Night comes like an assassin's bullet: out of nowhere. After a dinner of beef jerky, which you seem to adore with a worshipful fervence, and a repeat of Motrin, I set about separating the top bunk from the bottom. This older style of bed can turn into a set of twin beds, and that's what I wrestle them down to.
The top bunk has aged better than the one I plant my ass into every night, but I flip the bare mattress anyway and dig up some sheets.
"Where do you want to sleep, Meera?" I ask.
You look up dazedly from Sun Tzu, and your brow wrinkles with thought. You are silent, biting your lip.
"I can move some stuff around in the storage room."
Looking faintly embarassed, you shake your head.
Oh, so now you choose to play the other side of the 20 Questions game. Great. "Show me, then."
You get up stiffly, hobble over, and stand right next to my bed.
That's not even fair. "Why there?" I ask, because I simply don't get your reasoning.
You fish for the right word, and finally whisper, "Safe."
Ah, hell. Why do you trust me, a man you've known for all of 48 hours, enough to sleep next to me in the dark? In your position, I wouldn't do it. Right about now, I'm beating my forehead into steak against the wall of appropriateness, that line I try to pull little, naive you back from. But how do I say no to that face?
"Alright." Leaving about three feet of aisle between the beds, I show you how to put sheets on an American bed, explaining the concept of why you need to bounce a quarter off 'em or it just isn't right, and you are looking like you're ready to end the day by the time I'm done. So I go around angling all the fans and turning off stray lanterns, leaving you to get comfy.
You're sitting on the bed with the last lantern next to you on the floor, staring at your boots. "Why are you being so nice to me?" you whisper.
I sit down on my bed, at your back, and start to take off my boots. It takes me a minute to put my thoughts into words. "Because you deserve to be saved." I get the boots off, but you still haven't moved. "Is that so hard to believe?"
You snort derisively, but I don't blame you. It's tough for me to believe, too, sometimes. You bend over to take off your boots and something must pull, because you grunt sharply and follow it with a hiss.
Those stitches must be giving you a real fit. I can't imagine having my balls sewn together, but it must hurt. "I gotcha." I move around and carefully guide the loosly laced boots off your small feet, check your bandages. I feel your eyes boring into my head, and I look up. Your eyes are tearing, your chin trembling.
"Did I hurt you?" I ask, but I know it's not that.
You dissolve. I raise up on my knees and bring you close, and you hold onto me like the only liferaft in your sea of tears. Your sobs sound angry this time around, like you hate them. I try to think through why that is. Your rapists are dead: we shot every soldier in that village before coming to your hut. It's a kind of peace bought with blood, and I am familiar enough with it to know that it works fucking great. That isn't bothering you, I know it. You're away from the unforgiving jungle of Nepal, where your parents died so unfairly and you lived a life of hardship. You're away from its injustice and its anarchy and fighting, in a country of relative peace. You're not alone in your hurt: you're with someone who...cares. Or at least, tries to make that clear.
No, it's none of those things. But maybe it makes you angry that although you've been transplanted into a veritable fairytale, in a land of opportunity, you're in no position to let it make you happy. At least, not yet. And then you look into yourself and see how much further you have to go, and that makes you angrier.
Nothing like being surrounded by good things and being unable to let them in. Huh, there's some personal conotations to that, come to think of it.
It takes you about four hours to cry yourself out, and that's impressive, considering your nose is broken. It's rather sudden, in fact, that you unwrap your arms from around me and simply fall sideways onto the pillow, pulling your socked feet onto the bed.
I look at you with with a 'WTF' face. I hardly expect you to just turn it off.
"I'm done," you assure me, reading my incredulity. You sound absolutely exhuasted, like you've got nothing left: like you're hollow as a shell casing. You peg me with bleary and red eyes, full of sadness and the rising tide of sleep. "Thank you, Barney Ross."
How the hell do you manage manners in the face of such crushing pain? Again with the thank-you! I don't know what to say to that, so I say nothing. Maybe choosing to let the pain out, on your own terms and time, is your way of managing it. Being master of your own emotions. Like turning an opponent's blow into enough anger that you can destroy them. It's a remarkably army way of thinking.
I pull the sheet up, and you carry it all the way to your nose. Reaching down, I dim the lantern down to a Bic lighter's flame and fall into my own bed. I want to stay awake and make sure you don't wake up and start crying again, but I can't. The last thing I remember is watching you find a way to not lay on your bruises, and the way the tension utterly fell out of you when you drifted off.
We keep a low profile for six more days, and nobody bothers us until Christmas calls my cell when I'm in the hangar, nursing my daily cigar.
"Still alive over there?" he asks when I pick up.
"Alive as I'll ever be," I reply. It's really good to hear a friend's voice. "What's happenin'?"
"Same as you, I imagine," he says, and I hear a BOOM through the tiny speaker on the phone. There's the sound of a bolt sliding, and a shell ejecting. I must be on speakerphone at the private range on his ranch. "R&R, some target practice. You know, the waiting game."
I make an affirmative noise. I do know the waiting game. How long until our next mission? I usually have 48 hours' notice, or less. What if I have to leave you? Holy shit, eventually I will have to leave you, by yourself, for days, maybe weeks. Holy shit, again. I glance through the two doors to where you're carefully pouring hot coffee into your twice-sugared mug. The stuff has really grown on you.
"How's she doing?" Christmas asks, interrupting my thoughts.
"Meera's making it," I say, checking the truth in the statement as I say it. It's less than I like, so I elaborate. "She cries at night, and functions during the day. I got her seen by a doctor the night we got home."
"And how are you doing?" the British accent responds. He sounds like he's equally focused on me and his gun scope. That's the sort of laser focus I hang my hat on. There's an entire brain's worth of thought process trained on helping me work through this problem.
I lean back against the corrougated wall and run my fingers through my short hair. "It's tough," I reveal. "After a mission, we put everything away and forget about it. This mission sits on my couch and cries my shirts soaked."
Christmas grunts sympathetically. "I feel your pain, mate." He commiserates in silence for a moment while he lines up his shot. Another BOOM. "You're one brave bastard, Barney."
"Or hopelessly stupid," I shoot back dryly. I sigh out some smoke, and let loose my biggest fear with it. "Have I bitten off more than I can handle, Lee?"
The bolt cycles as he thinks it over. "You've got it in you to see this through. And when you reach your limit, there's us. All of us."
The confidence I have in my team and their abilites is way more than I have in my lone self. That's why we're a team: more than the sum of our parts. "Thanks, man."
"Yup. Tell Meera I said hullo."
A tentative and general routine solidifys over the course of the second week.
During the daytime, you follow me around, and I keep you busy with small tasks. When I'm cleaning weapons, you're ready with the tube of oil for the mechanism. You really like handling the guns, and I decide that eventually I'll find a nice .38 to give you. You know, once I'm 100% positive you won't turn it on yourself.
When I'm maintaining the plane, I give you a paintbrush and you touchup Santa's smiling mug. That keeps you occupied for about five minutes before you've crawled into the internal workings next to me, and are handing me socket wrenches with a four-out-of-five accuracy. "Five-eighths, Meera, not five-sixths."
"Sorry."
During downtime, you finish Sun Tzu and pick up Four Weapons That Changed The World. "Barney," you get my attention. I look from the TV over at you, curled up on the end of the couch, legs tucked under you. It strikes me how much I love hearing my name in your accent. "Hm?'
"Do you have an AK-47?"
"Is a pig's ass pork?"
"What?"
"Nothing." I show the gun to you.
Your bruises all turn nasty shades of green, then yellow at the edges on your coffee-with-Bailey's skin. To a degree, it makes you look worse: like a messed up patchwork doll. I change your ankle bandages every evening, and give you a tube of scar cream for your face and wrists. A steady diet of Meals Ready To Eat gives your slim frame some definition, mostly ironing out the bones in your wrists and your ribs. Your metabolism must be high as a kite.
You still cry at night: gut-deep, chest-aching, throat scratching sobs. That's your time, and I can set my watch by it like Lassie passing the schoolhouse. Each time you crawl under the covers, I search for any improvement, any lightening of the load on your heart. Sometimes I think I glimpse it, like a cabin light in a blizzard, and others you fall asleep too fast.
I remind myself constantly not to overestimate your recovery. I mean, you were fucking gang raped and tortured. This is a marathon, not a sprint. A week-plus of good food and a shoulder to cry on will not fix what's broken inside you. But maybe two weeks, or three, or more will. It doesn't matter anyway: you're stuck with me until you're sick of me. I know that day will come, but it seems as far off as the end of the world. So I put it from my mind and concentrate on matching your pace: happy when you're happy, strong when you're sad.
When I'm working out, you're my spotter for the benchpress. It doesn't matter I haven't needed one in years, much less that I'm shit outta luck if I do happen to drop the load into your hands. Your brow is furrowed in concentration to match mine, as though your willpower is helping me bench my normal 340 pounds. When you stand on my toes when I'm doing sit ups, I happen to catch you smiling and ask why between huffs. You won't tell me, but you smile bigger.
Now, I (used to) live by myself. Some habits are hard to break. Like laundry, for instance. I wear the same clothes for a few days, in proportion to the amount of dirtiness the acquire. So one day early in the third week, I reach for a pair of BDUs on the shelf and come up empty. Civie clothes today, then. I pull on the Wounded Warriors shirt and some jeans with only a little dried paint on them.
"Guess what?" I ask as I walk into the room and start the coffee.
"What?" you ask, catching on to my cheerful tone.
"Laundry day."
I really need to get myself a washer and dryer for the hangar, but somehow, it never happens. I can definitely afford it: my pay is fucking obscene. But a part of me wants the excuse to go into town. It's rare I'm at the hangar long enough to exhuast the supply of clothes, so this will be an all-day trip to the dry cleaner's.
So I gunny sack all the dirty clothes. The wool blankets we've been using for towels smell mildewed, so they come, too. And because I'm a thorough bastard, I strip the beds and stuff the sheets into the pillow cases.
There's five bags total. You pick up one with a small grunt, and I heft the rest. They go into the bed of the truck, and we're on our way.
Neither of us have left the hangar since the free clinic trip, and once we hit the open road I realize how stir crazy I was. You're glued to the window, watching the countryside and mobile homes and crop fields pass.
"I've missed a whole world," you say incredulously.
Huh, you're first contraction. I must be rubbing off on you. Next thing I know, you'll be talking Brooklyn and smoking cigars. I click on the radio and you jump in surprise. You've heard bits of music on TV, but never savored the wonder that is Guns 'n' Roses.
"Wow," you breathe as Slash string-skips into Sweet Child 'O Mine.
I can't help but smile as your fingers start to tap.