Author's Note: Just letting you know, there is going to be an utterly draining screaming match in the latter half of the chapter. Some of it is a fight I wish I could have with an ex-friend, and then it got back to being more plot relevant but still a bit… off. I'm too emotionally tired right now to try editing that part but did my best with it all. If you want to skip this chapter, it might not hurt later understanding. That being said, I'm flying by the seat of my pants and a very basic outline so I can't guarantee anything.

Now that the important notes are done, onward!

Chapter 14: Wounds

"We're going to have to amputate his arm," I answered bluntly.

There was a beat of silence as everybody realized what that would mean in this primitive setting: lots and lots of pain. Even if Stevie stayed unconscious and under the remedies Aditi had provided, he would still feel most of it.

"You or me?" I asked Mackey, since we were the only ones with previous trauma care experience.

"You're the only one who's ever done surgery in these kinds of conditions," Mackey pointed out.

I really didn't want to do it. Neither of us did. But Mackey wasn't wrong; she at least was used to having the equipment in her helicopter. "Right," I muttered.

"How are you going to do it?" Anahera asked quietly. She tenderly brushed some blonde hair out of her husband's sweaty forehead.

"There's only one way I'm aware of that's even possible with what we've got," I answered, trying to think of any other way. But I came up empty.

"We'll need something solid to put his arm on, the spatula, and Aunt Libby's axe," Mackey told Aditi, "Put the spatula on the fire and once that's red hot, we can start." She looked green in the face even in the red-yellow light of the torch.

An alarmed squeak left Anahera and she clapped her free hand to her mouth.

Meanwhile Aditi slipped out the door to do her job, somehow keeping her composure.

"If his arm doesn't come off, the gangrene will become septic and he'll definitely die," I told Anahera to try and ease her horror, "At least this way he's got a chance. He'll be out an arm and there's always the risk of infection, but those can be managed." At least, hopefully we could manage an infection.

Thankfully Anahera gathered herself together quickly. "As long as there's a chance he'll live," she agreed in a slightly choked voice, "We can always make a prosthetic." Despite that he was unconscious, she gave Stevie a wavery but brave smile.

"If that one Roman general was able to make one, you bet your ass we can," I confirmed.

"And Gotz of the Iron Hand," Mackey added with forced cheerfulness, "He was able to play cards and sword fight and everything with that hand."

When Aditi returned she was carrying a roughly chopped tree stump. "Will this work?" she panted and hitched it further up in her arms.

"Perfect," Mackey said and gestured for her to put it down by the bed.

It was in bad taste but I giggled. "A stump to help make a stump," I muttered.

At the doorway Aunt Libby stood, face pained and axe in her hands. "You're amputating," she stated.

"We have to," I told her and held my hand out for the weapon.

Reluctantly the axe was given over. "If this were anyone else, I'd insist on doing it myself," Aunt Libby told me, eyes abnormally shiny, "It's my fault he's hurt and I need to make that up to him."

The heft of the axe surprised me and I quickly leaned it against my shoulder.

"Except I can't handle hearing him scream," Aunt Libby murmured, "Not my baby."

Across the bed, Anahera smiled painfully at her mother in law. "It wasn't your fault. Accidents happen and I doubt he blames you," she said.

Aunt Libby returned the gesture but her lips looked like they'd tear with the tension. "Is there anything else you need?"

I bit my lip, running through the equivalents of what I would use in Afghanistan. "The twins thought I didn't notice them buying those jugs of high-proof." Weakly I winked at Mackey, teasing.

"Antiseptic, right," Aunt Libby murmured. She was out of the room like a gust.

To keep my mind busy I examined the arm in question again, judging where to chop. I tried not to think of the possibility of bleeding out or shock or infection or…

It felt like seconds before Aunt Libby and Aditi were back. One handed me a brown glass jug the size of a growler and left immediately after. The other reported, "The spatula is red-hot."

Jerkily I nodded in acknowledgment. "Right. Anahera, are you sure you're okay being here for this?" I asked, looking into her dark eyes.

"I have to be here," she insisted.

"We need Liam or Electra, somebody to help hold him down," I told Aditi.

Again she departed and I made a mental note to ask after her later. And thank her for everything.

"I can help with that," Anahera volunteered. In preparation she gently stretched over her husband's top half, lying over his chest and left arm. For a moment she hesitated but then steeled herself and grabbed his right upper arm with both hands.

As gently as possible we moved Stevie's right arm so that the shattered piece was on the tree stump. Mackey poured a dose of the spirit around the area I pointed out as where I would aim for, hands shaking slightly.

Damn. That meant I was the only one with steady enough hands to chop and cauterize, since I wasn't about to let Aditi have to do such a horrible but necessary thing.

Liam and Aditi let themselves in, wincing at the set up and the sight. "Electra's still out hunting," Liam explained, adjusting his glasses, "What do I need to do?"

I pointed to Stevie's slightly trembling legs. "Help hold him down," I instructed.

Carefully my little brother knelt over our cousin's knees and then partially laid on him like Anahera. It left his chin resting awkwardly on her hip, but neither complained. We all knew that Stevie was physically strong enough that he could throw off his wife and accidentally hurt himself even worse; it was a risk we couldn't take.

"We need to make this as fast as possible," I instructed in the same voice I used on Afghani mothers to be when there was a baby on the way and bullets flying outside the door, "The less blood he loses, the better. Aditi, when the axe is over my head, you run for that spatula and bring it in as hot as you can. I'll use it to cauterize the stump, which is when he'll try struggling the worst. Mackey, you keep that bottle open. After the arm is off and after the cauterization, pour the stuff on and then we'll bandage him up. Everybody got that?"

I looked into every face, making sure they gave me a confirmation, before I got up from my kneeling position. "Right. Let's do this," I said, half to myself.

Helpfully Mackey pointed at the agreed upon aiming point in a reminder.

I took a last deep breath and let it out. Reluctantly, necessarily, I raised the axe over my head.

Aditi sprinted out the door.

In a glinting arc the axe fell, half force and half momentum, onto a spot just an inch further up than planned. The limb fell away cleanly and I let the axe drop with it, but I'd never seen so much blood-

Stevie screamed so loudly that my ears rang with it, jerking harshly under the human weights.

The handle of the spatula was shoved into my palm and I slapped the red-hot metal hard onto the exposed flesh and bone, like bacon against a pan. It almost smelled the same even. The hiss was similar.

"I am so sorry," I told Stevie sincerely, only barely glancing up from my work.

It was enough to see that his eyes were wide open as he screamed and thrashed. Had the pain brought him back out of unconsciousness?

After what I hoped was long enough, I peeled the spatula away. It did its job; the bleeding had been stopped by hideous burns and even some charred bits of skin.

Nausea rose up in my throat but I swallowed it down. Clumsily I got out of the way for Mackey to pour on some more alcohol, which only made Stevie scream louder and struggle harder; I wondered if I would lose some of my hearing after today.

Finally the new stump was wrapped and the screams began to turn into heart wrenching sobs. Or was that Anahera? If I stayed any longer I was definitely going to start up the waterworks.

"It's done. We're done," Mackey said, voice choked. She patted Liam's back.

He practically leaped up and sprinted out the door, hand over his mouth.

Meanwhile Anahera collapsed onto her knees on the floor. "We did it. You'll be okay," she whispered to her barely conscious husband, stroking his hair and kissing his face.

Now that the medical bit was over, I smiled tightly at the pair and gathered up the few supplies. "I don't think we're ever going to be able to use this for cooking again," I stated, holding up the spatula.

"Nope," Mackey agreed. She corked the bottle again.

Quietly we slipped out, axe and spatula and liquor in hand.

For some reason Gran's face went white when she saw us.

"What?" I asked, alarmed.

"You'll want to change clothes before Libby sees you," Gran suggested quietly.

Only then did I look down and realize, horrified, that I'd been sprayed with Stevie's blood. It dripped from the blade of his mother's axe.

Now that it was all over, I couldn't swallow the bile. Much as Liam had done, I rushed out the door with lips pursed and cheeks bulging.

No matter the necessity, I felt awful. In all my career I'd never had to hurt someone so badly to save them. By comparison the retching and stomach acid was nothing compared to the guilty pit in my stomach, despite that I knew I had nothing to feel guilty about. I just couldn't imagine the kind of pain that brings someone out of medicated unconsciousness; not even the grenades or their aftermath were that bad for me.

Wincing at the taste, I wiped my chin with my ruined sleeve and turned my attention to the axe and spatula held in my right hand. I'd have to clean those off before I returned them.

"Cass?" Mackey asked cautiously.

I turned to her with a noise of interest.

She too was pale and had clearly been sick, but her limbs had steadied. "Do you want to take his arm to the pit, or should I?" she asked.

At her side, Andy winced.

"If you can clean these, I'll get the arm," I offered, holding up the axe and spatula.

Very quickly Mackey agreed. Despite the circumstances I had to laugh at her nearly dropping the axe, clearly not expecting the full heft of it. "Dude, how the hell does she use this thing? She's like forty!" Much as I had she balanced the shaft beneath the blade against her shoulder.

Stevie was the same age as me, twenty seven, so that made her… "Forty six," I corrected.

Perhaps a little hysterically, we had a giggle about how hardcore our aunt is.

Before I went back to the room Stevie was borrowing, I dug for a clean shirt and found that almost every single one had stains from battle or hunting or farming. That would make the upcoming wedding even more awkward; I'd look like an even bigger nobody than I was.

Shit, the wedding. Did I remember a gift? Double shit.

Shaking my head at my forgetfulness, I changed into one of the worse looking shirts (worn at the battle through Osgiliath) on the way down the stairs. At the bottom I gave Gran a tight smile and knocked lightly on the door to her bedroom, now the medical ward.

Upon being told to enter, I nodded to Anahera. "Bandages look alright," I told her, seeing no blood on the linens, "Let me know if anything happens, I'll be at the cemetery."

Anahera jerked her head up, expression demanding answers.

"What else are we supposed to do with the arm?" I asked hypothetically.

Jerkily she nodded. "You're right. Sorry, it's just been…" She dragged her free hand down her tan face.

"It's been a day," I agreed. As if in demonstration I carried her husband's detached arm out the door and into the streets.

I'm no stranger to handling the dead, but the feel of the mangled, dismembered arm was still downright weird. The light was fading into beautiful purples and reds, but I was still able to see that half those cuts were from the skin splitting from the inside, and even if the arm had been salvageable his hand would definitely have needed to go. Call me crazy but I felt better about the whole thing from that.

Booming barks interrupted my thoughts and I jerked the arm up against my chest to keep the dogs from getting to it.

"Is that an arm?" Electra demanded, just a few feet in front of me. How had I not noticed her so close, even with her carrying a deer over her shoulder?

I must be slipping, I decided while I scratched Speckles, then Freckles with my free hand. With the other I morbidly used the severed arm to wave at her. A few globs of congealing blood splattered my already ruined shirt.

"Whose arm is that? What the hell happened?" Electra demanded and hitched her hunted carcass up her shoulder.

"You've been gone a few days, huh?" Thank everything for Grandpa, strolling over with a pipe between his dentures.

I managed to escape the scene and make it to the edge of the city before anybody else stopped me, this time Rosie. As soon as she saw me she ran over, shouting my name happily- then she saw the severed arm and skidded to a stop feet away. "Is that a real arm?" she asked, nose wrinkled.

"Your uncle Stevie's. I need to go bury it but after I do that and wash my hands, I'll be right over to play," I assured her much more steadily than I felt.

When Cressie realized that something was off, she hurried over. "You cut his arm off?" Cressie demanded, belatedly shielding her daughter's eyes with her hands.

Complaining, Rosie squirmed but was kept in place. She fought her mother's covering hands to little avail.

"It was either bury his arm or bury him, so I think we made the right decision," I told her cheerfully.

Cressie let out an aggravated huff. "I told them that the buildings here aren't steady and I told them somebody would get hurt, but nobody listened to me and now Stevie's lost an arm!" she shouted.

My mood soured and chest went tight with sudden anger. "Our cousin was in an accident, and you're making it all about you?" I questioned incredulously.

"I told them and nobody listened! This could've been prevented if they listened to me! We're lucky nobody died!"

"Yeah, we are lucky, but Jesus, try for some sympathy!"

"I'm an empath! I know how he feels!"

"Then stop making it about you!" I finally screamed back, "You always make it about you and I'm fucking tired of it!" If I were holding anything but our cousin's severed forearm, and Rosie weren't right in front of Cressie, I would have thrown it at her.

"Look who's talking!" Cressie screeched back, releasing her hold on her daughter in favor of folding her arms under her bust, "Every time there's a family event, you always interrupt it and make it about you!"

"Fine! I'll stop if you will!" I shouted back despite my burning throat.

"I'm not doing anything wrong! I'm pointing out that they should've listened to me!"

"That's what you always say! Lisa didn't fucking commit suicide! It was a septic infection-"

"She gave up on losing weight and quit her job and stopped her medical treatments! She gave up!"

"That job was abusive and she couldn't afford her medicine without it!"

"She gave up! And her family helped her do it! I could have fixed her!"

The sheer arrogance of that statement took my breath away. How dare she? "No you couldn't have," I told her incredulously, "It was an infection. If doctors couldn't fix that, you couldn't do shit."

"If she had lost weight, it wouldn't have been bad enough to kill her!"

"You don't know that!"

"It would've solved her other problems-"

"Stop it!" I screamed, "It wasn't her fault and it wasn't her family's fault and while they were trying to grieve you accused them of killing her! You were vile to them! You're sick!"

"I'm traumatized!" Cressie screeched back, "And they did help kill her!"

"You're using that trauma as an excuse for abuse!" Now that the cork popped, I couldn't help myself- it was all coming out. "You scream at us when you're angry or hurting and it's not our fault, and then play the victim! Whenever we don't agree with you, we're the enemy! It's always our fault and never your fault! Stop it!"

"Stop screaming at me!" Cressie screamed, "You're hurting me!"

"You hurt me every time you scream at me!"

"I'm expressing my pain!"

"Then use a normal volume or express it to a fucking pillow!"

"Don't tell me how to express my pain when you express yours by killing people!" Cressie finally accused, face blotchy and twisted with anger and pain. Her hands were fisted at her sides and her arms trembled.

"The fuck are you talking about! I only ever killed people when I had to, on duty!" It wasn't like I'd been some prolific serial killer at home, no matter how many threats of murder I doled out to boyfriends and girlfriends and exes. Unlike many of my fellow Marines, I could count on hands and feet how many people I've had to kill over the course of my military career.

"You never would've enlisted if you weren't in pain!"

"It was a family tradition! I wanted to make the family proud! And get away from Mother and you!"

"You're a fucking murderer!"

"Enough!" Aunt Libby shouted from the side lines, freckled face a mask of disbelieving shock, "What the devil has gotten into the two of you!"

Cressie was fucking lucky for that, or I just might have made her correct. I didn't have a weapon on me at the moment but I wouldn't have minded beating her to death with Stevie's lost arm. "This has been coming for years," I sneered, never looking away from my eldest sister.

"Yes, I heard," Aunt Libby said dryly, before her eyes dropped to the severed limb I was still holding. "You should bury that."

Seeing the order for what it was (a way of busying me without putting me out of earshot) I did as I was told. It also gave me the opportunity to wipe my tears away with little notice.

"So, are we all murderers, or is it just Cass?" Aunt Libby asked, voice almost light, "After all, most of us were in the military. We all saw combat while we were there."

I set the arm down, grabbed a discarded shovel, and began to dig several feet from the pit.

"Mackey only ever helped people, she was an air force medic," Cressie tried pointing out.

"Pararescue, and that involves firing on enemies who get too close to the evacuation. I repeat: does that make us all murderers? Or is it only Cass?" Aunt Libby wasn't having any of it.

"Yeah, well she was only defending herself and Anahera was a mechanic, and Stevie never even got into a dogfight, and did you or Grandpa even kill anybody? I mean, you were in a spy plane and he was a diver. And since there was never a nuclear war, Andy didn't," Cressie listed off.

"Mackey, correct. Anahera, correct. Stevie flew fighters and bombers, and had a tour in Iraq. Eastern Europe really didn't like unexpected visitors- still don't, so they usually tried to forcibly invite me down for a chat. As far as your grandfather, people were on those ships he made explode in Vietnam. Andy is also trained for a battleship's main battery and used it to destroy seaside targets. Does that make all of us who went fighting, into murderers?" She was like Gander with a choice sinew: doggedly persistent.

"Yeah, actually. Except you, since that was defense," Cressie agreed unexpectedly, "They all went out with the intention of killing people. That's murder, that's wrong, and they all belong behind bars where they can't hurt anybody else."

I downright stabbed the ground with the shovel and jumped on it with both feet. Rich, coming from a civilian, I thought furiously. Bet she was really angry when that team killed Osama bin Laden.

"Right," Aunt Libby said tightly, "I'll let them all know so they can be out of town as much as possible. You're lucky that Andy and Matt are leaving in a couple weeks; we can have Cass, Electra, Stevie- when he's capable- on the road with the caravan, but I'm not sure if Dad has the stamina-"

"That's a bit excessive, maybe," Cressie cut in.

"Oh yes, I forgot, Madhav was a police officer back in India. Do they have the same kind of record as American cops? I doubt it, but he can go just in case," Aunt Libby continued, "Unfortunately we don't have the resources for a prison and I doubt King Theoden would see your reasoning, but I'm sure Denethor would grasp it with both hands. Is that what would make you comfortable? We can ship them off to Gondor right after the wedding, or the caravan can be their parole. The death penalty would be just too ironic-"

"Stop twisting my words!" Cressie screamed tearfully.

"Then what do you want?" Aunt Libby questioned sharply.

"I want to not have to be afraid of you all!"

Stunned, I froze in the middle of tossing some dirt. Bits fell pitifully back into the hole but I barely noticed; my world had shifted a little to the left. Cressie had spent this whole time afraid of me? Of us?

Okay, when we really riled each other up I had imagined the satisfaction of throttling her. But doing it? Never! Not even Cressie or Electra! I'd fucking stab myself first.

When did this fear start, when each of us joined the services? Or was it also Madhav for being a cop and Liam because he was into judo? Nan, with her service in the British SOE? It just seemed so absurd that I literally had no idea what else to think.

A riot of emotions clogged my throat and bloated my chest. My head started to ache with the force of the hurt, disbelief, shock, sadness, anger. The hurt in itself felt like the immediate aftermath of those grenades- my ears started ringing again.

Motion caught my attention out of the corner of my eye, away from the town. A lone rider, coming from the east.

"I'm sorry Cressie, but you're the only one who can solve that problem," Aunt Libby said in an overly composed voice.

"We have a guest," Madhav added quietly.