Chapter II: Worth
Late September that year was gorgeous, in a way autumn in southern Europe can tend to be, war or no: an opulent metamorphosis, in that lovely little corner of the calendar. Elle felt the change pull something out of her, a longing for newness, even as the threat of winter crept ever closer. Following Falsworth's departure, the other volunteers noticed her growing more and more distracted, committed only to performing well the small tasks that coaxed brief smiles from the tired, scarred faces of wounded men. To everything else, she was indifferent, quiet: tossing and turning each night, caught in the throes of strange dreams. Her home on fire, the boy dead and gone, stars wheeling endlessly overhead.
This was not unusual; even the staunchest of nurses found themselves mired in a kind of walking grief as day in, day out, they bore witness to pain and melancholy; again and again they paid the price of war by proxy, watching as the lifeblood drained from a stolen son, brother, lover. And they simply did it one more time - an endless series of "one more times, just once more," as the broken body of another boy (they all became boys when they wept) came across their gurney, wracked with a pain those nurses could chip away it, but never completely fully dislodge. And in between those moments, there were dreams. Names and serial numbers and bright green eyes, or blue, or brown - all of them closing and then blinking into a new reality, bearing a hard-bought lesson, old as the world.
And so when Elle began to drop things more frequently, when she developed a tendency to stare, for just a beat too long, at odd spots around the camp; and when she woke through the nights, with a teary "Mama" on her lips, the more seasoned nurses clucked their tongues in internal sympathy. She'd learn. She'd learn. They had.
Some of the other volunteers, however, were not so sensitive. For a girl with less than six months of service under her belt, who had yet to actually witness the death of a patient (she was largely assigned to recovery wards, for Heaven's sake!) - it all seemed a bit ludicrous. And that observation, so subtle, so faintly damning, began to fester and curdle, boiling over into something dangerously close to resentment.
Pat shoved her roughly awake one morning nine days after Major Falsworth had returned to the front. Elle had been rather down in the mouth since his departure; she had developed rather an attachment to the handsome officer, not that anyone blamed her. But the adulatory praise so often heaped upon the dreamy girl who possessed only a modicum of medical skill (she was nothing so wonderful as warranted all that damn praise) was beginning to rankle some of the other aides and not a few of the nurses, resulting in a rather charged environment when it came to their private quarters. Pat Hemming, in particular, resented the fact that Elle did hardly any real work (a few bandage changes and tidying store cupboards hardly counted), that she rarely went above and beyond, and yet was still the apple of Barnett's eye and the recipient of copious amounts of commendations from officers. Officers! Officers whose nightstands she littered with half-dead weeds and shiny stones! Like a child.
"You've been assigned to help Jenkins in D," Pat barked, sorely in need of one of the cigarettes she had recently begun smoking, after last week's foreboding telegram. "She's got an incoming patient. Worked up."
Elle rubbed at sleep-ridden eyes, struggling to grasp at consciousness after another night of fiery dreams. Up and down the length of the tent, Rebecca, Susie, and most of the others were still sound asleep, and a quick glance at her watch told Elle that it was not quite gone five. The night shift should be addressing this new patient; Elle and Jenkins wouldn't be on for another hour. As she started to ease her stockings up her legs and search around for the rest of her uniform in the pinkish dawn light, she mentioned as much to Pat, who shot back a surprisingly cutting response that actually made Elle freeze in the middle of buttoning her dress. It wasn't like Pat to be so cruel, was it? To volley that kind of a curse into the face of a fellow volunteer?
Perhaps though, Elle reasoned, saying nothing in reply and simply shoving her feet into those awful bloody shoes that pinched her so very much - perhaps Pat was just irritated at being wakened so early for someone else's information. She must have been sitting up, though, or Jenkins (or whoever had delivered the message), would likely have gone to Elle's bed themselves.
It had rained in the night, and the walk to D was wet and muddy. When Elle ducked into the entrance of the tent, things were already progressing, quite chaotically. Several officers were awake, and looked distinctly infuriated about it. Jenkins was flipping through a sheaf of papers on a clipboard near the nurses' station, ignoring an audible undertone of curses as most attempted to go back to sleep. A goal that was being impeded by the loud and abrasive string of complaints issuing from a young, towheaded man in bed number four, wearing striped pyjamas that did not entirely conceal a considerable swathe of bandages covering his left shoulder.
"Faster in future, if you please, Andersen," Jenkins snapped with a face like thunder, her eyes not leaving the pages before her. "Bed number four. Corporal Fredericks requires your assistance with his bedding. It is" - and here her eyes flashed up to meet Elle's, a matching of inquisitive hazel and furious green - "inadequate."
Elle glanced over; she'd remade and prepared bed number four just yesterday afternoon, stretching new white sheets crisply over the mattress, fluffing the Army-issued pillow into as comfortable a shape as she could manage. She'd even brought in a dozen small posies of flowers, each containing a generous few sprigs of lavender that she had collected from the forest's edge. She hoped they would aid in good dreams for the weary new men on the ward. But there was Corporal Fredericks, sitting upright with a scowl on his face and venom in his eyes, a veritable snake ready to strike. With a sigh, Elle strode over to the store cupboard and slid out a neat stack of bedding, realizing that not only would her entire day be lengthened by one unpleasant hour, but her linen rotation had now been disrupted.
She eased Fredericks into a chair that Jenkins had pulled up at some point, perhaps to sit with the newcomer, as she sometimes did, particularly when they were overwrought. Entering the recovery wards tended to bring out just one of two responses in recuperating men: either they were happy to be away from the surgery and on the road to health; or the reality of their forthcoming return to the front struck such a deep fear into their hearts they could barely contain it.
This man, though, appeared neither relieved nor frightened, so much as thoroughly perturbed by just about everything surrounding him. "I'm not even properly wounded," he groused, deliberately jerking away from a proffered cup of tea. Elle bit her lip; never a good sign when an Englishman turned down a cuppa. "A shot to the shoulder. Bollocks. If there were proper medics out there, they would have fixed me up then and there and put my gun back in my hands."
Elle murmured a noncommittal acknowledgement as she focused on smoothing out the creases in his fresh sheets. Perhaps a clean - well, cleaner - bed would do him good, help him to relax. Nerves could do odd things to a troubled mind, so she simply listened as he continued in much the same vein, his tone rising and falling with equal parts dismay and frustration as he listed the general failings of the British Army he had thus far encountered. "And what kind of care do you call this, then?" he snapped, as she reached a soft grip under his good arm, hoping to help him back into bed. He was gesturing to the small glass of flowers on the nightstand. "Idiot girls running about picking bloody daisies?" He glared at her, leaning back on the pillow she'd just unnecessarily changed and plumped, after waking up thirty minutes sooner than she'd needed to, after skipping breakfast and tea and all manner of personal time to race over to attend to him. If she'd been a shorter-tempered woman, she might've cursed at him.
But she couldn't bring herself to do it, not once she'd met his eyes. A pale blue, washed out from tears - there was pain there. Ancient and new and so, so raw. And it clenched at her heart and made her want to cry, to pull him into her and rail at the world for what they'd done to him. They'd broken him apart, wrenched him to pieces, leaving nothing but an angry shell behind. Another broken boy.
He spat out another criticism, but this one she did not hear. She pushed the mug closer to his wrist, offered him a smile that did only served to enrage him further. And as their first day together wore on, as his grumbles and complaints boiled over into a pure fury, as her hunger increased and her back ached and her spirits flagged - as that day wore on, her heart broke a little more each moment. For that broken, golden-haired boy in bed number four.
Even Jenkins commented on Fredericks' less-than ebullient personality: as she and Elle finished their shift and prepared to head to their respective quarters for a brief, midday break, the normally poised and proper senior nurse indulged in a spot of gossip. "He's a bit of a...well, to be frank, he's a bloody infant," she said, scratching idly at her cap, her Yorkshire brogue blooming even as she lowered her voice. "Never stops moaning, not once - to hear him talk, you'd think he lost every limb he has."
The surprises continued as Jenkins apologized for calling Elle in so early that morning. "The night shift - Bermondsey was supervising, you know, and she's not the most diplomatic - they had a hell of a time settling him." Both women paused as a press of doctors, flanked by a few olive-clad officers whose eyes simply slipped past the two of them. Nurses might pose romantic prospects to new recruits, but by the time they were all the front together, the rosy notions of dates and courting had been mostly dashed. Occasionally, one might hear of an engagement on leave, or of a soldier getting caught helping his girl-in-white sneak out of her tent of an evening. Nurse Jenkins herself, of course, was above reproach; and Elle was growing quite self-conscious of the fact that her hair had lost its shine and her eyes were troublingly dull. Lack of sleep. Those blackberry stains beneath told the story.
Fredericks had them, too. Deep shadows traced underneath those blue eyes, cutting away on the precipices of sharp cheekbones. He had a hollow look about him, poor thing, and it made her think back on that visible rage simmering far too close to the surface; his broken heart so raw and so rampant that it was as though she could feel it, hear it, and it broke hers in turn. She said as much to Jenkins, who whirled about to face her, now that the gaggle of medics had moved on.
"You...you…" Jenkins - once called Rosemary - turned to face the younger girl. That stupid young girl. That infantile idiot who could not help but poeticize every man, every man who came under her care with their bleeding bodies and the deep wounds no nurse could stitch. They came to Rosemary broken, and she sent them back out into the world as fragile as they had come to her, the shattered lines of their tragedy slipped back together, milk on china shards. She needed a slap. She deserved it. "You."
But there was nothing, nothing that Rosemary Jenkins could say, to this stupid little girl who looked across a path of mud and blood with such hope in her eyes - the child of twenty-six who healed more men from the inside out than Jenkins could ever dream of doing. They needed her, just as much as they needed science and medicine and stitches and morphine. They needed a goddamn bouquet of flowers by their besides; they needed to remember music and books and the way a girl laughed at a joke she knew she ought not to.
Before her, Elle was waiting, anticipating another lecture from one of her betters. She was used to them by now, and had all the composure of a kicked dog as her fingers played about the bottom edge of her apron, as she shifted to find purchase in the sodden ground. Barnett tried to shield her from the criticisms of the other nurses and volunteers, but she'd heard enough in the past few days to realize not everyone was appreciative of her methods.
Disappointment, though, was a surprise: "Good afternoon, Andersen," Jenkins said tightly, flattening her lips against the bitter taste of common sense. "I expect I'll be seeing you tomorrow."
A second wash of rain began to fall as Jenkins stalked away, back ramrod straight and betraying no hint of the immense turnabout she had just experienced. Elle understood that something had changed in the space of a few minutes, but she could not for the life of her put her finger on what or why or how. She contented herself, then, with a quick shake of her head just before she dashed off back to her quarters. The morning shift, though swift and officially uneventful, had been a taxing one and she was ready to embrace a quiet respite. Her odds were on quarters three being empty, at least for the next fifteen minutes or so. Long enough to grasp at a shallow-enough sleep that no dreams could touch her.
Best laid plans and all that, it did not surprise her, in one way, to find Pat curled up on her cot, a fan of letters in one hand and a cigarette between her lips, fixing a cagey glare on Elle, who was sleepily trying to navigate the orderly rows of beds, making her way to her own. Not much had passed between the two of them for a while now, though they had enjoyed a tentative friendship in the spring, having arrived together from England on the St. Vincent - but then, weeks of seasickness and patriotism do tend to bring ragtag souls together, even just for the duration.
The telegram that Elle did not know about had started it all, the animosity and the waspish behaviour. Pat lashed out against just about everything except the patients and Barnett, treating them to her last reserve of self-control. Her own nightmares had grown steadily bloodier, as she imagined all manner of cruel fates for her Mike - the inevitable horrors blazing between those stark lines. Regret to inform. Regret to bloody inform.
They all knew, she thought, even that stupid little mare, Elle. What kind of a cheeky name was that, then? Elle from London, Miss Elle Andersen of Londontown, she with her posh accent and her out-of-place manners, who batted her eyelashes and had them all panting in her wake. And with what, Pat wondered? Black hair and plain eyes, awkward limbs and chewed fingernails. There were career nurses here with prettier faces, but even most of them could not garner those dopey smiles on the faces of the men - that peace and that calm. That joy.
Pat watched her slip into an uneasy doze, pondering the likelihood of some other motivation. Could it be? The girl was no raving beauty, and yet had more than half the hospital in love with her. At the unkind thought, shame clutched at her, tight as Mike's arms. It wasn't fair, it would never be fair, that she slaved away every day and received nothing in return but another cup of soup and feverish dreams of what had been and what could never be again - blood on the uniform she'd pressed; their little house in Salford, shattered and hollow; every plan they had ever made aching and untended, floating adrift on the tide of a blank future. It raked at her, burned her from the inside out. Growing and growing, roiling and focusing its gaze on the girl four beds down, the girl everybody loved, the girl everybody cared about, the girl everybody would cry for - while their eyes slid past the widow-to-be in their midst.
And a plan took shape.
"Fuck you!"
The bowl of water - not too hot, not too cold - was a porcelain whirling dervish in the air, and his curse a slap in the face that Elle could not help but shrink from. How could someone so ill, so weak, so thin be altogether so much? His anger was like a beast raging within him, untameable and sure, and she so longed to ease it, to coax it out and make it smile. If it could smile, then perhaps he could breathe, for the first time in too long.
Such an outburst had happened so many times before, you see. Twice a day, every day for the past seven, to be precise. Elle had been assigned to Fredericks' care nearly exclusively, mostly because she was the only aide willing to work with him. Pat, Susie, and Rebecca, along with eight other volunteers from another contingent, had all tried and had all failed. In the end, Elle was responsible for a six hour shift with him beginning each morning, and another VAD, a resolute Scot called Jane, took him on until lights out. She had a habit of positively befuddling the young man with her Highland accent, tinged as it was from years in Manchester. Fredericks tended to just gawp at her as she bustled around his space and ordered him to do this and that. He could never quite seem to muster an expletive when Jane was about.
But Elle was a different story. Privately, Jenkins thought the fool rather enjoyed making the aide squirm, watching as her face turned red and her hands began to shake when he would spool up into an absolute state. Occasionally, a smile - vindictive and cruel - would flash across his face, chased away by a look of resolute venom.
The other soldiers on the ward would attempt to intervene for Elle's sake, entreating the Corporal to calm himself, to have a care for the woman's sensibilities. This, however, would only serve to infuriate him even more, and on and on it went. A bowl of porridge tossed to the floor; blankets kicked away; curses hurled from left and right. One fine Wednesday saw Elle actually dash from the ward, tears streaming, falling to knees in the grass beside the canvas of the tent, sobbing under the sun.
"That's it," Jenkins said brusquely, a shadow in her path. "I'm having you reassigned. This is nonsense." She reached a not-ungentle hand down to grasp Elle's shoulder, creasing the uniform and making her feel thoroughly childish as the nurse hauled her to her feet. "There are better ways for you to be spending your shifts."
"No," Elle argued, and Jenkins was surprised to see a new set to her chin, to hear a new resolution to her voice. "No. He needs me."
Jenkins stared. "Fiddlesticks!" The girl was an idiot, clearly - or, at the very least, a glutton for punishment. "Andersen, I am not having this. I'll be speaking to Matron about this promptly. We've got plenty of witnesses. The Corporal's behaviour is inappropriate and uncalled-for." She exhaled sharply as she considered the potential ramifications here. Filing complaints against an officer, even a junior one, could be a tricky process. Loyalties ran deep and illogically. "You may be an aide," she continued firmly, "but you should not have to be subjected to this...to this…" And here she sputtered, Rosemary Jenkins, who always knew what to say - here she stumbled, giving Elle the perfect opportunity to supply the answer:
"Suffering."
Ah, there it was. The one word Jenkins never liked to bring up on a shift, the one word she had, actually, cast from her mind the day she put on her uniform - pushing it back deeper and deeper into the recesses of a subconscious cavern, a place where the nightmares go, where the guilt hides, where sorrows sleep. Those broken, weeping boys grasped so at her heart, each and every one. Motherless sons writhing in pain, aching for something she could not bear to give them - because if she gave it to all of them, there would be nothing left. A shell. An empty shell. Carved from pain and misplaced honour.
A good nurse was an effective nurse. A good nurse prioritized and compartmentalized and gave of herself in ways she could sustain over time. A good nurse cared, but never opened her heart too wide, lest ghosts crawl in. A good nurse loved, but a good nurse lost, too.
Elle Andersen would make a terrible nurse. She made for a moderately successful aide - but she dirtied up recovery wards with wildflowers; she interrupted the orderly, chaotic flow of military life. She flouted rules with sweet smiles and she caught men off-guard with a charm only they could seem to understand. Belasis, Clarke, and Musgrave despised her, she'd heard. Fredericks would ruin her. And yet there she stood, all clenched fists and gritty smile, a sheen of sweat attesting to her troubles. She wasn't sleeping, either, Jenkins guessed. And yet there she stood.
Determined. So bloody determined.
To ease their suffering. With flowers and songs, trinkets and jokes. And by God, the girl was actually doing it. While doctors and nurses and other aides healed their wounds - stitched and sewed and sawed and scored - this idiot girl was bringing back their souls, ferrying them back to what they had been before. She made them laugh. She brought them home.
"He needs me," Elle said quietly, loosening her fists and picking at a loose thread on her apron. "He doesn't know it, perhaps, but he needs me."
Jenkins chewed on her bottom lip, trying to steady her voice before it emerged. "You're being foolish, sentimental," she replied, as evenly as she could manage. "There's no room for that here, love." It was a lesson she'd had to learn herself, a long time ago. Raised on cheap, claptrap novels pitching nurses as romantic figures, as a girl she had half expected herself to be promptly swept off her feet by the first dashing soldier she brought back to health - but the first dashing one had died eleven years ago and the rest was ancient history. There was no room.
A light breeze picked up, threatening rain and playing about the hems of their uniforms - Jenkins' thoughts drifted to a dance hall in Blackpool, once upon a time, when a pretty blue dress had kicked up about her shins and no ghosts had clung to her wake. The wind picked up a hank of Elle's hair, ever so slightly lifting it above her shoulders. Had she ever gone dancing, Jenkins wondered? "If there's no room for sentiment," the girl said, after a pause, "there's no place for me. I'm a creature of it, nurse."
How could Jenkins make her see? How could she shake this poor fool out of this absurd delusion? "You can't fix him," she insisted, softening her tone, hoping that might, at the very least, soothe the girl into reason. "He's an injured man, and he'll recover from that. But that anger…" She shook her head. "What if he hurts you?"
Elle gave her a wry smile. "Then I'll recover from that. Surrounded by quality care."
Misty rain began to fall; it was proving to be a damp autumn, and Jenkins acknowledged that the rather grey days the camp had been experiencing of late could have something to do not only with Fredericks' irascibility, but could also easily account for Andersen's stubbornness in this matter. There had been no reprieve; still in the grips of the nascent Italian campaign, the flow of the wounded from the front was constant and the numbers ever-increasing as the battles intensified. Medical staff, at every level, of the camp were hard-pressed to find time to sleep, let alone the opportunity to contend with the swiftly shifting emotions of life in a warzone.
It seemed to be the most likely option here, to explain why Elle was so staunchly refusing to obey what amounted to an order (or at least, a decision handed down) from her superior. If Jenkins decided to truly push things, Elle could be brought to discipline for her insubordination. But the seasoned nurse, standing there foolishly in the first sprinklings of today's shower - she wanted to know more. In her time, she had never encountered this subtle sense of rebellion over so small an issue. Corporal Fredericks was being incorrigible and supremely unpleasant; there was nothing tragic there. He was alive; he could walk; he had lost no limbs; he still looked like himself. He would be back on the field with a gun in his hands in a few weeks.
And yet, and yet.
"I've got to report this," Jenkins insisted, finally. "I've got to report this, actually. He can't go on; he needs to be moved. Maybe an isolation ward for a day or two would see him right."
"No." Elle shook her head, still resolute. "You can't. He's alone in a roomful of men, he's always alone. If you put him on that ward, he'll wither away even faster than he is now. You tend his shoulder, Nurse Jenkins, and I'll tend the rest of him."
Jenkins' ears perked up at that. "What does that mean?"
Hazel eyes drifted to the greying horizon as Elle replied: "I can't stitch his wound back together, and I'm sorry about that. What you all do for these men is...remarkable. I envy it. But I...I can help him, I can work with those stitches and the medicine you give him. I can - well, to be honest, I can't really quite explain it. But if I can bring him back - bring him back to…"
"To what?" Jenkins interjected angrily. "To who he was before he was shot? Before he watched good men gunned down? Andersen, you can't ever do that. No one could."
"But I could try. And maybe that would be enough."
How many times had Jenkins heard nurses speak thus? Starry-eyed, fresh from training, ready to heal the wounds of the world in one benevolent swoop. And then, reality: a price to be paid, at dear cost. She sighed, once more taking in the sight of this wilful woman before her, standing her ground for a soldier too mired in self-pity to find a way out of his own misery - which, though perhaps it wasn't fair of her to dwell too much on this - was far less severe than that of many, many others, both in front of and behind the lines.
But there was a pull there, a feeling that she ought to permit this, to allow for one more chance, because Elle wanted it so badly, and the girl rarely asked for anything. She still had some fire, some passion, and that could very well blaze into instinct, into true talent. "One more day," Jenkins grumbled, hoping she somehow wouldn't come to any blame because of this. "One more shift. Finish this, and if you can get through it without being struck or sworn at or having anything thrown at you, I won't report it."
Elle's long arms wrapped themselves about Jenkins' tired frame; the first embrace in far too long. For a moment, she allowed herself to melt into it, to enjoy the feeling of gratitude, the firm touch of happiness. And then Nurse Jenkins pushed away, perhaps a bit more forcefully than was strictly polite, because how utterly ridiculous for an aide to be hugging a nurse over such a trivial matter. The aide, however, didn't seem to notice: "Thank you, ma'am," she breathed, a smile bursting on her face, a sunrise in the midst of this burgeoning rainstorm.
"Listen to me well, girl," Jenkins continued, as though the smile hadn't warmed her from the inside out. "If one thing goes wrong, you won't step foot in that bloody tent 'til he's gone. Understood?"
Elle nodded, watching as Jenkins strode back into the tent, pausing only to scrape muddy boots against a sturdy tent peg near the entrance, and then the younger woman sighed. Deeply. The entire debacle had edged far too close to the confrontational for her comfort, and a moment ago, she'd thought she had been about to lose it all. Truly, though, she could not quite account for this insistence on helping Fredericks; after all, the man had been nothing but unpleasant to her for days now. But that was why she was here, wasn't it? To aid them, through thick and thin; to bring them up from their very worst? Fredericks may have been more verbose than Falsworth or Lucas or any of the others, but that didn't mean he did not deserve her care - perhaps he needed it more than her previous charges. And in any event, that was her mission here, wasn't it? To comfort and to care. That boy in there, her age or younger, was suffering, and he needed her. They all had; desired or needed something to ground them in their new reality, to tether them to who they had been, so that they could ford ahead with grim new knowledge.
She recalled how Falsworth had lightened so much in the days before his departure, when the awkwardness between them had faded away and only humour and goodwill remained. Colonel Lucas she remembered with a faint smile, how she had read aloud to him a few afternoons a week - long, dull tomes about eighteenth-century agricultural practices. And then there had been Parker, who had enjoyed her off-key humming, and Dunville, who'd so liked a joke…
On and on she thumbed through the memories of what had worked, what had helped, trying to suppress that little flutter of panic as she faced Corporal Fredericks again, this time sodden and not a little nervous. For his part, the soldier was visibly chastened, appearing smaller and thinner in the space of just ten minutes. Sunk back into his pillow, he picked idly at a scab on his right hand, the hand she had intended to wash, before he'd so violently kicked away the bowl of water. Not that they got too filthy while he was lying in bed all day, but it was Barnett's opinion that the soldiers benefited from that kind of self-care, that washing and shaving and trimming one's fingernails could remind them that they were worth that much, that they were real and human, in need of tending beyond flesh wounds.
Fredericks' eyes were a very precise shade of brown, Elle realized, taking a few chary steps closer. A hint of sunlight - a warm reprieve from the rain outside - had shafted down through the mesh window above him, and the reflection of it caused some rich gold flecks to shimmer in his gaze, as those treacle eyes snapped up to meet hers. Was there penitence there, she wondered? Or a still-brewing rage, ready to engulf her once more?
It was surprise, though she didn't realize it, that was blooming there in his eyes. Fredericks - Corporal Peter Fredericks - had assumed that he'd well and truly scared her off, that frightened little rabbit of a woman, she whose gentle hands and lilting voice reminded him so much of his mother. His mother who had sobbed as she'd seen him off, begged him not to go, dredging up four dead brothers, lost in the mud of France; a husband, his father, who had never seen his son. She had torn at him when he'd first joined up, coming home in his uniform with a smile splitting his face, expecting tears of pride, not anger. She'd torn at his serge, trying to rip back the layers to find her boy, buried as he was in bad memories and tempted fate. In the end, he had left, because it was his duty. He was a good lad, made of strong stuff. A patriot. A bloody patriot.
A bloody patriot who had wept like a baby when the bullet went through his shoulder, when he swore he could hear his father's voice, his uncles' wails. Banshees on the field.
And then she came. His greatest disappointment yet. They couldn't even give him a pretty aide, a dumb girl from London who just wanted to flirt and maybe have someone to write to when he returned to the front. No, they gave him bloody Andersen. Who reminded him far too much of home. Who made tears crowd his throat. Who made him so bloody, fucking homesick that he wanted to cry out for his mother. Who made him so, so angry.
She was back.
"I apologize, Corporal, for leaving so abruptly. I needed air," she said quietly, beginning her usual process of tidying up the space around him. Fredericks did not know it, but she always liked to begin with a few small tasks, to gradually invade their territory, so that when she did come at patients with washcloths or pincers or clippers, it did not feel like a full-scale assault. She made herself at home within his world, easing herself into his new reality.
Watching as the woman straightened the items on his nightstand, as her fingers trailed close to his blankets, as her face relaxed and then sporadically tightened with an expression very like agony - he studied her, for the first time in their entire acquaintance suddenly gripped by a need to understand why she was the way that she was. There was something so motherly in her bearing at this moment; he'd never seen it in girls their age from home, who liked a laugh and a flirt and a good dance. Those girls he understood, but this?
In a silent study, he permitted her to wash his hands and face, to trim the encroaching stubble from his cheeks, to make him a cup of tea and ask if there was anything else he needed - as though, just a few hours before, he hadn't said such a vile thing to her, hadn't tossed the bowl at her face. As though nothing unfortunate had ever occurred between them at all.
When she left him in McTavish's capable (if bewildering) care, Elle looked back at him from the canvas flaps of the recovery ward tent, and the grin she gave him had no trace of the goddamned pity he both craved and despised. And it warmed him right up.
It was, in a word, a bloody success for approximately two days. Two whole shifts of quiet interactions, of Elle being able to complete all of her duties on the ward entirely unassailed. Fredericks was nearly silent, perhaps a tad shamed by his previous campaign of discouragement and tyranny against the aide who, it had to be said, had been nothing but patient with and kind to him. He was as a humbled child, come before a sterner mother after a terrible tantrum - nothing she couldn't forgive, but something they both could not quite forget.
Though things were fine, Elle found herself one night soon after, troubled by those strange dreams. Her home aflame; the boy broken and dead in her arms. After three hours of restlessness, of gazing up at the ceiling of the tent and wishing away those awful images, she finally got up, once she'd reasoned that at half-five, it was close enough to the beginning of her shift that she should at least put this insomnia to good use.
The camp was still, nearly peaceful, early that morning before the frenzy of reveille and the medical shift change occurred. She passed by a few guards and other aides, none of whom looked at her curiously; sleepless nights were all too common. Her walk was actually calming, in a way; she could feel taut muscles stretching and pulling with the effort of her strides; as her breathing even and her thoughts gradually began to circle a nexus of sorts, as she realized where she was headed: recovery ward D. She took a right at the officers' mess, and a left about ten yards after that. And then she heard it.
Low at first, rising as she drew closer to the soft canvas sides of the tent, nearly leaning her cheek against the fabric in an effort to confirm her suspicions. Sobs from what she suspected was bed number four.
Weeping in the camp was just as common as sleepless nights, but where some soldiers, nurses, and aides could bring themselves to talk vaguely about "bad dreams" or "tossing and turning," the crying was rarely mentioned. Such discussion skirted far too closely to an unhealable pain, an agony with no possible reprieve. Nothing to diagnose; nothing to treat. And so it wasn't discussed, lest someone probe too deeply.
Elle had, despite herself, turned away from teary soldiers before - her mandate was to comfort them, to provide them with whatever they required most of her in order to feel safe and respected. That was her job. At times, however, that meant she needed to turn away, to ignore their tears, to leave them with a cup of tea and find another job somewhere on the ward, allowing them their time to mourn or miss or rage. But this, this was different.
He was in her arms in a moment, his arms winding around her neck and his face pressing against her breast as he pulled her up and into his bed. Tangled together, he continued to weep - fathomless, wracking sobs. He trembled under her hands, as she smoothed loving fingers down the expanse of his back, pyjamas plastered to his skin by a cold sweat; as she allowed him to pretend, to use her, to indulge in a comforting fantasy wherein this bed was a boy's, those arms were his mother's. "Hush now," she murmured into his hair. "Hush now, darling, no need to cry."
Oh, but there was. There was in that moment and there would be more to come. For as Fredericks' sobs ceased, fading into the edge of sleep, as her hands continued their ministrations, as her lips pressed against the crown of his head, there came a sharp, resounding admonition from the entrance of the tent.
"Andersen!" barked Matron Barnett. "What is the meaning of this?"
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