There were a set of soft tugs on the bed sheets and then the tiny familiar grunts of effort. The bed bounced delicately and Clara could hear the small giggles Charlie tried to hold in as he crawled up towards her, flopping down beside her to continue chuckling. A gentle finger touched her cheek, then her nose, and then drew a circle on her forehead before he pulled her bottom lip down slightly and she opened her mouth quickly, pretending to try to bite his finger as he recoiled and squealed. Then she sighed and looked at him, lying across from her.
He was holding a teddy bear to his chest – Raggy, because her mum had called it a Raggedy Bear when Clara had let Charlie choose it at a store – and he wore a sleepy grin. His dark hair was disheveled and she looked it over, considering a cut as he sighed, drawing her attention back to his eyes.
"Hi, mummy," he told her simply.
"Hello, my Charlie," she responded, knuckle brushing his cheek as he smiled.
The words might as well have been their 'I love you', for the boy didn't quite know the relevance of the actual words. Clara had a hard time saying them to anyone. Even her son. They brought back too many painful memories of a man she tried hard to forget. She chose to show her son love in other ways. In quiet moments they shared; in feelings rather than words. They sighed together and then laughed in unison before Charlie rolled to drop himself off the bed and rush towards the kitchen for breakfast.
During the car ride to the daycare, they sang silly children's songs Clara played from a CD, and she glanced back occasionally to see him flopping Raggy about, a steady grip on the old bear so he wouldn't fall on a turn or a bump, and as she lifted him up out of his seat, he dropped the bear down in his place. To keep mummy safe, he always said, because Charlie knew his mother worked for the military; Charlie knew how dangerous her job could be.
He was three years, five months, and seventeen days old.
And he knew any minute his mother could die.
Clara carried him into the building and she made her way towards his class, afraid he might have fallen asleep on her shoulder, except he was gripping her tightly. His legs wrapped around her waist just as they reached the door and she pulled him back to see his small face fighting a frown.
Fingers running through his thick bangs to push them from his eyes, she asked quickly, "Charlie, are you alright?"
"I just miss you when you're away, mummy," he responded, voice barely there. As though he might be on the verge of tears, and Clara's heart broke to hear it that way.
She shook her head and smiled, "Only a few hours, remember? Then grandmum will be by to pick you up and we'll all go to the park in the evening, watch the sun set together – would you like that?"
He brightened, but only slightly, and he nodded, letting her pull him free from her to set him on the ground, pushing the door open so he could greet his friends. Children, Clara thought with a sigh as she watched them exchange hugs and rush towards their toys, would never not be beautiful to her. She gave the attendant a wave and then she was off, driving the few blocks to the base where she straightened her uniform over her body as she entered the building and saluted a General before making her way to her office.
It was a quiet morning – that's how she always remembered it. Maybe it seemed that way to her in her hindsight because of the loudness that proceeded it; maybe it just had been silent. There hadn't been any warnings and there hadn't been any meetings or drills or alarms. No warnings of any kind. Just her door slamming open at half past ten, an exasperated young woman with bloodshot eyes staring in at her, mouth working over the right way to deliver the news.
"Clara," she stated simply, and she knew. Her stomach dropped because she should have addressed her as Lieutenant Palmer, but instead she got just her name, and then, "There's been an incident. You should... you should get your things."
"What incident?" She asked boldly, grabbing her bag to sling over her shoulders as she stood to follow the young woman.
"There've been several attacks," she started slowly as they moved swiftly through the halls towards the fleets of vehicles, "The Daycare..." she began.
Clara's feet froze, along with her heart, and she stopped, head shaking as she shouted, "What about the daycare?"
The woman responded on a nod, "They've bombed the daycare."
She stared into the face that watched her nervously, and she felt her body run cold and hot simultaneously as her head swam warmly, her mouth opening to utter simply, "Charlie," before she broke into a run.
Behind her, the woman was calling out to her, but her voice faded behind the pounding of Clara's heart in her ears. She could hear the blood pulsing through her veins and the stomping of her boots against the ground as she made it down four flights of stairs and out the front door and around the corner. Her chest felt as though it might explode as she tore into streets, jeeps honking and swerving, and she pushed several new cadets to the ground just before exiting the front gates and rushing towards the plumes of smoke now darkening the skies.
"No," she moaned, "No, no, no, no."
It became her mantra as she neared the school, terrified of what she would find, and she skidded to a halt when it came into view, her breath momentarily knocked free from her lungs. Clara looked over what was left of the two story building and then she continued to move forward, feeling the contents of her stomach threatening to expel themselves as she pushed on. She could see Captain Jarvis already tossing rubble aside looking for his four year old daughter Sam, and she could see General Isaacs shouting and pulling away from those who tried to tear him from the scene.
"Not until I have Jimmy!" he bellowed in response, turning and grabbing hold of a piece of building half his size and screaming with the effort it took to push it aside and let it crash onto what had been the sidewalk around the school.
Clara hit the edge of the debris with a grunt and she could already hear soldiers shouting at her to stop, but she wouldn't. She bloodied a knuckle on a brick and she burned a finger on another. Hands rounded her arms and she swung out to punch at people she knew – people she'd trained with; people she outranked; people who outranked her.
She didn't care.
"I need to find Charlie," she shouted at them angrily.
Turning her attention to the bricks, she began to dig, ignoring every logical thread of thought in her head that told her this was ridiculous and dangerous and counterproductive. She could hear the small cries from within the rubble. The tearful screams and the calls for mummy that blurred her vision and finally allowed her to be pulled away, dropped onto the pavement in a heap of tears, and an eventual puddle of vomit, as those unaffected began coordinating an actual search effort.
They had to bring in machinery, they had to keep people to the outskirts of the debris, otherwise they risked crushing the children who had survived. Clara's mind repeated those words to her as she listened in a daze – the ones who survived, because they knew it was impossible that they all had. There were shelters, but only so many would have made it. She imagined not many even had a chance to understand what had happened, much less found the time to get into the shelters. Clara hoped it had been quick for the ones who had died and that those left weren't suffering.
Her eyes closed, squeezing new tears onto her dirty cheeks, because Charlie had to be among them. He had to be alive and he was stuck underneath burning heavy bricks and smoldering fires and thick smoke. Conditions grown men and women wouldn't survive. Charlie was suffering, she knew, because the only other option was he was dead and Clara wouldn't accept that.
The backpack on her shoulders beeped every so often with phone calls she ignored and she worked until the sun fell beneath the horizon, drinking water when forced and refusing to stop. "I'll slow down," she told a General gruffly, "But I will not stop until I'm holding my son, is that understood?"
The woman nodded sadly and handed her a bottle of water with a gentle, "At least take five minutes."
Charlie might not have five minutes, she wanted to say, and she knew she conveyed the message through the look she offered, because the other woman merely nodded and moved away to check on another soldier.
The first child out came with a bowing of heads and the first true silence the next morning. A little girl of five, her head having sustained a massive blow, her small crushed body laid out into a body bag to be taken away for identification and Clara watched the soldiers solute the child. She raised her own hand, straightening her sore back to offer the girl an ounce of the dignity that had been stolen from her by terrorists.
By the Doctor, someone had whispered.
Moving brick by brick, listening to others occasionally shouting out and then hearing the silence that followed, Clara found herself going numb to it all. Her phone had stopped ringing, the battery no doubt dead in the device, and her mother wouldn't be allowed near the site to check on her. She tried not to think about the woman, or how devastated she would be if she saw her then. Clara knew she looked horrid, crusted in dirt and blood, going on almost thirty six hours without sleep with little food or water – she couldn't keep anything down – and cried out.
Focusing on the whimpers that still occasionally rose from the remains, she continued to dig into a second night and then into a second morning. She'd been forced into a cot to lie down to rest and had been angered when she woke hours later, going back to digging into a third night and then a third morning. Her fingers up through her shoulders had lost feeling and her legs burned with the need to stop, but she carried on, shuffling bits of building and classrooms aside, hoping she could find someone – anyone – alive in the rubble. They'd pulled twenty four children; thirteen had been deceased. One had been in pieces.
And then she heard her name.
Stumbling backwards, she stood and looked to the group forming about ten feet away, all glancing up at her as someone dug hurriedly into the pile in front of them. Clara slid as she moved, hands cutting against bricks as she fell, making her way towards them to see the body half uncovered.
"Oh," was all she was able to say, voice wavering as she knelt to take over, watching her boy wince.
There was a terrible gash underneath his left eye and as she tossed debris off his legs, he moaned just a bit and she cried, seeing how they were broken, his right foot twisted at an odd angle. His shirt lifted and she could see the discoloration on his flesh and she could hear those around her going quiet. She supposed they knew what was coming, but as long as she could hear the tiny squeaks and gasps sputter from his lips, Clara held onto hope. She carefully plucked his body up into her lap as she fell backwards and someone shouted out for a gurney and she smiled.
A gurney, she thought to herself, not a body bag.
She touched his cheek and his eyelids shut tighter and Clara exhaled heavily, her heart pounding in her chest as she held him carefully, knowing he was hurting, seeing it in his little face. She brushed her fingers through his thick bangs, sullied with caked muck and blood, and she closed her eyes, pressing a kiss to his cold forehead where she could hear his wheezing breaths, struggling.
"Hold on, baby," she told him lightly, "Mummy's got you."
She shifted back when he murmured and she looked down at the bright eyes that slowly opened to greet her. Clara laughed because his lips turned up into a smirk as he glanced over her face, something in his body relaxing when he realized she was the one holding him, and they stared at one another for a minute in silence, Clara hearing the commotion behind her of workers trying to ready her with a board for him.
"Hi, mummy," her son breathed slowly, quietly.
"Hello, my Charlie," Clara whimpered back on a laugh shaken with tears.
The smile remained on his tiny lips, and his eyes continued to gaze up at her sleepily, but his chest had stopped its motion. He lay limply in her arms and Clara's bottom lip trembled as she understood. She heard the workers around her go quiet and she shook her head.
No, she wanted to tell them, you can't mourn him – he's still here.
Except she knew, bringing him up against her chest to hug as she began to bellow... he wasn't.