Resilient Children
A/N-This thing fell out of my brain over the course of my Developmental Psych lecture and the Syntax and Semantics lecture that followed. I have no other explanations.
Patient. Or Patience.
John Watson was a patient man, ask anyone in London.
But they're wrong.
Ask the men still in Afghanistan. They would tell you that John possesses a remarkable amount of patience, but he was seldom a patient man.
He was an army doctor, and that meant he didn't have a desk. He didn't have attending nurses, no facilities even halfway sufficient. What he did have were patients.
A call would come and he would be off, racing to the convoy with his kit in hand. He would be in a flurry of blood and sand and mortars until the job was done. And he would come back, blood on his hands. Either beside a gurney or a body bag.
Until the day he came back on the gurney.
The gunshot's deafening report was all John could remember after he reached the young man whose leg had been blown off by a mine. Next he knew, he was in a medical examination room on base, listening to another doctor tell him how he would be lucky if he lived.
The doctors told him to have patience, that he would get the use of his leg back. That his arm would be good as new if he just did the physical therapy.
Be patient. Wait. Work slowly. God that phrase, how many times had he uttered it himself, "Take it slow," now as he was here in the PT ward doing hand exercises with a ball of sand, John was certain he would die.
But he isn't one to be patient. Or be a patient. John pushes, tries, does. And he limps out of physical therapy weeks ahead of expectations.
But the dreams and that limp followed him out.
Resilient, his doctor had told him. He was 'resilient' to have bounced back to quickly after the accident but John knows this isn't true.
His resilience isn't his ability to walk or the fact that his shoulder no longer catches when he reaches for something.
John knows that he is resilient.
Every morning, when in a cold sweat and gasping from a nightmare, he reaches for his gun.
Places it to his temple.
John is resilient.
He doesn't fire.