The first part of what has, yet again, become a chapter far longer than intended.
As always with this one: trigger warnings galore - war, miscarriage, suicide references.
"You'd never know...
I was fighting for my life 8 months ago.
I shut the door and covered the windows,
because the sunlight hurt my eyes.
I couldn't even go outside for so so long...
And you couldn't tell...
But the inside of my head was a living hell.
I tried my best explaining how it felt,
But nobody ever understood.
Doctor said that everything looks good...
So I blamed myself.
I don't think I've ever been so lonely.
Didn't know if I would make it out -
The dead of the winter of my life
In the middle of the summertime.
And it still haunts me now."
"You'd Never Know" by blu eyes
She made it to the bed and fell into a fitful sleep, despite it only being six in the evening, exhausted after the emotional turmoil of the day. While she originally snuggled into the duvet shivering with a chill, her sleep turned feverish as she began to toss and turn in her tumultuous, vivid dreams. They began as they always began - clouds of toxic rubble powder as walls of a maternity unit crumbled around her - trying her best to do anything possible to give aid amongst the screeching of her ears, ringing.
It had been a clusterfuck – the kind that no bastard crazy enough to sign up for is ever really supposed to come back from. She had been climbing the military ladder, blindly burying herself in work as Charles had gotten further and further from her emotionally, and then physically. So, when the state of play in Syria had entirely collapsed into absolute chaos, she had volunteered without hesitation.
It was naive, and the very thing she had furiously accused him of, for her to think she could run from her grief by running into a warzone… and yet, it was precisely that kind of courageous recklessness that Captain Charles James had once said he had adored so much about her.
Inevitably, even for seasoned soldiers, there are some wars that are more war than others, though none are pretty.
Syria was that war.
Barbaric. Bloody. Indiscriminate.
Unwinnable.
She only went in to help provide aid as a medic, of course - there was officially no British skin in this fight besides in the skies - but, it took all of a few days before she saw the front end of shelling, government planted landmines and even rumours of the use of sarin gas on civilians.
In truth, she had been sent into a state of complete overstimulated overdrive, doing the one thing that she had so often accused Charles of doing… not stopping at all so she wouldn't have to stop to think. Instead, she had thrown everything she had left in assisting medics with mounds worth of supplies and trauma medicine in Aleppo's remaining hospitals.
The only way to get into Aleppo to help those who still remained had been on foot from the border. So much blood and hurt and pain had been witnessed by that point that Molly had marvelled at the resilience of the Syrian people, medics, firefighters, lawyers-turn-freedom-fighters, who had chosen to stay behind in the city they loved, even if they had been entirely falling down around them. Every step she took in that city, it had occurred to her that it could be any city, in another life, and just how lucky she had been, really, to grow up in the relative peace and not-so-tranquillity of Newham only having to deal with her dad and his pants.
Luck, flook, chance, as a certain person would always say. At that moment, she had been unable to push his voice away, as clear as a whistle in her mind, despite trying with all her willpower.
Looking out at an entire city, an entire civilisation, in rumble while trying to not to breathe in particles of all that had burned, she considered not for the first time what a waste it all was… and how small it made even the absolute devastating collapse of her marriage seem.
In a cruel twist of irony, it was less than five minutes after this moment of enlightenment, a shell had hit the maternity hospital. When she'd finally come home from that humanitarian mission, her newly allocated post-mission shrink had called her traumatised.
If she'd had any energy left, she'd have laughed.
It was almost insulting to use that word. You'd need a whole new word, she'd said, and there was no word grave enough.
The dream was soundtracked, as it always was, with the scorching screech of the tinnitus the explosion had given her, leaving her temporarily deaf for at least twelve hours after because of her proximity to the strike. Stumbling, screaming, but not one word would come as she cannot string syllables together properly without hearing, as she tried, in vain, to help save the poor souls that were now strewn across a twenty foot radius in a cloud of dust.
Doctors… Nurses… but mostly, newborn babies.
In the dreams, it's always the same: she is frantic amongst the mountains of unstable and ever-shifting rubble, unable to find her way out of the fog of dust and away from the constant images of dismembered horror. It moves with every step she takes and it falls on her like it might bury her alive. She howls, deafly, for help, holding tiny, delicate, innocent bodies in her hands, not knowing whether the words escaping her mouth are even words or just howls of traumatised grief.
It was some painful kind of irony that she had on more than one occasion compared the breakdown of her all communication with Charles, and the feast and famine that followed, as like being abandoned in a fog, only for her to end up lost in a cloud of dust so thick and screaming for him, no longer for the man he was by then, the lost one in the fog, but as the only man she'd ever loved that, deep down, she always thought would save her.
Every dream, she reaches and reaches, trying to climb through enough to get to the screaming baby she could have sworn she could hear even above her tinnitus… but every dream, she falls.
Flailing blindly until she was pulled from the rubble, crying out and howling still, but this time not for the poor, innocent lives she could not save, but for the husband who would not come… and for the child she had lost.
For a life not lived.
Despite the fact she could hear nothing except a ringing so loud she had cradled her head in agony, she had immediately tried to help them… but the sight of such small bodies flung as easily as discarded toys from their incubators had forced her to vomit.
The sight was burned into her retinas long after they had pulled those who had remained back out… and for all the hours until her hearing returned, not entirely knowing if it ever would, she stared at a blank wall, rocking back and forth. When she'd come back to reality that day, in the middle-eastern military hospital, alone, she had been told she had had to be sedated, because she'd been screaming.
For Charles… but also for Freddie - the name she had given to her unborn child who was taken too early to even have a name officially, whose life she could not save, either.
Practically blind as well as deaf with the amount of grit and ash in her eyes…she had been entirely at the mercy of the tears she could not keep in anymore. When she had finally come back to her senses enough to manage to build up some pretence of numbness again, she finally turned her phone back on…
Charles did not answer, before they eventually, not long later, had a completely emotionally void conversation – a negotiation over a chest of drawers. The conversation that truly ended it.
How did one cry tears when one had cried them all?
She braced herself for how she knew the dream was going to end, how it always did, with her screaming into the dust only for Charles to never come… but just like that the nightmare seemed to morph, deviating from its usual well-trodden path. Suddenly, in the lack of logic that only dreams could provide, she was in the hospital, the same one where she had had to be sedated after being pulled from the ruins in Aleppo. Somehow, she just knows who she's looking for, as she begins racing down the corridors with the same level of panic as she had in the clouds of rubble and dust. She's shouting for him amongst the lino floors and bright, fluorescent lights, as the dream begins to blur and confuse her time in that military hospital in a haze of trauma and her, older, very real memories of when Charles was rushed into hospital after the boar trap had gone through his leg and he had almost died of sepsis in Belize.
She somehow knows where to find him, but suddenly her feet won't move, stuck at the threshold of a hospital room, until it's suddenly not a hospital room anymore, but a bathroom. She glances around, desperately lost and confused, only to catch sight of a limp, pale hand hanging over the edge of the bath. She could see no more, but she didn't need to.
Flashes of poor Rolex boy, the young Afghani soldier who had been killed by one of his own at point black range, filtered into her mind as the sickeningly slack position of the hand felt all too familiar.
Except, this, she knows, is Charles' hand - Charles' bathroom - and there is a sickening amount of blood dripping onto the tiled floor… all because she hadn't been there to stop him.
She screams and wails at the sight, knowing he's dead. She desperately tries, she manages finally, to drag herself awake, realising that the sound which had been a scream came out in fact more like a strangled, croaking cry.
She managed to sit up and finally, to open her eyes, but the panic of the dream did not recede. This new, horrendous imagining of a brand new worst case scenario of Charles' PTSD was a traumatic development and she found her breathing wouldn't level out. Her exhales were loud and groans of distress leaked through her gritted teeth as she threw back to stiflingly sweaty covers and found her feet moving of their own accord. All she could see, even with her eyes open, was the ghostly, terrifying imagining of Charles' pale hand hanging over the bath and the blood, and life, dripping out of him. Feeling sick and a horrendous sense of dread, she suddenly, desperately, had to find Charles.
In an urgent kind of autopilot, she moved towards the door, shocked as she opened it to find Tiny sitting, almost like she was on sentry duty, outside the door, whining as though she had wanted to get in and it made Molly jump. She almost laughed, if she hadn't been so preoccupied with urgency, and braced a hand against her sternum.
"Hey there," she had murmured, not sure what time it was as the house seemed still and quiet. "What are you doin' out here?" Tiny accepted her gentle pats on the head quietly, rubbing her face against Molly's leg in the way Molly had seen her do to Charles when he was in distress, which raised a lump in her throat and left her feeling slightly ridiculous, until she suddenly thought about how that dog surely wouldn't have left Charles' side, unless...
"Where's Charlie, hm? Where's Charlie?" she asked Tiny with a false sense of calm, suddenly unable to think the thought as she stood up and began down the corridor at an increasing speed. Her pulse was thundering as she lightly knocked on the master bedroom door, panic setting in further as she found his bed empty. Still in the post-dream haze, she found herself hurrying down the staircase at breakneck speed as her brain kept piling on worst case scenario image after worst case scenario.
She wasn't sure what exactly had expected to find, but she raced round the corner into the library in an almost blind rush towards the one singular light source she could see - so blindly that she all but collided into a wall of muscle as an unknowing Charles rounded the corner at the same time.
She made a sound of frightened surprise as her anxiety was in overdrive and was immediately caught by Charles as he grasped her by her forearms to keep her upright. Looking down at her, she could barely register he was in his lounge pants and a soft, black t-shirt. He was squinting in confusion but it almost immediately morphed into quiet, caring concern, disregarding the novel he had been carrying.
"I… Sorry—I'm sorry—I just—" She was suddenly holding him with more veracity and running her hands over him in a way he recognised as being something medics and soldiers alike would do to check for injuries, grasping his shoulder, then his face, her hand pressing hard as she moved over him, before resting it hard against his chest over his heart, seeming to feel for his pulse. "I just—wanted—needed to—see you're okay—." He watched as she tried to minimise her anxious response, trying but absolutely failing to hide it from him, looking over her with a wide-eyed, earnest lack of judgement as he let her grasp him, feeling his pulse with urgency as she stumbled over her words. "I had a dream—and I thought—Charlie—."
Suddenly, her voice broke and her face crumpled in a heartbreaking kind of way, clearly confronted, eclipsed by some invisible invasive traumatic image her mind had conjured up, as she moved her hand to hold his scarred wrist.
It didn't take a genius to know what cruel, awful image her mind had created.
"Oh. Oh, no, Molly," he breathed with heartbroken empathy, immediately shushing her in the most calming, comforting tones he could manage. He reached for her and pulled her hard against his chest and wrapped his arms around her back in the most warm of a bear hug he could give her. Immediately, she made quiet sounds of crying mixed with a kind of hyperventilation, as though she was ashamed of the sound. She had nothing but underwear on and he had been entirely shocked at the sight of her, but he barely had time to register it as she clung to him like a child.
"I'm here. I'm here…" He tried to quiet her with gentle, quiet shushings, but guilt swamped him, hearing her panicked, anxious ramblings, piecing fragments together. "You' re safe, Molly I'm right here," he murmured urgently, trying to keep his voice soothing. Standing in the doorway, he struggled tokeep them upright with the force of her, so they ended up almost sinking to the solid wooden floor, instead reaching to pick her up and slowly lower them both to the velvet settee. He couldn't help but press his lips to the crown of her head, relishing in the simple act of being able to hold her. She was hot against him, moist under his cool hands with the sheen of sweat from her nightmare, with the tiniest tremor beneath her skin. "I'm here, you're safe—."
"You never come," she whimpered distractedly against his chest and he frowned in confusion trying to make sense of it. "You—and Freddie—you, you, you never come—Oh, god, Freddie—."
Immediately, he felt like he'd been kicked in the chest, hearing that name again. He had never had much say in the name Molly had given their unborn child, whose gender was never known but whom she had been convinced would be a boy, but he hadn't minded. Ashamedly, by the time she would have likely begun really using it, he had already run away and hidden behind his uniform – a sign of things to come.
By the time he had come around to the idea of what he'd left behind, Freddie was lost…
Blood on a supermarket floor.
He reached down to try and get her to look at him, trying to push down his own sudden, infuriating tears, blinking hard and trying to clear his throat. In his arms, she was still rigid and clinging in the way a young child does and he, silently, basked in the feeling.
Saying their unborn son's name, her face crumpled again in the horrifying way that sent him spiralling. The lump in his throat was suddenly unavoidable and his eyes burned.
""-It's always the same and you never come. I beg and scream and you never—."
"-I'm sorry," he uttered mournfully, so full of remorse, but she didn't seem to hear him.
"But this time—you were bleeding—and I couldn't—couldn't get to you—." The jumble of her words had a lack of cohesive narrative but he felt sick at even the remote glimpse of what trauma they might mean.
"Darling, I don't understand—." he murmured, croaking.
"The hospital is coming down––they're—the bodies—they're everywhere—and they're so tiny—and… and… Freddie…" She fell quiet, weeping with an awful quiet, suppressed rigidity against him, trying to push away tears that keep coming. He held her as tight as he could and groaned as he tried to repress a sound that was half sob, half whimper of despair of his own.
She fell silent, besides her loud breathing, her head against his chest and her grip still as unrelenting as before, fingers digging into his bicep and into his back.
They sat in this heavy, fumbled silence for a long, unquantifiable amount of time, one in trauma, the other in guilt, but both suddenly very aware of the weight of their shared blanket of grief. He held her just as tightly and allowed himself to simply feel the taught rhythm of her body, tense with the pulsing energy of her emotions like the overwound string of a delicate bow. Guilt made his stomach turn over with every quiver of her breath and he had his eyes clamped shut, his face against the frizz of her hair.
"I'm…so…sorry," he whispered, shaking his head against hers, suddenly angry. "It's not enough of a word and I hate that I don't—can't—express how much I… I will never forgive myself for not being there for you—for you both." The word all but caught in his throat. "I…" His voice shook and at her back, his hand squeezed into a fist, looking down at his scars in a wave of self loathing. "I hate myself… more than I can say—."
Seeing the starkness of those white lines again, suddenly it was as though someone had awoken her as she exhaled in realisation and rose from her position in a spring of movement, trying to rub away her tears. "Oh, shit—shit—I shouldn't—burden ya with all my shit when you—."
Immediately, he pulled her back down, keeping her attempt to flee to make her look at him, admonished by her trying to protect him at the expense of herself. "-No, Molly! A trauma shared is a trauma halved," he found himself saying, now openly stealing exact words from his therapist. He rolled his eyes at himself, not quite believing he had said it and as she looked up at him, she caught it. "God, my bloody shrink would love that I just quoted her to someone else."
Molly managed a weak snigger at his expense, trying to wipe her eyes through shaky breathing. "Or doubled," she said softly, unable to help herself.
The words sat between them in the quiet for a moment.
"Do not censor yourself for me," he implored, his voice more forceful than intended. She immediately looked at him scornfully, expecting to be told off. Quickly, he added a softer, urgent, "Please. It's important."
"What, like you've always been so honest with me?"
Immediately, he was pulled up short - she had him there. She fidgeted, now sitting up, she boldly grabbed his scarred wrist, looking down at it, thoughtfully. Charles' pulse raced at the touch.
"Would you tell me about this, if I asked?" She licked her lips, still salty with tears, and shivered suddenly, suddenly realising she was only in her underwear. She watched him as he suddenly couldn't look at her, immediately leaping to reach for one of the many blankets in the basket beside them.
"You're shivering," he muttered, tucking the tartan wool around her dutifully. his eyes looking agonised with the very feelings she felt at the idea of telling him of the traumas she had seen and known since and because of their estrangement.
She looked down, self conscious of her near-nude state in her comfy but pretty 'going to the hospital for a check up but also don't mind getting ruined' underwear suddenly, until he settled straight back down next to her and offered back his wrist for her to hold, reinstating the conversation.
"Would you?" She whispered, sniffing inelegantly. "If I asked, would you share yours, the way you want me to share mine, suddenly all so honest?" Her voice shook evenly as she tried to ignore her emotions, but the words that followed tumbled out as an accelerating stream of consciousness as she touched his scars, but with purpose this time. "All the shit that no one should ever see that we shove into that box under the stairs an' try to fuck to pretend doesn't exist because otherwise our brains might just shatter into a million pieces—."
Now, she could see he was uncomfortable, frowning down at his arm and shaking his head.
"I can't, Molly… Not that. You don't want—." She scoffed and pushed up to stand, charging forward a few paces, immediately unsurprised by his hypocrisy as he rushed to expand. "It traumatised my mother to—to—find me like that. I can't, won't do that to you, too—."
"-Wha', an' you think I'm not traumatised?!"
Her words were loud and incredulous, almost coupled with a laugh of disbelief, shocking him into silence.
Suddenly, it was as though you could hear a pin drop between them as she spun around and the words just launched out of her and she was suddenly motionless as she released all that had been stored up after two years of isolation and absolute despair, each sentence more forceful than the last.
"In case you'd forgotten, before we'd even dated, I'd plugged a potentially fatal wound in your stomach with my bare hands and had to sit there, begging with the universe that you wouldn't die before I got even the faintest chance to tell ya' I loved ya'." A lump rose in her throat so high that her voice sounded like she'd been smoking fifty a day, but her anger and frustration and sheer need to be heard meant she barely noticed. "I watched my best mate drop dead before my eyes on the pitch me' Dad still insists on going to ever bloody match day, all the while knowing I'd loved you when I could never love him like 'e wanted. I married you, after all those times you asked, all your confidence and for a minute there, we 'ad the best fuckin' bliss of my entire life and then—." For this part, even she has to hesitate to force the words to come. "-and then we lost Elvis…and I lost my husband." She gives an ugly sniff, trying to breath through her nose, turning away to try and keep some dignity, unable to look at him for the next part. "You lost your best friend… but I also lost mine." Turning back to him, she pushed some force back into her voice, trying to be strong. "You started running away and I went into full fix-it, perfectionist, first child of childish, neglectful parents mode, desperately trying to make it all better, to find something that would help you, because I felt like it was just me you didn't want, me that just wasn't good enough of a wife, but you convinced me that I was crazy, suffocating, 'too much'… and you ran anyway, to be with Her. Then, low and behold, you stood on that fucking boar trap, on I had to almost watch you die…again."
The last word came out fractured and tearful, as her tearful state finally broke down the anger in her words, just a little. Now, he wasn't looking at her, but away, his whole face lined and contorted with tears he was holding in with strength she was sure was taking everything he had in him. Her throat ached painfully with those she was holding back, and, she hated to admit, with those that she wanted to cry simply at the sight of his.
But, she knew – as a Cockney better than anyone – that sometimes, hard truths were the only saving grace left.
"You were screaming, begging for me with a fucking spike through your leg and I was on the other side of the world… but I came, even after how you left things. I came even though I knew you were already texting and emailing her in a way that was not appropriate. I came and I sat in terror as you almost died of sepsis right before my eyes and begged me not to leave you… only for you to leave me again, the minute you were better and unsupervised at Headley." She knows she is being manic, talking at a rate of knots and likely not making sense, but she cannot stop it. Now, his head is hanging down and he is wheezing with distress, but he isn't telling her to stop. Momentarily, it infuriated her to see his despair and the way it never made any room for her own. Before she could stop herself, she filled the distance between them again, towering over him. "How many times have you watched me almost die, Charles?" She knew he wouldn't answer, but the cold, neutral tone of the question did get his attention, as he lifted his wet, red face up to look at her instinctively in confusion.
She let the silence stretch out between them, as they both didn't need to answer that question… because the answer was never.
"You have no idea what that was like… or how much it has fucked me up."
Now, he was no longer hiding from eye contact. His dark eyes, red and crying as they were, were steady on her face, unwavering, despite his own pain… as though finally hearing her.
Suddenly, like a tsunami, the emotions broke through again as she wrapped her arms, and the blanket, against herself.
"But, funny thing, irony – one of your favourite things. I went and did what you taught me – the very thing I blamed you for doing – an' ran away to Syria once we were over… and… I've been shot at and sliced and punched and afraid for my life…" She sobbed, gasping for oxygen. "But then an airstrike hit a maternity ward and I—."
No one but her plethora of health care professionals knew of the exact content of the nightmares – and she realised in that moment, when she opened her mouth and oxygen just wouldn't come, that she was not sure she had ever practised having the words, or the robustness, to be able to communicate them. "I couldn't help them—." Her chest was tight and her next inhale came as an alarmingly estranged wheezing sound. "I couldn't breathe with the dust and I froze and I couldn't—." Uneven on her feet suddenly, it's like she couldn't even see. "They were so small—."
While Charles had been sitting, silently crying but otherwise frozen, but was suddenly on his feet.
Putting two and two together, it was like ice down his back. She was shaking so hard, she seemed to be struggling to stand still and her breathing made it sound like she was one asthma attack away from keeling over. Without thinking, he stood and pulled her into his hold, uncaring of whether she wanted it or not.
His whole body was rigid with the horror of the realisation of what she'd seen… and he needed to feel her warm and alive as much as he needed to give her comfort, too.
"I couldn't—help them—like I couldn't help–you—Freddie—."
The words were tiny and hysterical and had he not trained himself over years of his career to be attuned to any person he set his mind to, he may have missed them. Immediately, he let out a sob of his own.
"Fucking hell, Molly," he croaked, pulling her away from him to grasp her face. "Syria? I cannot imagine what you've seen—I never meant to imply—." He had ridden a wave of quite a magnitude of emotions in the time that Molly had been, rightfully, giving him the shit he had half been expecting since the very moment he saw her on his doorstep that morning. What had been utter devastation and grief, had morphed into unadulterated shame… but now, something new, healthier, too: soul destroying, gut wrenching empathy.
He was all but holding up weight as together he encouraged her to breathe with him and take deep, long breaths, trying to bring their stuttering diagrams back to some semblance of calm despite the copious amounts of salt and snot that now caked both their faces… again.
"You never wanted to hurt me… but you did."
And there it was, in soft, unaccusing words as she finally came back to herself enough to find air.
He had so desperately wanted to shield her from his trauma… he had given her trauma of her own… from which, she had run away and only found more, and more…
"I know."