Title: Growing Up – Chapter 3
Pairing: Treize/Leia
Warnings: Combat violence, light mutilation of canon, het sexuality/sensuality (nothing too graphic), military stuff.
See Prologue for notes, specifically regarding the manga.

Note: After posting a couple of chapters, I realized that it might be hard to keep track of the dates since this is a solidly episodic story. So I've added a count to make it a little easier, because the passage of time is more important than the specifics of dates. Sorry for not realizing this earlier.

xXx

(Late September, 188 - Day 0)

He wakes up to florescent light stinging his eyes. There's a moment of mindless absorption before he starts, body jerked upright by an instinct that's not entirely military-bred. There is a surge of pain in his leg. His stomach. He sweats. Cringes. Sees greyblack blooming blotches. Falls back against the inclined mattress.

"You should take it easy," a female voice tells him.

Treize's head rolls to the side until he can see her, standing on the other side of the small room, unfolding a thin, white-knit blanket that she's pulled from a small storage closet. She moves to the foot of his bed and drapes it over his lower half. He's drowsily relieved when he sees that he still has two legs.

"Do you know where you are?"

How could he? How could he possibly? Some things are obvious. He's hooked up, beeping, draining fluids from a couple of bags. He's woozy, the stench of other people's sickness is unmistakable, and the nurse looks like an idiot's caricature, a joke at a costume party. For all Treize knows, he's crossed over to another dimension.

"You're in the Barton Family Medical Center. My father had it built for his workers."

She's petite and smooth, her face a neutral mask, like a doll one might place in the passenger seat to abuse a commuter lane. Her wrists, he notes, are tiny as she manually turns the dial on the drip chamber of his smaller IV. He could grab one tight enough to break it, he's sure, even like he is. How long had the IV drip been automated? At least fifteen times as long as Treize's age. He knows then that he must still be on-colony.

"Your father…" He grasps with the syrupy effort of a man just out of emergency surgery. L-3. Money. Triple-Nine. Workers. But he's wading through fog too thick for clarity.

"My name is Leia. My schedule is on the board." She points to a small white board near the door that has two nurses' names and shift times: Leia, 0600 – 1800; Nils, 1800-0600. "Nils and I are the only ones working the floor this week, so I hope you enjoy predictability."

Treize grunts, feeling marrow-deep disinterest toward her, mystery Nils, and their schedules. He's so tired, and it's worse than a triple shift on lockdown. Worse than the sleepless pulled-taffy days of war games, days that stretch and stretch, seeming never to end, until, with a soft, thready tear, the coast seems clear enough to collapse in a damp lean-to with some other smelly soldier. He could be there. On Earth. Autumn leaves under his chin. Rain. Rain tapping and trickling through the trees, down the window...

"It's raining." His voice is a gritty croak. He intended for an upward inflection, to beg the questions 'how' and 'why,' for he has three weeks of the weather schedule memorized. His hand slowly creeps down to his thigh, the thigh that he'd last seen a butchered, gory mess. The area is thick with wraps that feel rough against his fingertips. He touches over where he knows the wound is, an instinctive knowledge, a black, buried smear of something's-not-right. He presses down. The pain blanks his vision and he sucks a breath in through his teeth.

"Your great general made the whole colony rain to control one small fire. While we only have one treatment plant open."

He feels the tangible creep of morphine as it edges into his consciousness, buffing away the tension. He lets go, lets his limbs go limp, lets his neck relax. The words sighed from the corner of his mouth are thoughtless, untempered honesty.

"Not my general."

Leia tilts her head, the first indication given that she's not a robot mannequin. "Oh?"

Treize's eyes drift closed. "That idiot."

Though, in truth, he likes the sound of the rain.

Xxx

(Late September 188 - Day 0 + 3)

Leia rolls a metal cart into his room, one with a squeaky wheel and an impractically wide turning radius. He opens his heavy eyelids and thinks he's watching her unnoticed. Her skinny arms float as she sets aside a roll of bandages and mixes water and antiseptic concentrate in a rectangular plastic container not unlike the one he vaguely remembers quietly vomiting into at some point he can't quite recall. Treize isn't sure how many days he's been in the hospital, and he remembers to ask at all the wrong times.

Yesterday Noin visited him, without Bresman and Ferris but with their regards. She didn't stay long, just long enough to exchange clumsy pleasantries and wishes for swift recovery. He stopped her before she could thank him, just on the cusp of sincere gratitude lanced with newfound hero worship. Stymied, denied a vent, she put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. It was a gesture beyond any expectation he had of her visit. And then he slipped, words cascading, and told her he was proud of her, a planned expression turned careless with a foreign infusion of honest-to-God respect. When her eyes welled up, she wiped her nose with the back of her hand in a gesture that was childish and unselfconscious. Hadn't they fought in battle together? Weren't they now equals? Yes, he supposed as he heard her booted steps recede down the hallway. They had. They were.

"Legs, head, or stomach first?" Leia asks, squeezing the bandages in her hand. She regards him with a smile that seems perpetually fixed. It's thin. Controlled. Carefully noncommittal. It indicates neither joy nor sarcasm.

"May as well work your way down," Treize replies, unsure of why she gives him the option, because he's certain there must be some sort of official procedure guiding these decisions. He doesn't appreciate having the choice, and he wonders if she offers because she thinks the opposite.

She takes a seat on the edge of his bed. He fairly certain she's not supposed to be doing this either, but he doesn't really mind. She's pleasant enough and always smells good, like fabric softener. When she removes the bandage from his forehead, he sees no blood on it.

"This is healing well," she says, inspecting the stitches. "With a little more attention, the mark should be small." She wets a cotton square with the antiseptic and pats it against the wound. As she does, Treize looks down her arm and catches a peek of her cotton bra through the loose short sleeve of her uniform dress.

"Good," he mutters.

She arranges a new bandage and traces her index fingertips along the four adhesive sides of it, pressing it down firmly. Her eyes, light blue and mild, meet his, light up, and for an instant, her lips purse into a smile that conveys amusement. It's gone before he can ask why without sounding paranoid. He feels her hands on the side tie of his hospital gown, pulling then spreading across his flinching stomach. She observes discretion in a sterile, professional way that indicates training more than consideration.

"Are you still feeling sick?" she asks as she peels back the bandage that covers the mended gash in his stomach. Her glance up at him is quick and expectant.

"It's better," he lies tensely. Her fingers touch for a fraction too long, whisper-light, and he holds his breath.

Leia inspects the dirty bandage for hints of discoloration and, finding none, makes simple work of replacing it. She then rises to her feet and waits with turned back for him to situate himself so she can tend to his last wounds. It's a young routine, still rusty, still awkward and painful and humiliating. He exhales harshly as he positions his right leg as previously instructed. It hurts like hell, and there must be an easier way to do it, he thinks, but there's something real about it, and it's one of the only ways he has left of demonstrating control. When she turns back, his gown is pulled up and strategically bunched to preserve what he reserves as the last shred of his dignity.

She's very careful as she unravels the dressing, her movements smooth and maternal and all-knowing. Treize exerts an unnecessary effort to keep at bay the shaking of his hands. He grabs at sheets, an occupation that seems superior to letting himself tremble. It's a difficult position to hold, foot flat on the bed, knee bent, thigh completely off the mattress. Every muscle he never thought he had in his leg is bunched and straining with hot pain. He hopes he doesn't pass out like he did the day before.

She pulls the anterior bandage off, and even though he's prepared himself, his stomach still heaves like it does every time he sees what's become of his leg. It amplifies the discomfort, and his mouth fills with saliva.

The wound is a deep, oblong, bloody flesh-crater of approximately 20 centimeters in diameter, extending from right above his knee cap to mid-thigh. It's larger and more bowl-like than it was in the cockpit, the result of multiple sessions of surgical debridement. Rather than the saturated pulled-pork mess that he saw before, images of which still assault him at odd times, the wound looks smooth, cleaned up, pink and healthy, bedded in a wide rectangle of skin that the nurse's aid shaves daily with a small, gleeful smirk on her lips. The entry wound on the outside of his thigh is smaller but just as bottomless. Treize muses with disgust that he could stick something through one wound and have it pop out the other.

He swallows hard. "You're not going to leave it like that, are you?" he asks with a nervy huff, tracking her every incremental movement with dilated, unblinking eyes.

One of the few saving graces was that the beam missed both his femur and femoral artery. 'A miracle,' the doctor told him the day before as he flipped through his paper – paper – chart. 'A fluke,' Treize countered bitterly as he wondered if these people even knew what a computer was.

Leia doesn't look up at him. Her focus narrows, and he cries out sharply when she pokes her gloved fingers into the wound, inspecting for discoloration and secretions indicative of infection. She withdraws her hand and says 'I'm sorry' in a breathy way that is purely apologetic.

"We're expecting synthetic muscle grafts to arrive from Jerusalem tomorrow." Her voice sounds distant, but not uncertain. It's then that her tone changes, sharpens, and hones momentarily to a fine cutting point. "Funny that when a Federation soldier needs something, things move remarkably quickly from Earth."

He doesn't really care about the attack. Barely registers it. Dimly decides that he might believe it. He closes his eyes and lets out a long, tremulous breath.

"I'm going to clean them now. Are you ready?"

Treize nods and imagines he's somewhere else. Nowhere specific. Maybe his office. His quarters. His bedroom at home. Being scolded by his mother. Yelling at a soldier for stepping out of line. Desperately trying – and failing – to talk Zechs out of applying to Lake Victoria. Any of those miserable scenarios sounds better than antiseptic solution being sucked into a large, needle-less syringe.

"Tell me what else," he murmurs.

"You'll go back into surgery, and the doctor will graft the muscle into your wounds so that they will eventually fill in."

She squirts the solution along the contours of the injury and gently blots out the excess liquid with an absorbent pad. Treize presses his lips together and grimaces soundlessly.

"We'll pump you full of steroids and wait a bit to see if the graft takes." Leia touches his knee and urges him to roll his leg in so that she can tend the entry site on the side. "Once we can safely assume there's no rejection, you'll go back into surgery once more. The doctor will take skin from the outside of your left thigh and graft it over the wounds on your right leg."

There's a minute or two of tight silence as she cleans and sops up the smaller hole. She starts talking again when she sees his jaw clench once, twice, hard enough to pull his mouth into a pained sneer. "You'll be on pain medication as needed, and you'll be required to inject the surrounding muscles with a regenerative formula that will induce local muscle growth."

Leia bandages and dresses his injuries quickly, stealing glances of concern at the young man, the almost boy, who's pressing the right side of his face into his pillow as if to bury himself in it. She then carefully coaxes him to lower his leg.

"Are you all right, Treize?"

His red-rimmed eyes crack open to the sound of his name, the first time she's used it. His already pale skin is blanched, and he tastes wet salt on his upper lip.

"Yes."

She stands and smooths out the wrinkles in her thickly-woven dress with her child's hands. She gazes down at him and grasps lightly onto the bar intended to prevent him from spilling out of bed. "So long as your body doesn't reject the grafts, you should return to full functionality," she tells him. "Cosmetically, the graft sites will appear slightly discolored, and the surface will likely be a bit lumpy due to the way the muscle grafts are likely to occupy the empty space. There will be scarring."

"But I will run again," he tries to confirm. He has to, because career depends on it, and he needs to know if this is a fight he should even take up. If it's not... he doesn't even want to think about that possibility.

"That's up to you – your dedication to your physical therapy regimen. If you want to run again, if you work for it, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to." There's a hint of something weaker than doubt in her voice, like she's breached the perimeter that separates her professional knowledge from a layman's speculations. "In the meantime, we'll give you some crutches and you'll be hobbling back to your unit in no time flat." Of that, at least, she seems reasonably certain.

Treize immediately hates the idea of going back, hotly and passionately, and he doesn't understand why. He touches at the cotton square taped to his head, then up and into his greasy hair.

"How many days has it been?"

"They brought you in on Monday morning. It's Thursday." Her eyes dart to the digital clock on his bedstand and she jerks her chin towards it.

He follows her direction and stares in fuzzy disbelief. How had he missed the date displayed so clearly and literally right in front of his face? What an embarrassing lapse in observational skills. Unacceptable. The kind of carelessness that gets people killed in combat. The kind of carelessness that makes him wince with disdain. The kind of carelessness he is bent to hell and back on conditioning out of every man and woman that he bears even the slightest responsibility to train.

But the concern is fleeting, like a log adrift in a current of opium.

"You should be fair to yourself," Leia comments as she observes the nuances of his facial expression. She's not yet sure how to read this one, but she's learning. Like a scientist, she tests him against herself, because every patient's different. Some need affection. Some need quiet. Some need witless conversation. This one... This one she's still trying to figure out. "You've been hopped up on goofballs this entire time."

"Still," he complains, though not without finding a modicum of floaty, undignified humor in her phrasing. "That's pretty bad." His eyelids droop and his head sinks even deeper into the pillow that smells like mothballs. "I should have – "

She touches her fingers to his forearm, softly, gently. "You should let yourself rest."

xXx

(Early October 188. Day 0 + three weeks)

It's night. Or, at least, that is what's been dictated by Central Weather. The colony runs on London time, a Barton nationalistic decision that is conveniently also Zulu time, which is different from L2-V08744, which is different from L5-A0206. A colony's refusal to run on Zulu is a brand of individuality deemed almost universally obnoxious by any transportation operation, business enterprise, or military contingent that has a schedule – which is to say, all of them.

But that, it's been determined by those Earth-born, is the colonies. Independence. Pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps. So much more so than even the most zealously capitalist nations on the planet. The Europe he's left behind is certain that it's moved beyond the self-serving free-for-all, voluntarily united (with a pair of woeful exceptions) under the Federation, the trigger-happy child of the EU. Uniting the Continent even closer is Romefeller and, inseparably, OZ, which have Europe steel-stitched at every seam through political networking so quiet and deep that they're bound not even to be publicly sensed until, like a metastatic cancer, it's too powerful to be stopped. Treize's Russia has never quite settled with it, the alliance, the call for submissive interdependence. It's sprawled and squirming against being cornered by the West and China, but it's by no means L2. No L5. No riotous bastard with something to prove

The light is nothing like the moon. How is it that they don't know that? It's right outside the door. How many of them have never been to Earth? How many have never seen the sun rise above the horizon? Certainly they've seen it peek out from behind Earth's black shadow, but it's hardly the same.

Treize thinks these things, these dull, pointless, and narrow thoughts, because he exhausted and can't sleep. He misplaces the blame on the old woman down the hall who's been moaning low for two hours and forty-three minutes. It's a sound that's held by the shape of the hallway and carried with unfortunate clarity to his room. Her voice distracts him from himself, from real thoughts, from personal thoughts, for which he's oddly grateful. He wonders what's wrong with her, whether Nils hears her and intends to do anything about it.

He touches his leg. His first combat wound doesn't feel like he expected it would. He's not proud of it. The defect feels alien. He wonders if it will ever heal, knowing full well that it probably will, and he frowns in the knowledge that his legs will never look like they once did. Not like last year. Last month. Battle – glorious battle, the qualitative and quantitative measure of bravery, the currency of soldierly respect – has warped him into a damaged thing. No, he's not proud at all. He wonders if all those combat-hardened limpers of his father's generation were proud, the ones who would spend hours in his father's study, filling the room with smoke of three kinds and drinking late into the night. Untouchables. Men of Honor. Were they proud?

Treize runs his finger along the perimeter of the gape in his leg. He could find it in his sleep, even buried under layers of thick dressing. He'll get a medal for this. Like the men in his father's study, a dozen or more jangling when they wore them in full dress, which they usually did, maybe because they were so heavy. How stupid of him to have coveted such an encumbrance.

The woman stops moaning – abruptly, as if she had a switch regulating the sound. Treize's eyes flit frantically from side to side in the dark silence, and he strains for a whisper, the beep of a monitor, anything. At the nurse's station, Nils clears his throat, and Treize feels himself relax, but only a little.

He often thinks about leaving. Randomly. Without clearance. He fantasizes about walking out like none of this ever happened. Without a limp. Without so many extra holes in his body. He imagines walking away all of the hours of his life he's wasted sitting in front of his computer. He should have walked more. He wouldn't mind dissolving into the colony-city, washing out, becoming a nobody. Another Earth import. Another aloof ex-pat with a funny accent.

But Triple-Nine isn't Bali. It isn't Milan or Paris or London or New York. It's a rough loop of barely-contained ballistic excitation. It's cinder-colored. It's perpetually a shortage away from evacuation. It's broke and broken. It's no place for an aristocratic soldier, a bred conservative with a brash streak of questionably sane idealism, an old-money only son of dubiously Continental sensibilities who has at all times at least one relative quietly in incarceration and another in a scandalous relationship with the absolutely wrong type of person. It's no place for Treize Khushrenada, and maybe that's what he finds most enticing.

He thinks he should probably go home, but he's snagged on the inability to stomach talking to his mother. Worse is the thought of seeing her face, the heart-mauling concern she'll try to stuff back behind a levy of blasé. He's already refused five of her calls, to the point where she's stopped calling altogether. She must understand, and yet, he doesn't think she ever really could.

It's too quiet. He very softly hums a song Ferris was listening to on the transport to L3. It's obnoxious and infectious. He can only remember one line, and you gotta keep driving, driving, driving on and on, because the road ahead ain't smooth and it is long. He thinks that those might be the worst lyrics he's ever heard, the most absurdly, nauseatingly apropos. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine how good it would feel to drive a drill bit through his left temple, if only to forget he ever heard it.