The boy doesn't make it. She shouldn't have been surprised, even if they'd been in a state of the art hospital with the best surgeons money could buy he would have had very little chance. It doesn't make it any easier to handle.
They couldn't find anyone who knew who he was. They'd buried him with a little ceremony in a local cemetery as they always did, marking his grave with a cross. She knelt before it now, a wilting flower clutched tightly in her palm. The sunset was dazzling her, and her knees ached before she finally realised how long she'd knelt there.
She unwillingly climbed to her feet, her knees protesting against the movement and her back cracking as she straightened. She slowly made her way over to the waiting convoy, sparing one last glance at his final resting place before she climbed into the jeep.
She was awoken from a fitful sleep by the sound of someone knocking on her door. She buried her head under her pillow and prayed they'd go away. Luck wasn't on her side as the knocking continued. Eventually sheer frustration dragged her from her bed and to her door.
She knew who'd be on the other side before she even opened it up. He was there.
"What do you want, Will?" The exhaustion she felt leaked into her voice, making her sound hoarse and gravelly.
"Can I come in? I'm gonna get caught if I stand here any longer."
Huffing out a breath she pulled the door wide and let him in, before she shut the door behind him.
"So what is it?" She griped, sitting on the end of her bed with a thump.
His brows drew together as he looked at her. "I said I wanted to talk before but this is the first time you've been alone in two days."
"I'm exhausted Will, can't we talk later?" She asked as she rubbed the heels of her hands into her tired eyes.
"I…" He trailed off, scrutinizing her face. "Are you mad at me?"
"What?" Exasperation was leaking into her voice now.
"You seem kinda pissed at me right now."
She growled quietly, her hands balling up into fists. "You listen to me, Will. The world doesn't revolve around you and the little band of brother's thing you got going on. I am mad, you're damn right about that but I'm not mad at you! In order to be mad at you I'd have to first give a shit! I just buried a boy with no name, in a plot with no head stone because some deluded terrorists decided that the market place he was playing in just needed blowing sky high! What pleased Allah about his death I don't know but I am mad as hell that it happened. I'm angry we're here, I'm angry he's dead and I'm angry that we couldn't find his family for him. You do not appear on that list anywhere!"
She panted as she finished speaking, her energy dissolving with her words. "Get out." She whispered, slowly climbing up her bed and turning her back on him.
"Cassie, I get it. Seriously, I understand-"
"Get out." She whispered brokenly. "I can't handle anything else right now."
Will looked at her. She was so small on the bed, curled up into a ball and hugging her knees to her chest. He wanted to climb up behind her and hold her. He wanted to take all the pain he had seen on her face away. But how can he do that? He's more fucked up than she is. He's destroyed in so many ways that he can't begin to understand and doesn't want to. How can he do her any good? She's young, she'll heal better than he will.
Her emotional wounds will be soothed by a life away from this hell hole. He cannot find that balm anymore. The only thing he can do is continue to risk his life, live from one buzz to the next and pray there's never a gap long enough for the wounds to begin to sting again.
Finally, with regret, he does as she asks, leaving her to her silence.
"He's staring at you again."
Cassie looked up from the chart, squinting against the harsh light of the town centre. "What?"
"That guy, from the other day." Jan prodded her glasses back up her nose and nodded her head to somewhere behind Cassie.
Cassie refused to look over shoulder, she already felt like shit for what she said to him the other night. If she looked at him and saw even an ounce of hurt on his face then she'd feel ten times worse about the whole thing.
"He'll stop it soon enough, I'm not that interesting from the back."
"What happened between you two?" Jan asked, taking the chart from Cassie's hand and putting it onto the chest of the man they had in the back of the make-shift ambulance.
Cassie busied herself with checking the stretcher was secure and closing the doors, trying to ignore the question for as long as she could. As the ambulance pulled away Jan still stood before her, her arms crossed over her stomach and a look of concern on her face.
No avoiding it anymore it would seem. "I may have said something to him that was, quite possibly, almost but not entirely, completely hurtful and cruel."
Jan squinted at her, tilting her head slightly to the side. "That doesn't sound like you. What did he do?"
"He didn't do anything," Cassie sighed, wiping the sheen of sweat from her forehead with her handkerchief. "That's what makes what I said even worse. I was upset about the boy and he just chose the wrong time to try and 'date me' so to speak."
"Date you?" Jan's interest was piqued as they headed back to their jeep where Dan waited with the engine running.
"He wanted to talk, have a proper conversation and I was completely in the wrong place for that." Cassie hissed as she sat on the hot plastic of the seat, her shorts riding up the expose her thighs to it with no barrier. "Wrong place, wrong time; story of my life." Cassie laughed depreciatively.
"Well what you said can't have been that hurtful cause the guys still watching you like a hawk."
Cassie dared to look in his direction as the jeep began to move away. Sure enough she could see Will staring back at her, he raised a hand in a small wave but Cassie's hand refused to respond before they were out of sight. Her heart sank as she realised he would probably take that as a direct dismissal of him, a rejection of his gesture and she couldn't help feeling just a little bit shitier for it.
Cassie was enjoying the first good nights sleep she's had in over a week when someone decided to encroach on it. At first she tried to ignore the knocking but after thirty seconds of someone attempting to beat down her down with their hand she gave up on playing possum and answered it with an angry, "What?"
"Woah there, cowgirl. Don't be rude." Will speech was slurred and the way he leant against his specialist told her everything she needed to know.
"Are you drunk?" She asked, glaring at him. She hadn't seen him since the day in the town centre, she was sure he was avoiding her at all costs which stung more than she ever thought it would, but obviously not quite since he was leaning heavily on his specialist in her doorway.
"Not as drunk as he thinks I am."
"Try a whole bottle of scotch to yourself, that's how drunk you are." His specialist groused, she seemed to remember his name was Gregs or some such thing. "Can I bring him in please? He's a heavy mother-fucker."
"Sure," Cassie huffed, stepping aside to let them stagger into her quarters. He made it to her bed and dumped Will on it, stretching out his back afterwards. "I get he's drunk, why'd you bring him to me?"
"Because this drunken idiot broke the bottle then fell on his ass and cut his arm up. It's pretty nasty."
Cassie felt a growl trying to work its way out of her chest as she looked at Will. "You better not be bleeding on my bed. Why didn't you take him to medical?"
"He's drunk, they'll write him up on it if I do."
"Serve him right," Cassie mumbled before she climbed on the bed beside Will and lifted his bandaged arm. "This is gonna need stitches," she winced, glancing under the half assed attempt at first aid they'd made.
"I can get you anything you need." Greggs answered.
"Don't need to," She sighed, reaching under her bed and pulling out a box filled with medical supplies. "You can go Greggs, he'll need to stay here if I'm giving him a local anaesthetic, I gotta watch him overnight."
"You sure?" Greggs asked, eyeing the door all the same.
"Go," She offered, pulling of the fabric and beginning to clean off the blood with an alcohol wipe.
He hissed, uttering several curses and yanking his arm away from her.
She levelled him with a dark look. "Hold still."
"Why should I?" He asked mutinously, his chin jutting out.
"Because if you don't hold still there's only one alternative." She leant forward, staring into his eyes with a cold calculation she knew would be taken seriously. "I'm gonna tie you down and stitch my initials into your arm."
He stared back, gauging how serious she was before offering his arm back and laying as still as a drunk person can.
"Good boy." She chuckled, cleaning the wound again.
She finally cleaned all the blood away and began probing the wound to check for glass when he spoke. "You never let me finish the other night." He slurred.
"Um?" She mumbled, concentrating on the vial of pain killers as she slowly drew enough out into a thin syringe.
"When I told you that I understood. You didn't let me explain why I understood."
Cassie glanced up at him. His eyes were closed as he lay back on the bed.
"Sharp scratch," she warned as she began injecting the painkillers around the deep cuts on his arm.
He didn't move, allowing her to finish. She pulled out the equipment she needed to stitch him up. "So explain now."
Her eyes were entirely focused upon the task at hand but she heard his slow intake of breath.
"It was during my last tour." He began, the fingers of his free arm slowly tracing a pattern on her exposed thigh absently. She was in no position to stop him and in all honesty she didn't mind. "I got a bit of a bond going with a boy who used to sell DVD's at the base, Beckham he said he was called. He was a good kid, a pain in the ass at times and a complete con-artist but still good."
Tying off a stitch she glanced up at him, seeing the soft smile playing around his lips as he spoke. His eyes remained shut.
"We got a tip about a bomb maker being holed up in this factory across town so we went to investigate." He took a deep steadying breath as he relived the memory inside his own head. "We found a bomb maker alright, enough explosives to blow us all the hell and all the shit needed to make that happen. We didn't bank on a body bomb."
Cassie's hand froze right before she inserted the needle to stitch his second and final cut. She'd heard of body bombs, been trained to spot one but never actually seen one. The horror of a dead body alone is shocking but to see where someone heartlessly cut into them to turn them into something made to kill others must have been traumatizing.
"It was a little boy and I was sure it was Beckham. I went a little crazy then, did stupid shit I didn't even think about doing before and then he showed up again. It wasn't him. It still doesn't change the fact that I had to dig a shit load of C4 out of a little boys body, just so we could bury him."
She heard his choke but couldn't stop what she was doing. She had another stitch to go before she could tie it off and do what she so desperately wanted to do.
"So I do get it." He finished, his voice steady once again. "I really do. It's horrible and it's despicable but if we're not here fighting against it then those people are defenceless."
She tied off the stitch, dumping the needle into the sharps container and ripping her gloves off. Turning she lay down in front of him, reaching out a hand to rest on his cheek.
"I'm sorry, Will." She said, it was pathetic and worthless but it was all she could offer him. "I was a total cow, I know that but I really am sorry that I said what I did. I do give a shit about you. And I'm sorry you had to go through all that last time around."
"Not your fault." He opened an eye to look at her. "Am I all stitched up?"
"Yeah, I just gotta put a dressing on then you can get in bed. You're gonna have to sleep all this booze off."
"I'm not that bad." He huffed, trying to sit up and falling back against the bed with a thump, his uninjured forearm resting across his eyes. "Ok, maybe I am a little worse for wear right now."
"A little?" She snorted, retrieving a large dressing from the end of the bed and applying it to his arm.
"Right," she huffed, looking at him where he lay. "Shirt off, pants off and into bed."
"Pants off?" He smiled, his forearm still obscuring his face. "I do believe you're trying to get me naked."
"Hah-de-har," she sniped, "Come on, get to it, some of us need some sleep tonight. Well, what sleep can be had between checking your still breathing every hour anyway."
"I'm fine." He groused, slowly doing as she told him.
She flicked off the light and joined him on the bed, leaving a respectable gap between their bodies. He didn't seem to agree with that idea as he reached up and pulled her back against him so his body could curl around hers, his injured arm resting down her side and over her thigh.
"This is entirely for medical purposes, you understand." He mumbled into her hair. "You don't have to move to check I'm breathing."
She laughed quietly. He was pressed so close behind her that she could feel every intake of breath. Not only that but she could feel his exhale as it ruffled her hair slightly. She wondered briefly what this all meant now. They had yet to have any kind of conversation that wasn't effected by alcohol or anger. As she drifted off to sleep she decided they really had to have a proper conversation... one day.
A/N I am chastened and ashamed, I have neglected all my writing recently. Life has this irratating tendancy of getting in the way. I will finish this story and hopefully start making headway in my Loki fic soon!