same race? Is not something that is inflicted on someone on the other side of the world inflicted upon as us well?
Is hurting one individual not as if you hurt the whole of humanity? Doesn't their pain and suffering affect us as well, don't we feel it? Isn't she a cog in the giant machine that is used by the power-mad around the world to inflict the kind of suffering she experienced in her night-terror? Why do we continue to do this to each other? After so many millenia why can't we just find a common basis? Can't we really find peaceful ways to solve our differences?
Will we learn the lesson before it's too late?
THE END
"The only people finding enjoyment in war are sociopaths."
On the wall of a damaged building in Sarajevo, post-war