REPOST.
author's note: i'd just like to warn you, i know very little about military history or anything like that. i did as much research as i could, but what i found was confusing in the very least, unhelpful at most. so, if you are more aware of what goes on in evac hospitals and it is just eating you up inside, please do let me know! i feel so stupid xD.
also, i had originally intended this to be one of those lost girl follows thorin on his quest stories - however, i suddenly changed my mind and decided her story should go somewhere else. and sadly i did post it before i came to this conclusion as to why it just wasn't 'feeling right'. now, i get it. it just makes more sense in cohesion with thranduil's story. they're both veterans of war. they're both hurting. they're both guarded. it just feels...right. it will still take place during the events of the hobbit, but it will have very little to do with thorin. this is all about thranduil. bow chicka wow wow. aw yeah, so classy.
anyway. enough rambling.
disclaimer - i own nothing that lives in middle earth. everything belongs to tolkien except my oc.
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I've been staring at this crumpled piece of blank paper in my lap all afternoon.
It used to be so easy, you know. The words used to be fluid, effortless, flowing out of the tip of my pen without much thought or arrangement behind their purpose. They weren't necessarily colorful descriptions. Most of what I wrote in these letters were crude, basic outlines of my adventures. But it never bothered me before. I was just…telling a story. And the only person in the world important enough to know my story wouldn't care if it was scribbled out in kindergarten runes on the back of a travel brochure. She just wanted to know I was alive, carrying on with the adventures she read about each week with all the spirit and optimism of the girl she knew and loved. After all, I didn't want her to worry.
That was before.
Before what….I can't be certain of what to call it myself. All I have are symptoms of a greater problem. My enemy is nameless, without form, a difficult foe to face as it has none to speak of. The only concrete evidence I have of his existence at all are the shadows of insecurity and anxiety that he leaves in his wake. I second guess my every move when he is nearby. To eat, sleep, even breathe - I'm always wondering, terrorized by the very idea, if he is watching, if he will slip into the innermost corners of my conscious thoughts and steal into their threadbare frame. He becomes them, turning their surety into crumbling shrines of doubt that turn every act of bravery and every good deed to dust in my hands. I don't know what to call him – only that he's created this terrible wall between me and everything that I thought I used to be.
There's no use. I rumple the paper in my hands, furiously crushing it into my sticky skin of my palms until a half-formed ball forms, then I chuck it across the room. It lies jagged and dirt-stained on the bare reddish clay of the tent floor. A searing breeze shuffles inside, ruffling every shred of cloth within. I watch the paper bend under its prying fingers. All the while, my head stays perfectly blank, untouched like pure white marble.
Maybe there's no story left to tell – at least none that she would want to hear. All that's left is the end, where time marches in and steals her little girl away to face the fate she had always somehow been designed for. I don't think I could bear telling her that her little girl is nothing more than a whining, cowardly wretch who doesn't deserve to be a Marine.
It's all just as well. With my shift coming up, I have work to do that requires all my attention, and I won't have time or even the energy to worry about it. The hot restless air sucks itself back outside and I follow it, ducking beneath the burlap tent flap and walking out into pure, unfiltered sunlight.
For a moment, I just stand there, still just as overwhelmed by the unrepentant power of the Middle Eastern desert as the day I stepped foot on its enemy shores. I shield my eyes and look up into the long stretch of open sky above us, thin strips of cloud smothered behind a veil of heat that shimmers against the blanched peeling blue. And there in the distance - the sun, a tireless beating tyrant who lords over the rest of us mere mortals.
As ever, there's an electric trace of challenge sharpening the air. It circles the hems of my dungarees, prickling at my ankles, and I can feel it – the cruel laugh of the desert brushing up against us, satin-soft as ribbon against our painfully aware skin. Like a dark promise - if they don't kill you, I will.
Dipping my hands into my pockets, I move on, accepting the knowledge of uncertain death with more ease than I used to. Our first few weeks here, everyone was on edge, their trigger finger always remembering the cool weight of the gun barrel under them, how good it felt to be armed. We hardly slept and ate less. Mostly we looked like we were always on drugs. Wide-eyed, restless, jumpy in that sad but funny way that boots always are. As we hardened, and the outer protective shell of experience began to form between us and the rest of the world like a film of glass, we calmed down and transitioned easily into the unpredictable patterns of guerrilla warfare. In between skirmishes, we learned to compartmentalize the fears and deep-set anxiety which plagued us, translate them so that they became useful instead of distracting. Fear became vigilance, and it grew impossible to wake a sleeping soldier for fear of having your neck wrung like a wet rag. We settled into this new life of ours with a sort of resignation that back then, we still didn't quite understand, accepting the good with the bad without question.
Now we knew better - no matter how hard we tried to reclaim that old innocence , there was no going back.
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That night, they bombed a nearby town, where we were later told a small platoon from the three-five had followed and infiltrated a small, but well-known infidel base.
As the casualties poured in from echelon two, I was bumped up from 'administrative' work to serve a twelve hour shift in the trauma ward. Being pulled from my medical duties just a few weeks prior, I was only permitted to stabilize patients, and among those I was only allowed to treat minor to moderate injuries. It didn't make much of a difference. Plucking shrapnel from the shredded body of a small child with 'moderate' proved no less unnerving than treating incidents of thoracic degloving or third degree burns.
The following hours were a lesson in futility. I held a lot of dying hands, inflated collapsed lungs that would fail mere minutes later, administered morphine and breathing tubes, and witnessed enough last words to fill a book. Most of it I didn't understand. They muttered to unseen gods, eyes glazed over as they searched cracked ceilings for answers to prayers. Sometimes they realized I was there, looked right through me, and whispered the only words they knew in my language – help me, please God, please help me.
When the bedlam finally died down - tarps thrown over the dead in the morgue and the living not much further from the same fate – an XO armed with orders from higher up handed me a clipboard and sent me in the general direction of the supply tent, mumbling something about making myself useful. Exhausted, but relieved for something to do other than evacuate corpses from triage, I escaped to one of the smaller rear tents. It was quieter here – easier to concentrate on nothing, and far away from the thrum of dying murmurs and anguished moaning.
There were three of us – supply sergeant, specialist, and me. The sergeant clapped me on the back as I came in, nodding his thanks with a strained, too-thin smile for standing in for his second specialist.
I responded as best I could under the circumstances, which – after seeing the look on the sergeant's face – was no response at all. His huge, callused fingers closed over the sharp upper peaks of my shoulder blades to stop me from coming in.
"Just came from ICU?"
I nodded weakly, feeling the first traces of exhaustion start to seep through me. "Yes, sergeant."
"How long you been on shift, corpsman?"
"Can't say I know for sure." I scratch the back of my head, eyes locked on the dirt floor. "They pulled me out of patient administration. Short-staffed. Anyone who knew the right end of a needle got pulled in to help."
He looked at me like I was growing horns from my temples. "…That was yesterday morning."
"I'm fine."
He saw a lost cause in front of him. It took him a while, but he finally realized there was not much more he could do to persuade me otherwise. Resignation flooding his tired features, he nodded and shuffled to the side to let me through. "All right, carry on. Specialist Harmon is in the back with rations."
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Time passes differently in this place. Faster, with desperation and need fueling the quickness of it all. The moment you step outside into the cooling air, settling at your feet in mounds of trampled tired dust – it hits you. How long you've dragged your heavy feet. And how much you really need sleep, despite the tightness roiling in your gut.
I trudge through the rows of empty cots – glad for the solitude after two days in the company of the sick and dying – and feel the silence filter through the balmy air. At the end of the first row, my own cot, the epicenter of my entire world, lies untouched. It looks as though I'd never left it, but I've returned changed, much as I always do. It stays the same, static in a world ravaged by turmoil and painted in varying shades of blood (wet and dry and blackened and new), and yet I always feel like a stranger when I come back here.
Exhaustion hits me hard as I slump down into the rusty springs. All the breath sputters out of my mouth, the smoke of an old extinguished flame gurgling in my throat, and my lips hang slack as I lie back and struggle to breathe. I close my eyes and try to remember how lungs work. Bring air in, push air out, and all the while working in the background while the body moves on and the head thinks and the heart struggles to learn. I open my eyes, shaking my head at the thought of waxing poetic over something as simple as breathing. I'm no Walt Whitman. And I don't want to be either.
My eyes are heavy, but the last thing I want to do is sleep. The very thought of letting my head roll back, vision darkening all the while as I slip away, no control over the images that surface as the sleep deepens – anxiety starts to bubble, hot and tightly coiling around the outer edges of my heart. I need a distraction.
There's a book in my knapsack, the Pelican Brief – one of the old favorites from an even older life. I was allowed to bring a couple of them, though I lost my favorite copy of Sherlock Holmes somewhere outside Suwayrah and cried over it for days in secret – or so I'd thought. It had been the one my mother gave me for my sixteenth birthday, an early edition with earmarked corners and old, withered pages that smelled like a dusty library. I never did hear the end of it from the other guys. They called me Cry-Baby for weeks. Even afterwards, when the situation blew over, they still laughed and looked over their shoulders at me whenever books or even Sherlock Holmes were brought up in casual conversation.
I had few worldly possessions here. Books, my mother's letters, pen, a few reams of paper, and a picture –
The thought occurred to me with a thrill. I patted the breast pocket of my dungarees with a hint of panic, sitting up in the bed as the fatigue cleared for a moment and adrenaline flooded in. With a sigh of relief, I quickly calm down, pulling the wrinkled picture out with trembling hands. It looked older than it really was. A year's worth of folding, unfolding, and folding again had taken its toll on the smooth glossy finish, although it still felt soft and familiar in these hands that had long since crusted over with callus. Sometimes I hated looking at it, especially in front of the others. They always stared at me with pity, the way anyone does when someone shows signs of homesickness. It weighs in all of us like an anchor, pulling us down, making us remember. Sometimes it's not good to remember, but to forget and carry on.
But now, with no one else around and my chest tight and prickling with homesickness, the desire to look at the picture slowly burns away into a slow, searing ache. Tears gather at the rims of my eyes, scalding the tired fragile skin around them. I open the picture and smooth down the wrinkles with a touch of worship stealing into the tips of my fingers. I bring a still-shaking hand to my face to wipe furiously at the tears that sit warm and glinting on the whittled crests of my cheekbones.
I look so – young. My eyes are folded away behind plump crinkles of skin – still bright, still shining, like little lights in a dark distance. They look up into the lens of the camera with rivulets of laughter running through them, and I can almost hear the sound of my mother's rumbling laugh rising up to meet it in the background. A baggy Nirvana shirt sags over my bony shoulders, still just a girl trying to fill up the open space of a quickly growing body. I remember that summer – I'd shot up three inches, spent long nights rubbing my throbbing legs under the blankets, and my mother cut off all my jeans because she couldn't afford to buy me new ones. I'd been wearing a pair of the shorts in the photo, their frayed ends spilling over my sun-browned thighs.
And then there was Iggy right next to me, all curled up into my crouched figure as I hugged him to my chest. He was one of the best friends I had in the world, besides my mother. And a dog.
A golden retriever, to be more exact, but it didn't bother me that my best friend walked on four legs instead of two, barked instead of gossiped, and drooled all over my favorite pillow. I could tell him anything and he would keep all my secrets. He watched Die Hard with me at Christmas the whole way through, even twice if I insisted, and curled up next to me when I was sick – never leaving my side. That summer the picture was taken, we'd taken him with us to the river for the first time, and I remember laughing when he'd taken one look at the water and jumped in without a second thought. He'd sloshed back to shore, barking and throwing back his head as if to invite me in, then raced back in when it became apparent that I wouldn't follow. He got even later though –barreling through our half-made camp without warning, dripping wet, and he'd stolen the hot dogs mom had laid out on the picnic table to make for later. He left a devastation of mud and waterlogged blankets in his wake, watching us from the sidelines as we grumbled and cleared away the rubble.
I seem to come back into my own body, the transition jarring, and it left me sobbing. My vision went hazy as I stared at it, my hand over my mouth, the other holding onto that picture in a vise grip. I had the most horrible sinking feeling that the girl in the picture – the happy girl, the unscathed girl with dreams and hopes and plans - was gone forever. Even worse, I missed my dog.
"Are you okay?"
I startle at the sound of another human voice. It blared across the stretch of empty cots between us, though I think maybe they'd intended to be loud, to be heard over my crying. Bile tickles the insides of my throat as it passes through; I swallow hard against it and keep my face hidden away in the shadows.
"Hey, corpsman…" The voice came again. A man's voice, young, probably not much older than me. "Are you okay? You sick or somethin'?"
"I'm fine!" I snap back at him, folding the picture up again and shoving it back into my pocket. "Everything's fine…"
Those last words, I think, were directed more toward myself than him.
"Yeah, well…" He sounded unsure. "Just, holler if you need me I guess."
I nod, too humiliated to turn around and face him. He sinks down into his cot much the same way as I did – an audible sigh of relief, the realization of weariness dawning on him, and then the silence, when we all start to reflect and forget where we are. Just for a little while.
"Man, what a day." He groans, punching the lumps in his pillow. Like it would help.
I don't say anything in reply. He could just as well be talking to himself.
"Sad, you know? That they get caught in the crossfire just cause everyone's got to do their fighting in the middle of civilization…"
In all honesty, one of the last things I wanted to do right now was ponder the double-edged sword that was humanity. I didn't question why the battles took place in the middle of towns and cities full of innocent people…I just helped clean up the mess afterward. If you started to question, if you let doubt settle in where obedience should be, it would only get harder to do what you had to do. If we were all honest with ourselves, the most important question, the one we should all we be asking was why war even existed in the modern age in the first place.
We shouldn't be here. We should all be living in peace with one another. And yet, after thousands of years of trial and error, of growing into the thinking, feeling version of humanity that we've become, we've seemed to pour all this knowledge and capability into learning newer, more systematic ways of killing each other.
"It's better not to think about it. You won't like the answers you find."
"You sound like my grandma…" he snorts. "God, I miss them. How long you been here?"
"Sixteen months."
"Long time."
"Yeah, tell me about it."
He goes quiet for a second, then sits upright in his bed. "Did you hear that?"
I turn around, adrenaline building again. "What - ?"
He sits up, legs uncurling beneath him so his feet touch the floor, perched like a coil ready to spring on the edge of his mattress. His eyes are locked on the tent flap – or something beyond it.
His voice, when it reaches me, is almost no louder than a whisper. "I heard something."
Suddenly, he bolts upright and looks over his shoulder at me. Fear digs deep into the dark back corners of his eyes, taking root in the shadows hiding there. Without a word, he waves me over, and I mop my face quickly before tip-toeing to his side. My dungarees, stiff with sweat and old blood, barely move despite my quick, jarring gait. The fabric grates loudly in protest against the stillness.
We both know better than to speak when on high alert. Instead, he motions for me to follow his eyes, where we both find a shadow roving in the moonlight against the backdrop of the burlap tent. The corpsman reaches for his knapsack as quietly as he can manage, both of us keeping close watch on the shadow. It seems uncertain, as if lost, and it seems to slowly dawn on the both of us that whoever they are, they don't belong here.
Digging through the sack, he seemed to locate what he's looking for with ease and drew a gleaming silver pistol out from the bottom of it as he dropped the sack unceremoniously to the ground at his feet. He gestured for me to follow him, and suddenly I wished I'd had time to get my own weapon from my knapsack. It's too late now.
We both slip out from underneath the tent flap, making minimal noise except for the crunch of rock and sand beneath our heavy boots. The shadow slips out of sight, making a right turn at the back end of the tent in front of us. We follow behind, making a hard right where he'd turned just a moment before. It was a man dressed in long, black robes that looked threadbare in places and stiff with blood in others. He was barefoot with open gashes catching the moonlight on his ankles. The combat medic in me starts to itch at the sight, wanting to clean and bandage the wounds before they turn gangrenous. They look deep – maybe he'd been involved in the skirmish that took place in the town nearby two days ago, a patient wandering around after waking up and finding himself in strange surroundings. The corpsman at my side thought the same. Unlike me, he seemed to know rudimentary Arabic, and called out to the man in the strange, musical language.
The man turned around. One eye glared white and wide open in the darkness while the other, seemingly missing, retreated into the back of his head, cast in deep, bloody shadows. The sight would have sickened me if I weren't so accustomed to gore.
He replied in his own language, outstretching his hand in a way that seemed accusatory. Anger etched deep lines into his face, the angles cruel under harsh white light. Fear washed over me. This man seemed much more than angry – he was enraged.
The corpsman next to me seemed to think the same. He raised his gun and, even in the foreign tongue that he spoke, I could tell from the heightening tone of his voice that he was warning the man.
But the man did not listen. Instead, he curled his fingers into his palm, pointing only his index finger first at me and then at the corpsman.
"You," he said, pointing. "And…you…"
He continued to speak in Arabic, but the sound of it changed. He seemed to be…chanting. His good eye began to shiver, his arms shaking too as he hummed those otherworldly incantations, and then rolled completely into the back of his head. The corpsman screamed at him to drop his weapon in English, forgetting, in his panic, to translate the warning into Arabic. Ignoring him, the man droned on, and I felt cold as I shuffled backwards in the sand.
Finally, the stranger put his arms down and reached into the pocket of his robes. The corpsman stopped screaming and flung himself backwards as he pulled something out from underneath the loose, black shawls.
He pointed it at me and I, rooted to the ground in shock, realized with a stab of fear that it was a handgun. He cocked it, finger closing slowly, purposefully over the trigger. I wasn't moving, stupid girl that I was, and my stupidity afforded him the ability to relish the act of carrying out his vengeance.
"What the hell is wrong with you?!" The corpsman shrieked at me from the ground. "Run, you stupid bitch, run!"
There was no use. I'd lost all feeling in my legs, the ability to move at all, much less run. It was as if something held me there. Fate, maybe, or just the mortal fear of knowing what would soon come.
I closed my eyes as the trigger pulled and the deafening crack of a gunshot ricocheted harshly off the material of the tents around us. The bullet hit, finding its mark with ease, and the force of metal shredding through paper-thin flesh slammed my body back into the ground.
I didn't feel a thing. I was dead on impact.
let me know what you thought, if you'd like! thank you for sticking with me to the end. :)