Author's Notes: I feel like every time I try to estimate how many chapters are left, I keep having to push it back.

So I give up. It will be a surprise. For me as much as for everyone reading. Talk about a story with a life of its own. \o/


The Long Road Home – Chapter 9


An hour after the Soldier vomits his hot dog, he is ready to try again.

Now that he knows what the hollow twist in his stomach is, it's intolerable that he not tend to it. The remembered warmth of a split pea pancake makes him shaky and impatient. His mouth is already wet with anticipation.

He is still awkward on his feet, still unreasonably tired with little exertion. The expectation of food crowds his thoughts, preoccupying him, and he forces himself to take a steadying breath and think. He does not have enough dough remaining to fail in a second attempt.

In the end, the Soldiers decides on a strategy involving little risk.

He selects a small carton of orange juice and a cookie from the shelf of a store marked 7-Eleven. He was able to consume these things before without becoming ill, the Soldier reasons. Perhaps they will serve him now, where the hot dog did not.

He parts with more of his dough, almost all, and then he sits on a curb and takes sips of the orange juice. He nibbles the edges of the cookie. The juice is dynamite on his tongue, the cookie crumbly and sweet. It takes him an hour to finish both, though it's hard not to rush. His flesh hand trembles with the effort of it.

When he finishes, though his stomach gurgles and shifts, he does not feel the violent nausea of before. Instead, there is a strange, torpid sense of satisfaction – his body's relief, the Soldier suspects, at having been provided with something needed after too long without.

He could stand without dizziness, now; of this, the Soldier is almost certain. But he does not move to do so right away. He remains seated, wants to keep this moment a little longer.

It's a good moment.

He watches as people drift by on the street. He finds it strange, how deeply his perceptions have changed in so short a time. He still marks movements that might be threats, still predicts the potential for those nearest him to do him harm. But now, he watches faces, too. He pays attention to blonde hair, to broad shoulders, to eyes the blue of remembered summer skies.

He is not certain when his priorities began to shift, but he knows they are no longer the same.

The Soldier sits on the curb, and his flesh fingers brush back and forth, absently, against the –

(– rough fabric beneath them. He's half-scared this is a dream, that the bare comfort of the bedroll's just his own dumb head making up what he wants to see again. Christ knows it's a dream he's had before, and every time ends with him muttering his serial number through cracked lips when it's time to wake up again.

Words cut through his thoughts before he can get any further, and he's glad for the distraction. "Hey," says Steve's voice. "Coffee's on." The man who's not the Soldier looks up in time to see that his best friend's nudged open the tent flap and is peering in, backlit against the dim light of dawn. "You awake?"

He hasn't slept at all, but he's not about to say so. "Now I am," he says instead, "Gee, thanks, Stevie." But suddenly coffee sounds like the best thing he's ever heard.)

– concrete. He likes the feel of it, the little pits and unplanned irregularities. He likes sitting here, on the sidewalk in a city that once was his. A city that once was Steve's.

And that's what reminds him: he has something he still needs to do.


The Soldier finds the green lady above the water late in the afternoon.

He's walked a long way to reach her – and yet, when he first sets eyes upon her, he knows the trip was worth every step.

She stands larger than life and larger than memory, though he recalls being only a child at her feet. Her crown radiates out to frame a face with an elegant, stern sort of beauty. The sun's broken through the clouds for the first time in days to touch her with rays of orange and gold.

She glows. She holds her torch high, but she doesn't need it. She's bright enough just the way she is.

Beside the Soldier, a cluster of small children are being herded by an older woman in a pressed brown skirt, and he moves absently aside to let them pass. Almost reverently, he feels for the folded paper in his pocket. It's worn now, creased from being opened and closed and thumbed by the Soldier's hands, one metal and one flesh.

The green lady above the water looks just the way she does in the picture, and he holds the booklet aloft so that he can see them side by side.

"The Statue of Liberty," say the words on the paper, and the Soldier does not know what liberty means, but he likes the sound of it, thinks that it fits very well here with the sun streaming through the clouds and the ocean stretching away into the distance.

He stands there for a time, still and watchful. He recalls words, not in a clash of images as recollections so often come, but something subtler, knowledge tucked inside him that he hadn't been aware was present. "Give me your tired," say the words, "your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

The Soldier doesn't know where the words are from. He doesn't know where he heard them, or who said them, or what they mean.

But they linger in his mind long after he turns away. They fill him with a sense of belonging that he's never felt before, and he aches, and aches, and doesn't know why.