Author's Note: A tale of the further adventures of Joan Redfern and Tim Latimer from Human Nature/Family of Blood. Written for the tindogs ficathon.
"Then it all ends in destruction. I never read to the end. Those creatures will live forever. To breed and conquer. A war across the stars for every child."
The summer has passed. The boys under her care have returned from their homes and their families. Somehow she knows that this will be the last time. All summer stories from France have reached her, though she tries not to hear. They only serve to remind her of the two men she has loved and lost, and of another world's war that came too close to home. Some of the boys who have only recently left return in the uniforms of newly commissioned officers, to recruit their former schoolmates. She argues long and hard with the headmaster against letting the boys go. They are still children in her eyes, she can still see the tear stains after the battle with the scarecrows, still remember the joy behind the fear when they rose again, that they hadn't really killed anyone.
She is standing in her office looking at her resignation letter where it lies upon her desk, awaiting her decision, when Latimer comes to see her. She has spoken to young Tim with less regularity than she would have liked, her contact with him strictly bound to official medical concerns. Thankfully nightmares come under her jurisdiction. They talk of the terrible events of the previous year and the ominous ones to come. Her own dreams are sometimes less than peaceful, the things she saw in the watch and journal haunt her still and she likes to think that their conversations help them both. Both of them clinging to their pieces of an adventure both terrible and magical. As he stands in the door way to her office, she knows that her nightmares are far from over. He is about to go and face his own, this war and the role that he already knows he will play. Notions of predestination bring her no comfort, she does not want to loose another good man to war.
In his hand he holds the watch, his thumb caressing the strange patterns across its surface.
"This is about your dreams, isn't it? They're not true you know, just dreams."
He looks up at her sadly. His other hand reaching out to squeeze hers in the comforting manner of a man much older than he.
"We both know that's not true."
Silence stretches between them, the sounds of the school around them oddly distant and muffled, as though they were coming from far away and long ago. Her knuckles are white from her grip on the chair back beside her, the effort of not pulling him into her arms like the child he still is in her eyes tearing her apart. Despite the impropriety she wants to cling to him and beg him not to leave, she knows that when he walks out the door of her office, he will leave his childhood here with her. She hopes desperately that innocence will be all he loses to this war but fears that will be the least of his loses. When he speaks again he forces cheer into it, his fake optimism grating on her already strained nerves.
"After all, it'll all be over by Christmas."
They both know that's not true either.
She knows that neither her former employers nor her family understand why she chooses to go to war. Surrounded by blood, mud, tears and women at least a decade her junior she sometimes wonders too. But she has no husband to wait for, no children to miss her. Only the memory of young boys firing machine guns at scarecrows and the soft confessions at midnight of nightmares. And a young man who'd seen this hell and gone willing into it, with only the hope of saving someone who he had done him nothing but wrong. Cleaning wounds, administrating pain relief and offering what comfort she can give, she wonders what she gave up her John for. The sacrifice to save the world from a war across the stars, only for the world to tear itself apart. Sometimes amid all the blood and the mud and human suffering she wonders why she followed her schoolboys into this hell. Both longing to and fearing to see one of them, any of them. To take care of them one last time, as though that could ever make up for her failure to protect them from this awful war.
After a time the boys all begin to look the same, though she takes care of them all as though they were all her former charges. So when a familiar face shows up on one of her beds she barely notices. It's not until he calls her 'matron', disconcertingly while she is removing a bullet from his shoulder no longer as unconscious as he'd previously been, that she realises. She doesn't doubt that it was 'ruddy sore' but she tells Hutchinson off for crude language anyway to hide her relief that his injury wasn't worse. The muddy young man who brought him in is revealed to be Latimer and young Tim shows her the watch and confesses that his dreams have come in handy. She could gladly hug them both for simply being alive but she reminds herself that she'll get blood and mud all over her uniform and in this place its hard enough to get through the day relatively free of those substances without purposefully putting yourself in the way of them.
The latest 'big push' is taking place and she is too swamped with the injured to relish this small victory in finding this pair alive. Apparently the push goes in the wrong direction, as a bomb hits her field hospital and she finds herself working in the midst of a running battle. Hours later when the combatants are either being patched up or lectured on the importance of respecting the neutrality of the red cross, she finds both boys under a bed crumpled in a corner. Both unconscious her blood runs cold as she takes in the angle at which Latimer has been bodily sheltering Hutchinson. No spine should ever bend that way.
Optimism in a field hospital such as this is something scarce and fleeting, but it shines out of Latimer like the sun. They're shipping him home soon, back to specialists with a better chance of repairing his legs. He seems insulated from the suffering and depression around him, buoyed up by having retained the use of his arms. Enjoying beating all comers at card games of all descriptions. It's almost enough to stop her seeing his broken body stretched across a bed, to change his dressings without seeing her own hands and the surgeons covered in blood, trying to piece flesh and bone back together. In fact if she ignores his too pale face and the chart, she can pretend that only his bones are broken, needing only time and rest to heal. She ignores it firmly and watches Hutchinson perform the same dance, his guilt eroded in the face of Latimer's unrelenting cheer.
His arm in a sling and shoulder still firmly bound, Hutchinson is heading back into action. His injury will keep him mostly out of the firing line, co-ordinating supply chains.
"The doctors reckon Latimer won't walk again. Do you think that's true? Nurse Redfern, don't lie to me. He saved my life, twice today alone, and because of that he may never walk again. I was never very nice to him at school, but we've stuck together out here. We had to, we've lost nearly everyone else from school who came out. If he'd left me to die out there he'd still be in one piece…"
In the midst of all this mess and horror, here she is at home. This she knows how to deal with. A young boy facing mortality through stupidity and accident is a rare yet all too familiar situation, one that long ago she was trained to deal with. She places her hand on his shoulder, meet his eyes confidently and speaks firmly but gently in a manner that served her well over the years at school.
"Yes. He might have. Or had he not been on the ground he might have taken a direct hit and died instantly, or been hit further up the back and been completely paralysed. Or perhaps without you to get to a hospital he would have been out there on the field in the way of a bullet, or a bomb, or a gas attack. Do not dwell on what ifs, boy. They never come to any good. And if you want to do something useful, well, perhaps now would be a good time to start being a better friend to him. Yes?"
He nods awkwardly in reply and his uninjured hand comes up to squeeze hers. He looks terribly fragile so she lets go before he breaks, fearing that she will break too.
After the war she cannot bear to return to the school. Cannot face the ghosts of her boys the ones she saw slip out of life in front of her, and those whose deaths she only read on the village war memorial. She seeks out employment at a convalescent home, too sick of death and blood to face even the most gentile of cottage hospitals. She works with the youngest children; the doctor's avoid assigning her to the young men and teenage boys with tact that she appreciates more than she can say.
Young Tim Latimer writes her, just as he promised. His letters full of the doings of his few remaining school friends. She particularly enjoys his tales of Hutchinson's failure to successfully court a young lady he has set his heart upon. She has no particular fondness for the older boy, beyond that he is one of the few she was able to save, but the fondness and humour that infuses the anecdotes pleases her. Much of his cheer in the rest of the letter seems forced. Between the lines she understands that his mother is growing increasingly ill, feel his frustration that she insists on hiding it from him.
Hutchinson's parents have a home on the shores of the Tiernsee, high in the Austrian Alps. Behind the amusing tales of their exploits chasing the local fräulein – they never seem to catch the girls, but they don't seem to mind – she reads the sadness that not even the crisp mountain air can halt her 'gradual decline'. She shares his distain for the term. Only a faded social butterfly of an aristocrat like his mother could still die of consumption. Joan saw too many boys die of TB in the trenches to be so euphemistic.
His next letter after she dies is equally tinged with sadness and euphemisms. Since the death of his father before the war his mother has been 'making rather a mess of the finances' and his family home will have to be sold. The forced cheer returns with his claim to not have to spend any more time 'rattling around that old mausoleum'. She's rather grateful to hear of Hutchinson's continuing pursuit of his young lady, now in London, where Tim and he have taken refuge in a town house. Apparently he's there to 'keep Hutchinson out of trouble' but from the sound of it, they seem to be having a good deal more fun causing it.
Hutchinson finally wins over his girl and the three of them adopt his parent own 'rattling old mauseleum' as their own. She takes up a position as nurse to Tim, despite her belief that young Robert has been managing to look after him just fine on his own these last few years. Clearly marriage and business are taking up more of his time than he would like. Sometimes Joan thinks that Miriam is jealous of the bond between her husband and his friend. She's glad that when her work at the convalescent home had come to an end, she'd taken up their request for a nurse. She's been through several battles with these boys, it appears that Hutchinson's marriage is to be another. She and Tim are comrades in arms against the twin forces of Robert's arrogance and Miriam's pride in making the marriage work. (Tim assures her that as both are wretchedly miserable without the other, their task is a necessary one) She finds treating them all like children serves her well, in taming the excess of foolishness in the household.
She takes care of him, though not much, tight muscles, bathing and medication are hardly challenging work. He values his independence and her work is more focused on ensuring that stubborn streak of his doesn't land him in trouble. She has a strange place in their household. Robert is in grateful, polite awe of her, Tim talks to her like a friend and equal, while Robert's wife Miriam regards her with an odd mix of disdain and companionship, her class instincts wanting to look down on this mere 'nurse', her sharp mind, starved of intellectual companionship desperate for conversation. She walks a fine line to keep the balance in this house stuck between the past and the future, its attitudes always slightly out of sync with the rest of the world.
She and Miriam find their balance one day in May when the younger woman nearly dies because the fancy doctors are too busy arguing over whether or not to risk performing a caesarean section to pay attention to her condition. Joan commandeers one of their trainees and between them save both her and the baby. Emergency surgery, she finds, is much easier when you're not under bombardment, and removing a baby turns out to be a bit easier than bullets. Babies at least want to come out.
The baby grows into a sunny little boy. They call him John, a nice simple name after a man who was anything but that. Every day older he grows seems to bind them all tighter together, their lives revolving around the child. Until one day Joan realises that quite by accident she has what she never expected to know ever again. Family, as Tim remarks casually to her one day, is an odd thing.
Another war comes and goes, and quite by chance takes Miriam with it. And it is not until young John buries his head in her shoulder and sobs that she realises how bound she is to these people. This boy has fought in a war as bloody and awful as the one she watched over, seen people die and no doubt caused plenty of deaths, yet still he clings to her in the face of his mother's death. He has softened her, she realises, her professional distance lost bit by bit long ago. She cradles him as though he were seven, comforting him the way she wished she could have comforted his father and uncle all those years before.
Seasons change, and the world with it. Soon it seems that her boys are taking care of her, more than she is of them. She sees young John married and his own son haltingly call her 'nana Joan'. She rarely dreams of her John, or the man he really was. The life they might have had together does not haunt her, because the life she has lived has been just as full of love.
She wakes one morning, to crisp hospital linen and gentle morning light. In the chair to one side is young John, his own small son asleep on his shoulder. On the other, in his wheelchair is Tim, behind him Robert, hands gripping the handles to stop them fidgeting. Her heart, so light and fluttery in her chest lately, seems huge and full. There's so much she wants to say suddenly, and her breath feels hard to catch. There's so much she's never told them, how grateful she is to them for not letting her drown in her work, for making her part of their family. How glad she is to have known them, that they have survived to love and laugh and cry. How much she loves them. She reaches out to Tim and he takes her hand. She touches that strange watch that he still carries everywhere and somehow the scattered words form themselves together.
"Thankyou, all of you, for a fantastic life."
Her words have another meaning she knows, vaguely. But it doesn't matter. They understood. She sees it in the way John hugs his little boy, in Tim's shaking hands and in Robert's knuckles, so white where they wrap round the wheelchair's handles. They'll take care of each other in their own odd way, she taught them well.