Chapter Text
His therapist thinks that the war bothers him. It’s not that. No, the war was fine, just fine. Better than fine, really. He had purpose there. He could help people.
He can’t help anyone now, not even himself. He’s worthless, just a washed-out army doctor with a bad leg and a worse shoulder. His hand shakes again. He thought he stopped that, but that was back when he joined the army in the first place. Getting kicked out would set him back. Obvious.
He’s useless. There is nothing he can do except sit and stare at the blank screen of his computer.
And contemplate his gun. Maybe.
Don’t be dull. Shut up.
He’s getting off topic. He does that now. It used to be that he could catch the shifts of topic hopping and then concentrate for hours on a single thought. Not anymore.
He was talking about the war. How his therapist is an idiot.
It is not the war that bothers him, but the dreams. Sure there is gunfire in his dreams, the screams of fellow soldiers as others call “Doc! Doc, here!” and even the burning agony of his shoulder as the bullet tears through the gear that is supposed to protect him from such things. His blood spraying on the kid on the ground behind him; the kid’s blood – God he’d been kneeling – and brain and skull is an echo of the original spatter.
That’s a nightmare in itself, but not the worst and not because he’d been shot. The kid’s death bothers him, just like all the other deaths he has seen, but not done. He only points a gun when he means to kill. Some people would say he does that too much for a doctor, but he will protect his men. Always. And that’s the nightmare. He’s lying wounded in the sand and his men are dying around him.
Somewhere in the background there are the sirens of police cars and ambulances, noises that don’t belong in an Afghani desert. They ring anyway like long forgotten memories. He prefers to believe they are from when he went running, sometimes for weeks on end. He’d live like a homeless child, a runaway, taking only twenty pounds with him when he leaves and coming home hungry but satisfied a few weeks later, all his school assignment finished and able to sit still in a classroom again. For a while at least.
He heard many sirens on those runs. Some were for the kids in gangs after a fight ended and there were bodies on the streets. Other times he was the cause; like that time when a creepy man attacked a girl walking home and he beat his face in with a metal pipe. He called the police and ran. No one ever got his name. The girl never said what he looked like. He never saw her again.
He doesn’t like to think that the sirens may be from before the runs.
“How’s your blog going?”
“Yeah. Good.” He clears his throat, not even trying to hide the lie. It’s more habit to say than anything else. “Very good.”
“You haven’t written a word, have you?”
”You just wrote still has trust issues.”
“And you read my writing upside down. See what I mean?”
It’s their standard session conversation. She asks questions. He doesn’t answer or evades. They play cat and mouse for the hour or so he is required to sit and talk to her. He’s never quite sure who plays which role.
He might prefer playing the cat, but he thinks he’s the mouse. It’s not like he’s purposefully hiding his life from her. He just…doesn’t…trust her.
Trust issues. He only trusts one person in the entire country, and it’s not himself.
He spends his afternoons stretching out the psychosomatic limp with long walks. He has nothing better to do. No friends. No family that he’s willing to talk to. No job.
No money for a cab or the train. No money at all really. Which reminds him, he’s running low on food. He should get something that’s not take away.
That’s what he’s contemplating when Mike Stanford calls out to him.