He's been trying to write the damn letter to Bobby LaRue for two hours now, ever since getting home from family dinner—his first since breaking his ankle.
It isn't working.
He snaps his pencil in half, tears the paper into a million pieces, stuffs them into his half-empty glass of ice water, and throws the whole thing across the room.
The glass shatters with a satisfying crash behind the couch.
Splintering glass…the Humvee turns over…
He bites his tongue. Dammit, Reagan. This is not the time to go down that rabbit hole.
He looks around for his crutches, determined to get over there and clean up the mess before Linda scolds him, but they had fallen down, and they're just far enough away that he can't reach them.
"Danny! Are you okay?" she yells from upstairs where she's doing laundry or something.
He takes a shuddering breath, bites his tongue a little harder, and is trying to stand up, when suddenly she's hugging him tightly with one arm and rubbing his back with the other. "Danny, what happened?"
He shakes his head. tries to pull away from her arms, which feel more constricting than the flak vest he'd worn in Fallujah. Damn, that thing was tight.
"Danny, babe, can you hear me?"
"Yeah," he rasps over the echo of shattering glass in his head.
"What happened, babe?"
"This stupid homework…I can't do it. I'm not Doc; I can't write a freaking letter to my dead teammates."
"Then don't. You need to recover physically before you can dig into Fallujah."
He nods. She's probably right…she usually is…but there's a part of him that fears that this current ankle injury won't heal unless he does the hard work Doc's asking him to do.
Turns out he'd misunderstood the doctor at his appointment last week. He had thought he'd get the cast off after 4 weeks—what they had actually said was that he might be able to start weight-bearing 4 weeks after surgery.
But after x-rays, weight-bearing was a no-go for at least two more weeks. It wasn't healing like they'd hoped. He sits through a five-minute harangue from the doctor about how if he keeps sneakily trying to bear weight on the ankle, he risks being stuck in an ankle brace and on desk duty for life. Something about instability of some bone he can't spell or pronounce.
As it is, right now he's back to the wheelchair and sleeping on the couch—no crutches, no stairs.
Tomorrow will be 5 weeks since he broke his ankle, but only 4 ½ since surgery.
He shakes his head at himself, confused by all the days and weeks and times…
"What if…I've probably been hanging around Doc too much, but what if I have to dig into Fallujah for my ankle to heal properly?"
She kisses him. "You have been hanging around Doc too much, but you might actually have a point, babe. Your ankle is definitely broken—that's not a psychosomatic injury—but the fact that it's not healing like it should…" She shakes her head and kisses him again. "Tonight…you need a break. See if you can cancel your appointment tomorrow."
He nods, types out a text to Doc, and reads it over: Homework is giving me a flashback. Can we cancel tomorrow? Every other week is fine.
Doc responds in five minutes: How bad was the flashback?
Bad enough I broke a glass.
I'm sorry to hear that. I'll see you a week from tomorrow. Talk to Linda; that might help write the letter.
Thanks, Doc, he types, and shoves his phone away.
"I'm proud of you," Linda says with another kiss, and goes to get the broom and starts cleaning up the glass.
He wants to ask her why, but instead, when she's putting the large pieces of glass in the garbage, he says, quietly, "I was on patrol…"
He trails off, squeezes the arm of his wheelchair until his knuckles are white, then goes on.
The words coming out of his mouth aren't making any sense, but he can't stop then, and then Linda's kissing him. "Danny, stop. I'll listen—but not like this. Wait 'till I'm finished cleaning up the broken glass, and then come sit on the couch so I can look at you while you talk."
He hates that she always wants to look at him when he's talking about Fallujah…he'd rather her look at anything else…but he nods, and fiddles with the broken pencil Linda has put back on the table, until she sits on the couch and beckons to him.
He ends up stretched out on the couch, his bad leg propped up, his head in her lap. "Think I'll skip talking and just go to sleep here," he says, even though he knows if he falls asleep now, that's just an invitation to nightmares.
"Babe, please. You've admitted you have done everything in your power to not talk to Doc; you told me the bare details; this is eating you up inside. Please talk to me."
"I can't," he says, and turns his head away so she can't see his face.