#d8 fall..luetnant means d8 case lieutenant

[furymint]

19. playing with each others' fingers!!!

hand holding meme | header | wc: 1,562 | wwi au so welcome to austria-hungary

The nurse that led Elliot into the room was little more than a child. She had the brightness of inexperience and the voice of a teenager; she was probably a poor man's daughter or a foolish man's wife; she believed Elliot when he told her that he was a medical professional. That was all he needed.

In return, he gave his attention. The girl glowed and stood at his ear to chat. Mr. Feran had recently returned from an appointment with the doctor. He'd met with a new addition to the hospital: a specialist from Vienna who professed great interest in concussions. He and Mr. Feran had spoken for hours.

Elliot could only imagine what that meant.

Although it was late in the afternoon, the curtains were loosed about the pair of windows. The girl indicated the bed in the corner and the man heaped upon it. Mr. Feran had been asleep for hours. Sometimes his legs moved involuntarily as he slept. Faradism had no effect so far, but with consistent treatment that little problem was certain to melt away. Her trust in the doctors was absolute.

Elliot agreed. Taking off his coat and folding it over his arm, he assured her that he was familiar with this patient, and that he had visited at the perfect time, then. May he be left to observe those same leg tremors?

She acquiesced with a wide smile. Like a nodding flower, the girl turned in her skirts and blew away. 

If only it were always so easy. Elliot gave one solid sigh before he approached Nolanel’s bedside.

He folded his coat, set it on the floor, and lifted Nolanel’s small side table atop it. Although Elliot grunted with effort, the wooden dresser scuffed almost silently down upon wool instead of stone. He sat atop it.

Nolanel lay undisturbed on his side. The gloom did not disguise the dark circles around his eyes, or the pinch of a frown even as his mouth gaped for shallow breath. He wore pale, unclean clothes marked with soil stains and sweat, and at the end of his bed, his greatcoat was bunched up atop his feet where he'd kicked it away like a blanket.

Elliot silently cursed the men who were privileged to take care of this man. 

No doubt they found things of clinical interest in his manner: his embroiling passion, coarse patience, and frequent fears. But psychology would not bring a solution to a battlefield problem.

His nerves were the traitor. Those doctors put their hands-on him, felt muscle contract under their coarse fingers, and knew the power of that body. They wanted mastery over ligament and sinew, to dig their syringes deep to the bone and pull at the marrow. There must be something there--some malefaction that was not the mind but something physical and real.

When they touched his back and pushed their fingertips into the divots of each anatomical plane, did they wonder about the birthmark on his shoulder? Did they test for sensation in every shrapnel-bitten gouge before they found the nick in his ear, and did they notice where the sun had tinted the skin at his hairline? If they made Nolanel wrap his tremoring hand around a measure to test the force of his grip, did any of them fear how intimately those hands knew death?

Aide, specialist, nurse, assistant, cleric, trainee--How many had witnessed Nolanel’s angry blush when the doctor interviewed him for nervous lineage, decadent habits, old phobias and misdeeds? Could Nolanel have told them what he'd confessed to Elliot, drunk on morphine and broken with regret, so that his fears could be blamed when "D8 FALL: PSYCHOSIS-NEURASTHENIA. LEUTNANT, 23." appeared in publication?

It was not a story he could ever tell. Privacy was not just the word for it. Neither was security or shame. But deep within him, he felt the weight of a childhood under surveillance, of a parent's crimes, and a desire to maintain the soul's mystery. Too often, a misplaced 'how' or 'why' turned knives against the innocent. Too often, Elliot wondered when his luck would run out like Nolanel’s had.

He resisted the impulse to draw his leg atop the dresser with him. He stretched his arms over his head and surveyed the unchanged room: a dull, brown and chipped collection of furniture shoved against walls to clear space for empty beds. There was a side table drawer stuffed with discarded letter drafts beside one bed, and a neat stack of river stones on the windowsill nearest the other. Nolanel had nothing--but Nolanel was awake.

Nothing but the cowl of sleep prevented him from flinching at the sight of Elliot. "Dear God," he whispered, rubbing his face with his sleeve. The bed groaned as he shifted against the hard mattress.

Elliot stopped him. "Please, don't get up for my sake. Stay as you are."

Nolanel blinked slowly and forcefully. It took him a few moments more to process the message, then he slumped back down. His arms rested in front of him, and Elliot leaned forward to take one of his hands.

The skin was hot and dry. Nolanel flexed his knuckles against Elliot's palm, then gave no resistance as Elliot seized a patchy finger to inspect. His short nails were blackened with dirt.

At once Nolanel interjected, "You promised no questions."

Elliot glanced to Nolanel’s tired, taunting face. "I remember. I'm not here to talk about that." He needed a different name for shell shy.

Nolanel scoffed and pressed his cheek deeper into his pillow. His hair was a stark flurry of ink strokes against the aged cream cloth. "Just to stare and wonder?"

"Precisely." Elliot jammed his fingernail under Nolanel’s and scraped out the soil.

"Christ!" Nolanel yanked back his hand and tucked it against his chest. "The fuck was that?"

Elliot remained nonplussed. "Next time you assist in the hospital garden, wash your hands before you slip back into bed. Do you like carrying germs with you everywhere?"

"Couldn't help yourself in asking?" Nolanel's upper lip raised. He twisted under his blanket to inch closer to the headboard. "I like the smell."

Elliot stared. His mind raced to stop his tongue. There were infinities in the world less confusing than this--and as many things he wanted to blame. Nolanel was lucid, frustrated, embarrassed, but not mad. As much as Elliot preferred to condemn that thing for each of their disagreements, he knew he could not blame mind and emotion for everything.

And it was his fault Nolanel was agitated from the first. Elliot reminded him that he loved someone. There were fewer passions more shameful than that.

"The smell?" Elliot echoed.

"The earth," Nolanel averred.

This time, Elliot understood. In Galicia, the ground was disfigured. Craters sucked rain water and blood into the soil. Each trench was stuffed with chalk, rusted wire, and human rot, buried together by raucous shells. A layer of chemical powder topped no-man's-land and rioted into plumes when the wind dared to blow. Before the dugout had collapsed over Nolanel’s body, the Etes quarries had replaced the sky.

Nolanel knew how bombs could rip open the earth, exposing its veins and hollows, and how men could pick it like carrion until its toxins killed them. But he had also hauled horses from the tunnels and into the summer air, where their hooves could scrape against grass and dew instead of rock, and the mud on their coats was warm and fresh atop the coal dust. His hands had ripped thick, meaty mushrooms from patches of unseen death, and he had washed the dirt from them in cold rivers.

"I'll take you to Nógrád," Elliot swore.

"You won't," Nolanel countered, "It won't do any good."

"That girl--if by any kindness she may be called a nurse--would never notice your absence."

"It won't do me any good."

Elliot pulled a leg up and propped his chin upon his knee. "Something in this world will do you good if you allow it to find you."

Nolanel scratched the sand from his eyes, causing Elliot to hiss at him.

"Ah, that," Nolanel said.

"No, no," Elliot stalled. He couldn't grasp what Nolanel meant, and he wouldn't allow himself to guess. "I can find a fragrance--"

"Tell them to give my gloves back. If the hospital must grow its food, and I must pull weeds from between the beets, then I should have gloves to do it."

"The doctors are quite prejudiced against them as a maladaption," Elliot pouted.

"I know what they said. They told me my head was cracked. I'd like them to say the mill has no stone, and be done." Nolanel laughed roughly. His eyes flashed darkly as he sat up and grabbed Elliot's hand back.

"The doctor asked if I believed my senses were dying: if I heard less or tasted little," he said. "Yet ever since Volhynia I've felt more. Your voice is like a thunderclap in this room. There are hurts in my body, deep in my ribs and under my scalp, that ache in every second. I want less. It's a curse to feel."

Elliot pushed his fingers between Nolanel’s and squeezed. For a moment, foreboding hushed him. It seemed as though Nolanel were hollow, or something that talked but was not there.

"Sensation can be holy," Elliot whispered.

"Return my gloves to me," Nolanel repeated.