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Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Posts: 7,994 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
“Lucas, hey!” Derrick flopped down beside him. “It’s great, isn’t it?” Without waiting for an answer, he slapped Lucas’ shoulder. “Wanna hit a bar with me, get some real food and drink?”
“In a little bit. I – I have something I have to do first.”
Derrick’s eyes dropped. “Yeah, ok. Well…come find me when you’re done.” He bounded off.
Lucas climbed to his feet and kicked his pack under the bed before leaving for the main office. They would be holding the mail there, and he would finally be able to get all the letters Justine sent that must have been waiting for him. He wobbled through the yard on his crutches and approached the young man at the desk. He stated his name and asked if there was any mail.
The soldier flipped through the bin beneath the desk for a few minutes, then shook his head. “Sorry, Private, but there’s nothing here for you.”
“Excuse me?” He couldn’t possibly have heard that right.
“There’s no mail for a Lucas Val’Eyra.”
“Not even one letter?” he gasped. “This must be some kind of mistake. I’m expecting letters. Why haven’t they got here? They would have been sent weeks ago. Wait – is it possible that they got passed on to Falador? I was there for a few weeks.”
“Soldier, I haven’t seen anything under your name, ever. I’m sorry.”
“That’s impossible!” he shouted, losing his shaky grip on his temper. “They have to be here. Please, look again. I beg you. They should be here. They have to be. It would be from, from Justine. Justine Val’Myren.”
“There is nothing here!”
Lucas turned away from the desk and staggered back into the courtyard, where he sank onto a nearby bench and put his head in his hands. This was impossible. Justine had to have left him a letter. There had to be something. She couldn’t have not written him a single letter. Nothing. First, the shock numbed him; he couldn’t think beyond that one word: Nothing.

15-Jul-2010 21:22:01

Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Posts: 7,994 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
He dug in his pocket, and produced the one letter he had received, his trembling fingers turning it over and over again as he stared at the writing on the front. “Lucas Val’Eyra, Ninth Company…” He needed to see her handwriting. Needed to hear her voice come through the paper. That was all that had got him through these weeks of fighting.
“Hey, man, what was that all about?”
Sorokin was approaching him from the direction of the main office. His clothes were spattered with blood, and Lucas rose quickly. “What happened? Are we—“
“Not mine, man. I was at the infirmary, helping out. C’mon, what’s up?”
Lucas glared at the cobblestones. “I did*’t get any mail.”
“You were expecting some?”
He nodded. “Justine. My fiancée. She said – she said she’d write every day. She wrote once and then…then she forgot about me.”
“No way, man,” Sorokin said, as he pushed him back down to the bench, then squatted in front of him. “She did*’t forget you. It must be some kind of mix-up.”
“There’s nothing there…Nothing…” Lucas sobbed. Then he felt rage; rage for thinking Justine would wait for him, rage for crying in front of Sorokin, rage for how much he loved her. He reached into the back pocket of his trousers and produced a stack of envelopes. *I wrote all of these for her! Every night! And what do I get? Nothing.”
“So, mail these. She’ll get them, she’ll write back, and maybe they won’t get lost in the chaos.”
“She clearly doesn’t want to hear from me,” Lucas snarled.
“You don’t know that, man. I’m telling you, they got lost somehow.”
“All of them? Not a single one made it through. Nothing.”
“It’s possible. There’s got to be an explanation.”
“Yeah. She did*’t write anything.” He stuffed the stack of letters back in his pants. “Thanks for talking to me, but I’m not worth the time. I’m nobody,” he said, and began to walk away.

15-Jul-2010 21:22:55

Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Posts: 7,994 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, man!” Sorokin grabbed his arm and spun him around. “Now listen to me. As you have been made to be my assistant, I am now your superior. Mail the letters. Then you come to the infirmary with me, so I can see how much you have to learn – or maybe you’ll teach me a thing or two, who knows? Either way, that’s an order. Send your damn letters and clean yourself up.”
Cowed into submission by the other man’s yelling, Lucas bowed his head and scurried inside the main office. “Look…can you just mail these for me?” he asked, tossing the stack of letters on the desk. “Make sure they get to her, all right?”
“I don’t take them to wherever…”
“Then ask whoever does. These have to get to her. You make sure of it.”
Outside, Lucas walked with Sorokin towards the infirmary at one far end of the courtyard. “I have to warn you for what you’re going to see,” Sorokin said gravely. “It’s not pretty. There’s one thing you have to understand, since it’s why I ended up on Jonah’s team and you’ll have to obey this too. Out here, the policy is generally cut first, heal later, when people get injured. Infection is hell. So they just cut off the bad limb. But the amputations get infected and then, well, there’s nothing more to cut off. I don’t believe in that, and neither does Jonah. We take care of wounds first, cut only when there’s no other options.”
“Fine by me,” Lucas nodded.
“Once infection sets in, we can try to cut away whatever is infected…if it spreads, all we can do is make them as comfortable as possible. How’s the leg, by the way?”
“Better.”
“While you’re here is a good time to get it checked out, try to work out the stiffness a little. No signs of infection, right?”
“None.”
Then they were inside the clinic, and the chaos assailed Lucas’ senses, driving away all thoughts of his leg.

15-Jul-2010 21:23:46 - Last edited on 15-Jul-2010 21:24:35 by Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Posts: 7,994 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
The moment Sorokin opened the door, they were assailed by screams, and Lucas saw rows upon rows of cots, soldiers thrashing in their beds and crying weakly out for help. Nurses in stiff white dresses moved among them, and in some places, doctors carried them away to a curtained area, which must have been the operating tables.
“We’re just cleaning and dressing wounds. If you see infection or dead tissue, call me over.”
Lucas nodded and picked a row about halfway down the room to start. There was a rolling cart of bandages and buckets of water nearby, and he tugged it toward himself. The first soldier waiting for his care had a bandage wrapped tightly around his head, with tufts of flaming read hair sticking up out of the top.
“Who’re you?” the young man croaked.
“I’m Lucas,” he said. “I’m here to take care of you. What's your name?”
"Kenneth." The man pinched his lips as Lucas unwound the bandage, uncovering a sticky, bleeding **** above his left ear. Most of the hair around the wound had been scraped away. “Hurts,” he hissed.
*What happened to you?”
“Guy came at me with a mace. Helmet…crushed into my head,” he said tiredly.
“How long ago?”
“Couple of days, maybe? I don’t remember. They rushed me from Falador.”
Lucas nodded and smiled as he worked with the patient, trying not to grimace as he smoothed out the skin around the wound and cleaned the blood and pus from it. When it was clear, he bandaged it back up, and moved on to the next bed.

15-Jul-2010 21:25:43

Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Posts: 7,994 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Slowly, as he listened to their stories, he began to piece together a picture of the country over the last couple of weeks, marking each battle on a mental map, calculating casualties and trying to figure out who was winning the war. Port Sarim did*’t seem to be in any danger, so they must have been in good shape, especially since winning Falador. But if he judged by the endless rows of men lying bleeding and crying before him, it did*’t seem like they were winning. If he judged by these soldiers, the war seemed as though it might destroy them, wipe all of them out, one by one until there was nothing left.

15-Jul-2010 21:26:01

Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Posts: 7,994 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Many hours later, after the sun had dipped low to the west, Sorokin and Lucas closed the infirmary behind them and breathed in the cool twilight. Their clothes were smeared with blood and gore, their hair in disorder, their eyes tired and sad. For a moment they just stood outside the door, trying to catch their breath, as though they’d been fighting a battle instead of cleaning and bandaging wounds. Lucas scrubbed a hand across his face and made a low grunt of exhaustion.
“Want a drink?” Sorokin asked.
“More than you know,” Lucas sighed. A pause. “We should change.”
“Yeah.”
They walked slowly and stiffly across the courtyard to the barracks buildings, where they stripped to their undershorts. There was a well outside, and they hauled up buckets of water to dump over themselves. The cold seemed to snap them out of their trances, and they ran back inside to dress. Lucas stared at the contents of his pack dumped out on his cot, the letter-writing supplies carefully moved to one side so he wouldn’t drip on them. “I have no clean clothes,” he mourned.
“Who does?” Sorokin, in the process of tucking in his shirt, glanced at Lucas. “It’s a bar, man, don’t have to be clean. Just don’t have bits of other men on them, you know?”
He rolled his eyes. *That’s morbid…”
“Well, tomorrow you can pick up clean stuff. Right now, hurry up, I’m thirsty.”
Lucas donned the cleanest shirt and trousers he could find, and they emerged back into the night to stroll through the courtyard. He walked with his head craned back to stare at the stars speckled across the sky. “What a nice night,” he sighed.
“You want to stay here and stargaze?” Sorokin teased.
Lucas smiled soberly. “Just reminds me of better days, is all.”

22-Jul-2010 15:24:54

Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Posts: 7,994 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
They walked in silence for awhile, as they passed out of the garrison into the street. Music playing at the various inns and bars wafted towards them on the breeze. Lucas headed for the inn directly across the street, but Sorokin steered him away. “We can wait a few more minutes. I’ve got a place in mind.”
Silence again. Lucas began to feel nervous, like he needed to fill the silence. “So…tell me about being a medic,” he began, falteringly. “I mean – is it like – how does it –“
“How do we operate in battle?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we still have to fight – nobody gives medics a free pass, sadly. You have to watch out for everyone, though, and if you see anyone go down, you’ve gotta get them out, take care of them. But otherwise, you fight, you fight your way to them…I don’t know. You’re a soldier with more responsibility, I guess.”
“Great,” Lucas sighed. A pause. *It’s weird, you know…when I was fighting before, I did*’t realize how bad * I did*’t pay attention to everyone else, you know? I could kind of shut it out, not see the bad injuries.”
“You never realized just how ugly it gets.”
“Yeah.”
Sorokin shrugged. “It ain’t easy, man, I told you. Ain’t easy to watch out for everybody, and ain’t easy to have your eyes open, see all the crazy sh*t that happens in a war.”
“How do you deal with it?”
“I don’t. You shut it out whenever you can.” Lucas did*’t respond, wondering if Sorokin wanted to shut it out now. In the quiet, though, Sorokin kept talking. “The worst is that it doesn’t even feel like you accomplish anything. You save one life, well, great, but while you were working on the one guy somebody else was dying further down the road. Saving a couple of lives won’t win a war.” He laughed self-depracatingly.

22-Jul-2010 15:25:39 - Last edited on 22-Jul-2010 15:26:11 by Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Crystal Smee

Posts: 7,994 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
“I joined up with all those stupid noble intentions, the last war you know, when I was your age. Thought I was gonna be a hero, kill the evil folks, save the good guys. I was freaking excited to be a medic. Yeah, I wised up pretty quick. Saving individual lives don’t make a damn difference…’less you save someone like Jonah. I did that, you know. Probably the only time the man’s ever been injured.”
“He got hurt?” Lucas asked incredulously. It seemed to him like Jonah was made of steel.
“Oh, yeah. Stabbed in the shoulder. Blade barely missed his heart. I found him with a sword lodged in his breastbone, just lying there on the ground. I saved him, helped him get his arm back in fighting shape. He’s one hell of a terrible patient, by the way. But I took care of him, been under his command ever since. We talked a lot, while he was healing.”
Lucas glanced at Sorokin, and saw that his head was tucked down, a shy smile gracing his lips. He was proud that he’d gotten such an opportunity with Jonah. “So you and him…you’re friends?”
“As much as a man like Jonah has friends,” Sorokin laughed. “You’d never hear him say it. But he looks out for his own. You get in his good graces, you earn his trust…you’re good for life, man. He won’t run and hug you when he sees you, but he’ll save your life in a heartbeat.”
“And you guys talk?”
“Sometimes. He’s no big chatter, obviously. But getting to know him is worth it. Me and him, we don’t talk about war – we got enough of that already. We talk about our lives. He’s just…he’s an incredible man.” He stopped in the road. “Look, we’re here.”

22-Jul-2010 15:26:38

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