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Standard disclaimer: None of the Team Fortress 2 characters, places, etc. in this story are mine but are the property of Valve. No copyright infringement is intended by their use in this story.
Author’s note: Backstory of the Medic. More information on some of the sources for the story is at the end. There might be one more TF2 fic after this, we’ll see.
His first impressions: dank stone walls, flickering torchlight. A woman with gray hair and a lined face, who cared for him but never spoke. He did not know her name.
Two others: a man, tall and commanding, with jet-black hair and flashing blue eyes. And another woman, stern and regal, black hair streaked with gray. Later – much later – some half-buried thought would tell him the Administrator reminded him, a little, of that other woman.
He loved the man and the woman, almost as much as he feared them. And he was always cold.
The first thing he remembered clearly: he would have been about three years old, maybe a little older than that. He was in the man’s arms. The man and the woman were standing together at a high window, looking down. A river of torchlight streamed below them, glistening off the sharp metal points of weaponry: pitchforks, scythes, knives, hammers. A vast swell of noise reached up to where they were: shouts and screams, cries of anger that made him shiver.
The man turned toward the woman. His voice was calm, relaxed. “We knew this day would come.”
The woman, frowning, no sign of fear. “But the work is not yet complete. I thought we would have more time.”
“I did as well, my dear, but it seems it was not to be.”
The woman – his mother, he would realize in later years -- turned toward the man. “You go, my darling. I will hold them off.”
Now – only now – fear entered his father’s eyes. Not for himself. “That will mean death.”
His mother stood as proud and straight as an iron rod. “I will have it no other way. You must survive. To carry on our research. To care for our son.” She looked down at the boy and something came into her face; she reached out and touched his cheek tenderly. He could never remember her touching him, before. “Our little Johann.”
It was the first time he could remember hearing his name.
“Liebling,” his father said. His voice broke. His mother drew his father to him, and they kissed.
A deep repetitive booming sound came from below. His mother drew back.
“They’re forcing the gate,” she said. “Go. And remember I love you.” She had not said it to him.
Next, just himself and his father. A series of rented apartments and houses, dingy, run down, falling apart. Moving often, never staying in one place. Life was hard. There was never enough to eat, and he was still cold. His father rarely spoke to him, and when he did, it was usually with displeasure. Wherever they lived, there was always one closed-off room that he was never to go into; his father spent most of his time in there. Sometimes, he wished his father would spend more time with him. Sometimes.
His father kept birds, white doves, stacked in rows of cages. They were his father’s birds, but it was his job to feed and care for them. He felt sorry for the birds; crammed together behind cold wire, never allowed to fly or see the sun. Every so often, his father would take one or another of them into his closed room – his laboratory – and the next time he saw it it would be dead, or horribly mutilated. It was his job to dispose of the helpless little dove corpses too – the failures, his father called them – and they made him terribly sad. Sometimes he would cry over them as he wrapped their tiny bodies up and took them out with the rubbish, but he was careful not to let his father see.
Times were bad. He knew that, even at a young age; something he had heard his father say, picked it up, and simply internalized it: times were bad. What that meant, or how things might be different, he didn’t know. He knew that there was often fighting in the streets, brawling, the far-off – or not so far off – sound of gunfire. At first it scared him, calling up that distant, earliest memory; but after some time, he grew used to it, to stepping over bodies in the streets, or around pools of blood. It was just the way life was.
He was older now, attending school. He held himself apart from the other children; solitary by nature, he preferred to spend time with his own experiments on frogs, mice, beetles, whatever small animals he could find. The other children would taunt him when they caught him at this lonely pastime, shouting, “You’re going to end up a crazy old man, just like your father!”
“My father is a genius!” he would snarl, and try to fight them. Usually he lost, at least until he hit a growth spurt and put on some muscle. They stopped taunting him then, and switched to simply ignoring him. He told himself that was how he liked it.
By then, his father was working at a shady hospital on the outskirts of Stuttgart. He’d also begun drinking quite a bit, though he managed to keep it off the job. They were doing a little better now; there was food on the table most days, and he had some new clothing of his own, rather than wearing his father’s castoffs cut down to fit him. They might have been even better off if his father hadn’t been spending much of what he earned on drink and on an ever-growing amount of laboratory equipment. What his father was doing with all that equipment, just like what he did at the hospital all day and why he so often came back so late at night, were things his father never spoke of and he himself had learned not to ask.
Despite the improvement in their living conditions, things were still bad and getting worse. There was a terrible, bright, glittery quality in the air, something hard-edged and sharp, as if the sunlight was full of gleaming blades. While he no longer heard gunshots and screaming on a daily basis, the streets echoed with the tramp of marching feet and the jerky, tinny sound of army songs.
People began disappearing: the flower-shop owner he passed every day on the walk to school; the family living next door; one of his father’s colleagues at work. There was a boy he knew at school – not a friend, he had no friends, but they sat next to each other and occasionally spoke. One day when he came to school the boy was not there. Nobody seemed to know where he’d gone.
When he asked his father about it, his father turned on him with one massive fist raised. “You keep your mouth shut, boy, do you understand? Questions bring nothing but trouble. You keep your mouth shut!”
He froze, feeling as if he’d been plunged in icy water. It wasn’t his father’s threatening fist that scared him, though; it was the look in his father’s eyes. He’s not angry at all. He’s afraid. He could not ever remember seeing his father so afraid. What is happening?
The fear in his father’s eyes convinced him of two things: first, whatever was happening was very bad, probably much worse than he had thought; and second, whatever it was, not even his terrifying father could stop it. He swallowed, hard.
“I understand, Father.”
His father studied him. “I believe you do.” He calmed a bit. “Concentrate on your studies. You must be ready to apply to medical school in another two years. That’s all that’s important.”
His father never spoke another word on the subject. He didn’t have to; the fear and the raised fist had said everything important already.
Medical school was a refuge, though brief and imperfect. He found the curriculum almost childishly simple, and breezed through his classes, taking top marks in every subject. He managed to graduate a year early, and embarked upon his internship at a teaching hospital in Stuttgart – not the place where his father worked, but a larger and more prestigious one. It wasn’t enough to make his father say he was proud of him, but then again, he hadn’t expected it.
There was a nurse there who often worked the same shift he did. Her name was Hanni; she had curls the color of sunshine and clear blue eyes like mountain pools. Watching the play of light on those curls thrilled him somehow, gave him a curious floating sensation, maybe even something like happiness. He would turn to watch her out of the corner of his eye as she passed, trying not to be obvious, not to let his gaze linger. She was a bright spot in his life, and he needed one badly. Everything else in the world seemed to be falling apart. But at work, he could see Hanni, and for a while – a little while – it would seem like everything was all right. There was no harm in it, was there? In dreaming, as long as he kept his dreams secret and told no one?
Then one day, he found himself alone with her, leaving the hospital, at the end of an evening shift. It was nothing he could have planned, nothing he ever would have dared to plan. He never thought he would have dared to even speak to her outside work. But he saw her stop at the door, looking out uncertainly at the dark night, and he asked if he could walk her home.
It was horrible; he was stumbling over his words, and tongue-tied, and the heat in his face told him he was blushing furiously. But she started, and looked at him, and a little color came into her face too, and she said shyly, “All right.”
So he walked her home, in a blissful daze. He didn’t have much to say, and neither did she, but halfway there she reached out and hesitantly took his hand. Her fingers were so small and delicate, fitting into his big clumsy palm. A strange warmth spread over him, almost enough to beat back the winter cold. And when she said good night to him and left him on her doorstep, he could only stare at her closed door and wonder, how did this happen? How did he, the strange outcast with the “crazy old man” for a father, end up walking home someone like her?
Then he realized he was lost; he had been paying so little attention to anything but Hanni that he hadn’t kept track of where he was. It took him over two hours to get back to his and his father’s house. His father didn’t notice; but then, his father wouldn’t notice.
That was all it took; somehow, after that, he and Hanni were a couple. Having her there changed everything, for both of them; each saw the other as something to hold on to, in a world that was going from bad to worse. He floated through his shifts, counting the hours and sometimes even the minutes till he could see Hanni again, always wondering how on earth this had happened, how he – he – should be so lucky; how something this wonderful could happen to him of all people. And when she smiled up at him and kissed him at the end of the day, he could only think he would willingly die for that smile.
It was a sweet, sweet idyll, but it couldn’t last; already the storm clouds were on the horizon. Before the year was out, the news flashed across the headlines: War.
He had been scrubbing in for surgery when the announcement came over the radio and he froze, a chill running down his spine, as he listened to the barking voice of the announcer. The worried faces of the rest of the surgical team said it all, revealing that he was not the only one who had these fears. All through the surgery, he could hardly concentrate; all he could think of was What does this mean? What will it mean for me? For Hanni? For my father?
There were no answers, at least not right away. He hoped they would be able to avoid being called up, and for a while it seemed they could. The director of his hospital had some influence, and he suspected the man was using it to shield his staff, at least for a while; every day snatched from the front was one more day of relief. He held his breath, and hoped.
Then one day in the middle of rounds, the radio blared that tinny martial music, and the announcer’s voice trumpeted, “A glorious new offensive in the east …. “ A sick feeling filled the pit of his stomach. This time, he knew, there would be no escape.
His and his father’s call-up papers arrived the same day. Both of them had been seconded to medical units headed east; he had been assigned to the 17th army while his father was going to the 6th army, under the command of General Paulus. The few moments they spent at the train station before their separate trains arrived were the last time they would ever see each other, though neither of them knew that; later, he would think with an emotion that was not quite bitterness that even if they had known, he couldn’t have imagined his father would give him anything other than that last cool, “Do not disgrace me, son.”
Hanni had been called up too to a military nursing unit, though she was headed west, toward France. He’d bought a ring for her before they parted, perhaps sensing how much it would help both of them to have something to look forward to. Still, it took all the courage he possessed to take the box from his pocket and offer it to her. When, blushing, she murmured her assent and allowed him to place the ring on her finger, he felt euphoric, lightheaded, as if he were walking on air. That gleaming ring seemed to be more than a promise to her – it was a promise to both of them that somehow, some way, they would come out all right in the end.
Any sense of euphoria wore off quickly, however, as his unit pressed further and further east. He had thought he had known cold before; but it was nothing compared to the bone-shattering chill of the steppes. And nothing in his medical training had prepared him for the injuries he was now dealing with on a daily basis. The stream of trauma and mangled bodies that poured ceaselessly into his surgical tent – and oh, so very many of them completely beyond any hope of saving with the skills and tools he had – first shocked, then horrified, then enraged him. There has to be a better way, he told himself, staring furiously down at the corpse of a boy with half a head, carried all the way back to the casualty clearing station by his friends in the vain hope that he, the Doctor, could help him. There has to be. Something better than this.
In the rare lulls of combat, the few spare moments that he could snatch or steal for himself, his journal began to fill with scraps and scribblings and sketches, as his mind worked ceaselessly at the problem of what that “better way” might be. And somewhere, among all the jotted fragments and crude drawings and half-completed formulas, the barest beginning inklings of a concept began to emerge: a weapon (weapon?) that fired a healing stream of light.
Outside his journal, though, things were going badly. Just how badly, he did not know – the official bulletins were resolutely triumphant – but it was evident to anyone with eyes to see. They fell back, and then fell back again. Patients that couldn’t walk had to be abandoned; there were simply not enough vehicles or fuel to transport them all. When he closed his eyes at night, in the brief snatches of sleep he got, he could still see horrifically mangled limbs, could still hear patients crying for Mutter, for Wasser, for Hilfe, bitte, verlass uns nicht … The news came that the 6th army – his father’s army – had been wiped out at Stalingrad, and he felt nothing, there was neither time nor space to feel. All he cared about – all he could care about -- was his journal, and the weapon that could make everything better.
Pages filled with each passing day, as they fell back through plains, through forests, across vast slow moving rivers. More and more calculations crammed between the two wilted leather covers as he huddled in the bed of a jolting truck belching thick clouds of black smoke, or crouched under the table of the surgical tent while bombs fell around them and shattered the air with concussions. Decrepit tanks rumbled through the streets of a destroyed city outside while he scratched mad symbols onto paper stained with dirt and blood, or even scraps of cloth or tattered, filthy bandages when inspiration struck and his book was not immediately to hand. By now his unit – what was left of it – had been merged with the remains of several others and stationed in the rubble of what had once been a port town, trying futilely to hold off the enemy advance long enough for at least some of the civilians to be evacuated. He could not have named the town, the battle, or even his new colleagues; sometimes he would start to speak a half-remembered name and then realize – oh yes, that one was dead. His colleagues barely existed for him by this time, they came and went so quickly; they were little more than a stream of ever-changing faces of the dead or soon-to-be-dead. Only the mass of bleeding, mangled flesh flowing endlessly across his surgical table was the same, and yet it didn’t matter. Only the weapon mattered.
Then he was on a boat. He was up on deck, along with dozens of other ragged, filthy figures that had once been soldiers; the air was chilly and the sea pitched and swirled. The sky above turned dark, then bright, then dark again. He clutched his journal to him, his fingers pressing into the leather covers. It stayed with him.
They offloaded after a night and a day, or maybe two days’ sea travel west. More marching. The weapon danced in front of his eyes in the daytime, and shone in his dreams at night; by now it was more real to him than his surroundings.
Next came some men in a jeep, speaking a language he recognized from his school days as English, who surrounded him and his few remaining colleagues and covered them at gunpoint. Then somehow he was standing in a camp surrounded with barbed wire, with hundreds of other men – prisoners of war, he supposed. He let events wash over him and did not resist, until one of the guards, in the process of frisking him, came upon his journal and tried to take it from him. No -- ! Reflexively, he lashed out, striking the man in the jaw, and angry shouts filled the air. The enemy soldiers drew their weapons on him, preparing to fire; he stood defiantly straight, clasping his notebook so tightly that his nails dug into the binding.
“Das ist meins,” he said. “Ich werde sterben, bevor ich dich das von mir nehmen lasse.”
It might have come to that, except a man with sergeant’s stripes stepped forward. The sergeant gestured to the other soldiers to move back, and looked him up and down. “May I see?” he asked, pointing toward the journal with an inquiring expression. “Kann ich es sehen, bitte?”
“Sprechen sie Deutsch?”
“Ein kleines bisschen. Meine Mutter war Deutsch.”
The sergeant had a friendly, open face – and was backed up by pistols. He had no choice. He handed the journal over and watched jealously as the man flipped through it with interest. After a moment, the sergeant nodded, and then – joy of joys – handed it back.
He pressed the worn volume to him, sagging with relief, as the other man turned toward his soldiers.
“Let him keep it, boys. There’s no harm there.” He gestured, and his men grudgingly lowered their weapons, though some of them still looked angry.
The prisoner camp was better. There was no more fighting, no more attacks; no more huge influxes of casualties that required him to operate for days without sleep. As a medical officer, the authorities made him work in the camp hospital treating fellow prisoners, but that was light duty compared to what he had been doing before. Other than that, he was able to spend every single moment he was awake writing in his notebook, and his plans for the weapon advanced by leaps and bounds. He had no idea how long he spent there – days? Weeks? There was a rumor that they were going to be loaded on boats and taken across the sea, to Britain, or America. He didn’t care; it didn’t seem to matter. As long as nothing interfered with his work, all would be well.
The end of the war seemed to come without ceremony. One day he was laboring in the medical tent, treating the usual illnesses and injuries – all of them almost insultingly trivial after the horrendous carnage of the Eastern front – and then he was out of the camp, clutching a bag with his few possessions, standing on a railway platform waiting to catch a train back to Stuttgart.
His journal was buried safely in his pack, but in his hands he clutched something else, for the first time in a long time. A letter from Hanni.
Hanni …. He had closed the door on thoughts of her during the nightmare days of combat; he could not endure the hell of the Eastern Front otherwise. He had dimly understood that to think of her would be more than he could bear. He’d kept that door firmly shut all this time; even receiving her letter with his Red Cross package in the prisoner camp hadn’t re-opened it. Now, though ….
The letter was several months old by the time he’d received it; the paper creased and worn. It was short, the writing shaky as if dashed off in spare moments here and there; much of it had been redacted by the military censors, and little remained but banal sentiments. She missed him. She hoped he was safe. She couldn’t wait till the war was over and they could see each other. And yet as he clutched the letter in his hands as the train rolled on, re-reading the few lines over and over again until he had them by heart, he could feel that door slowly starting to open, a sliver at a time. Parts of him that had withered felt as if they were slowly and painfully coming back to life. And for the first time in years, it was Hanni, not the weapon, that filled his thoughts.
Where was she? Was she still alive? Had she changed, would he recognize her? Did she still have his ring? A thousand questions, hopes and fears swarmed his mind, and his heart was in his throat as the train approached Stuttgart.
The city itself was in ruins. He had heard it had suffered heavy bombing, but he was still shocked at the extent of the damage. Large sections of it had been reduced to rubble; he had grown up in the city but was forced to rely on street names to navigate his way, since he could recognize almost nothing.
The small house he had shared with his father had been leveled. All their possessions, his father’s lab equipment, his medical textbooks, the dove cages – all gone, either destroyed or looted. He took a seat on a chunk of broken masonry and just stared at the pile for the longest time, wondering blankly where to go and what to do.
He sat there for what felt like hours; he might have sat there forever before he heard a soft cooing sound. He looked up to see a single white dove, perched on a ruined lamp post, watching him. It ruffled its feathers, cooed again, and then boldly fluttered over to him. He extended his hand, and it hopped its way up his arm to sit contentedly on his shoulder.
“Are you coming with me?” he asked it, feeling somewhat foolish for talking to a bird.
It gave a little trill, and pecked in a friendly manner at his ear.
“Then I guess you are mine now, little bird,” he said to it. It is all that is left of my former life, he thought.
Hanni’s old home had been destroyed too; he had no idea where to look for her. If she even managed to survive, he thought morbidly, clutching her letter in his hands; holding onto it somehow felt like holding onto a promise. Finally he managed to track her down and meet up with her through their mutual connections at the Stuttgart hospital where they had worked.
They met outside the hospital at the site of a little café where they had often gone for dates before the war. The café, of course, was ruined, just like everything else in the city; there were only a few crumbled walls to mark the spot where it had once stood. Seeing Hanni again was almost a physical shock. She was much thinner than he remembered; and there were new shadows and angles to her features that spoke of suffering, both lived and seen. He could only imagine what he looked like to her: a gaunt, ragged scarecrow with haunted eyes, perhaps. Time seemed to freeze as they stared at each other; and then it felt as if some sort of magnetic attraction took hold, drawing them inexorably together. He could not have fought that pull, even if he’d wanted to. One step, another, another, and then they were running toward each other, wildly embracing, sobbing and laughing at once as they clung together with all their strength: a tiny knot of life and hope in the middle of all that ruin. It was over; they had survived; everything would be all right at last.
They were wed a few days later, in a quiet ceremony in a local pastor’s parlor.
And then, things fell apart.
The chief problem, as he saw it, was that Hanni simply did not understand. He tried to show her his book, producing the stained, filthy volume that he had carefully protected all through the war, flipping eagerly through the pages, explaining everything at great length and with enthusiasm, only to watch Hanni’s face go blank with incomprehension. When he changed tactics, trying to describe the torrent of mangled bodies that had passed through his surgery, and how out of that human wreckage had come his idea, she paled. Something awful flickered behind her eyes and she said, in a strangled voice, “I don’t want to hear anymore. We’re done with all that, you understand? We’re done!”
Patiently he tried to explain that this weapon could ensure that they were done with all that, but it didn’t work. As he talked on, Hanni’s complexion turned a sickly grayish-white. “Stop it!” she shouted. She raised her hands to cover her ears. Her eyes were hollow and she didn’t seem to be seeing him at all. After that, he left her alone.
The basement was another matter. He and Hanni had rented a house near the hospital that was more or less in good condition. Within a few weeks, he had begun moving in lab equipment – some of it purchased; other pieces “acquired” from the hospital where the two of them were now working again. It just seemed to make sense – now that the war was over, and he was back home, it was time to begin trying to turn all those scribblings in his journal into reality. It was time, in other words, to actually build the weapon.
To build the weapon! His heart swelled at the thought. To actually fashion the dream that had danced before his eyes all these long years, through the nightmarish chaos of the war. Something good would come of it after all, and he – himself – would be the man to bring it. The idea thrilled him, and he could hardly wait to get started.
Lab equipment, chemicals and reagents rapidly began to pile up in the kitchen, dining room, and parlor, over Hanni’s disapproving looks and protests – gentle at first, then increasingly stern. When the growing tangle finally began to encroach on the bedroom, she put her foot down – just as she had done with his dove cages earlier, which he had set up to house his growing dove population; after all, the little bird who had found him needed friends.
“Get this out of here,” she said, holding up an Erlenmeyer flask, “or I will throw it all in the trash tomorrow.”
He’d stared at her, shocked, and starting to be angry. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“I want to be able to sleep at night without worrying about an acid spill or an explosion or who knows what coming from all this clutter!” She flung out one hand in a frustrated gesture at the intricate glass and metal puzzlework of his equipment, spreading out across the carpet and walls of their four rooms. “Get it out of here or tomorrow I start throwing it out!”
She doesn’t understand, he realized again, and the realization both stunned and depressed him. To her, his research equipment was not a monument to Science, was not proof of the brilliance and ingenuity of the human spirit, was not the essential tool with which he could shape nature and bend it to his will, overcoming even Death itself; it was nothing more than an inert pile of glass and scrap metal. She doesn’t see. And he could not think of a way to make her see.
He had relocated his dove cages to the garden, but that wouldn’t work for his lab; at last, to satisfy her, he started moving his equipment down to the basement. Once he’d done so, he found it was the ideal solution. While it was dank and chilly, the basement had sturdy stone walls and even a deep stone sink with running water; it was separate from the rest of the house, so there was less chance of his equipment being interfered with or damaged, and he had isolation and privacy in which to conduct his experiments. Once he was down there, very little could disturb him; it was as if he were sealed in his own little world, a world of which he was absolute ruler. He could easily work down there for hours, losing track of time as he lost himself in his research.
Hanni complained of course, but then it seemed as if Hanni complained about everything. He honestly did not recall her being so much of a complainer before the war, and wondered if he simply hadn’t noticed. She didn’t like his rapidly growing dove population, now ensconced in the back garden; they left feathers and seed and droppings everywhere. She didn’t like the bizarre packages delivered to the house at all hours of the night and day, complete with strange sounds and odors emanating from them. She didn’t like that he spent so much of their money on his lab equipment when they were still struggling to make ends meet. She didn’t like that he disappeared down into the basement and she didn’t see him for days on end. And on and on and on. The list of things she didn’t like seemed endless.
He was vaguely aware from radio programs, films and novels that wives had a tendency to nag, so he supposed nagging like this was just something Hanni did as part of being a wife. Her complaints were all so exaggerated he couldn’t imagine she intended them seriously. Sure there had been a weekend – or maybe three or four – where he’d gone straight down the basement stairs after coming home from work on Friday and hadn’t emerged until Monday morning when he heard Hanni pounding the door with all her strength and shouting that he was going to be late for work, but that was perfectly understandable; he’d just lost track of time, that was all. And yes, he’d spent a few paychecks on glassware and chemicals and they’d been late with the rent a few times – well, all right, more than a few – in consequence, but there had been several large one-time expenditures he’d needed to set up his lab; the purchases weren’t likely to be repeated unless his current equipment broke or new equipment became necessary. As for the packages, well – he only ordered what he needed, and if some of his deliveries were squeaking, smoking or dripping acid by the time they reached the house, there had been no permanent damage to anything so what was she complaining about? Besides, as he had explained to Hanni several times, this was only temporary. It was just until he finished his weapon. That would surely be in a few months or maybe a year. “After that,” he told her, taking her hands in his, “things will get back to normal. I promise.”
She pulled her hands away. “Things never were normal,” she said bitterly, and then he had either bite his tongue or start the fight all over again.
Frauen, he thought to himself with a shrug. It was just the way they were, and nothing could be done about it. It was easier to simply disappear into his basement kingdom, closing the door on Hanni and all her unreasonable demands, and pour his focus into his creation.
He was closing in on it now, getting closer by the day, it seemed; his small-scale proof of concept prototypes were still exploding on him, but nowhere near as quickly or with as much force. He thought it was a problem somewhere in the flux capacitor, he just had to lock it down, and he felt as if he were almost there. And when he had it – The thought made him catch his breath. Hanni and her annoying complaints receded into the background as the trivialities they were before that glittering, shining prospect. How could he – could anyone – take her nagging seriously when he was on the brink of a discovery that would change history?
Nein, he thought. Grass grows, birds fly, the sun shines, and wives nag. It was just a fact of life, and nothing he needed to pay attention to. The weapon was all that mattered.
At last, after months of labor, trial and error, taking one step back for every two steps forward, he had what he thought might be a working prototype. It was nowhere near as large, powerful or sophisticated as the brilliant dream that shone forth from the pages of his journal, but it was a first step, and a first step that it had taken him a great deal of effort to complete. He stood for a long moment, admiring the small weapon in its stand on his lab bench. The cylinder gleamed serenely, the wires connecting it to its power pack shining a mellow copper in the glow from his worklight.
Only one thing left to do. The field test.
Distantly, he heard a pounding coming from the cellar door, but he ignored it; it didn’t matter to him. A heavy cleaver, taken from Hanni’s kitchen, gleamed on the workbench, next to the bottle of medicinal brandy he kept in the lab. He drew a breath, then another, staring at the knife, trying to gather his courage.
The pounding on the door came again, and Hanni called something indistinct, but he barely heard it. He seized the bottle and took a long swallow from it; then placed his left hand flat on the bench, fingers spread. He picked up the cleaver and steeled himself.
No other way. Can’t hesitate now.
With a sharp crack, he slammed the meat cleaver down. Severing the little finger of his left hand.
Horrible pain screeched up his arm, unhinging his knees so that he staggered and almost fell. The severed digit lay, absurdly separate from the rest of his hand, in a rapidly spreading pool of glistening blood. When he jerked his maimed hand back, shedding droplets everywhere, the finger stayed behind. Seeing that sickened him, made his head spin worse than the brandy.
The weapon – the weapon –
The silver pain was making it hard to think, even to concentrate – the room swam before his eyes – but he fumbled at the weapon where it rested in its cradle. Then panic flashed, brighter than the pain: he couldn’t activate it. Why not?! What’s wrong?! Blood was flowing over his hand, streaking his arm with gore and staining his sleeve. The scent of it filled the air, and he experienced a horrid moment of dislocation – where was he? In his basement, or back in the medical tent during the war? He struggled with the device, not understanding what the problem was, unable to think clearly through the waves of pulsing fire rolling up his arm and making his knees shake. Sweat was dripping down the sides of his face. Why isn’t it working, why isn’t it working, what –
“Didn’t you hear me, I’ve been calling you for – Aaaaaaaaagh!!”
The piercing scream drilled through his brain like an ice pick. He swung toward the sound, raising the cleaver unthinkingly, splashing more blood from his wound.
Hanni stood frozen, staring at him in open terror. Her eyes were huge and glassy, her face sickly gray. Red droplets stippled her cheeks and shirt front. Her hands were clamped over her mouth as if to stifle her screaming. The shrieking pain in his hand, the ear-splitting cry still ringing off the cellar walls, and his total shock at her presence combined into fury.
“What are you doing, you little fool?” he raged at her. “I told you never to come down here!”
“I – I – “ She stammered as if she had forgotten the use of speech.
“Get out of my sight before I lose my temper!”
Without another word she fled; the door at the top of the stairs slammed closed with a bang. But the shock had a beneficial effect; it had cleared his head like a slap. He looked again at the device and at once grasped what the problem had been – the cleaver!
He burst out laughing at his own idiocy. In his shock and pain, he’d been trying to activate his weapon with the cleaver still clenched in his good hand. No wonder he hadn’t been able to make it work!
Still laughing, he dropped the knife to the workbench and with his hand now free, it was child’s play to simply flip the switch. The weapon glowed to life at once, a stream of warm red light pouring out of its end, and holding his breath, he placed his hand in the beam.
At once, the pain was gone, its absence striking him like blessed relief. He watched, fascinated, as the white bone of proximal, medial and distal phalanges extended upward from the red flesh of the stump; as a glistening cocoon of muscles, blood vessels, and nerves wove itself around the bone, and then as skin extruded from the base of the finger to wrap the whole securely in its protective covering. When he finally switched the device off, and held his two hands up before him, examining the results – his little finger looked as whole and healthy as it had his entire life.
Holding his breath, he opened his and closed his fists. Once. Twice. A third time. The finger moved easily; there was not so much as a twinge.
It works. The weapon works. And he snatched up his notebook and pen, filled with a driving compulsion – record it all, now, this testament to his success. Now, now, before you forget, before it is lost forever!
He could not have said how long he stayed down there, feverishly scribbling, writing down every last detail of his experiment; as his mind opened up, charting new ideas, bolder ideas, thronging with possibilities; then with his tools in hand tinkering at his bench, putting together the first few pieces of the full-sized version. He worked in a daze, feeling almost as if he’d been touched by the powerful hand of a god. Ideas and inspiration flowed effortlessly from his pen; parts fitted themselves together under his hands as if by their own free will; it was as if he were working in a dream. When at last he stepped back from his work table, it rose before him like an edifice: The skeleton of his full-sized weapon.
My work. My creation. It will come to pass.
All at once he felt as if his heart would burst from pride. He felt lighter than air, euphoric with joy and triumph, and a powerful urge filled him to share it. He went to the cellar stairs and almost bounded up them, calling, “Hanni?! Hanni, liebling!? Hanni, there’s something I want to show you – “ He flung the door open, and emerged from his basement laboratory.
Hanni was gone.
Not only was she gone, but every last scrap of her possessions was gone with her. All her clothes. All her books. Her photographs, her jewelry, her knitting basket, the sheet music she played on their piano, her potted plants, her cosmetics, her hair brush – all. Gone.
The manic euphoria that had possessed him burst like a bubble. He stood there amid the emptiness, and a terrible sick chill descended on him. His stomach cramped and for a moment he thought he might throw up. Toward the end of the war, anesthetic had been increasingly hard to come by and it had not been uncommon to perform simple amputations without it. There was a peculiar look that would come over men, in the first breath before the pain hit – an expression of blank disbelief, as if facing a loss so enormous that they couldn’t comprehend it. Now – Gott im Himmel, now – he knew exactly what that felt like.
“Hanni?” he heard himself call helplessly, as if she were only hiding somewhere and his voice could summon her out of the air. There was no response.
“Hanni?” Still nothing.
He drifted hollowly from room to room, bleating for Hanni like a lorn calf calling for its mother, until up in the bedroom he saw a bright gleam on his pillow. Moving closer, he realized what it was.
Her wedding and engagement rings.
The sight struck him like the blast of an artillery shell. With a giant, gasping cry, he fell to his knees by the bedside. Groping blindly, he reached out and seized her two rings. He jammed them onto his finger – they would only go on his littlest finger, and only up to the second knuckle – and then collapsed on to the bed, on Hanni’s side. He took her pillow in his arms and buried his face against it, breathing the scent of her hair. The pillow grew damp against his cheeks. He stayed like that for a long time, and eventually slept.
A couple days of feverish searching eventually yielded the information that Hanni had gone back to her parents. Repeated desperate phone calls failed to get past her mother, a redoubtable battleaxe who had never liked him in the first place, so eventually he just showed up on her doorstep, pounding on the door until her father answered.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” the old man said, scowling ferociously.
“I’m not leaving until she does.”
At that, the old man slammed the door in his face – or tried to, he managed to jam his foot in there just in time. “Please,” he begged. “Please. She’s my wife, let me please just see her – “
“Father. It’s all right.” Hanni’s voice, thin and strained. Her father stepped aside, still scowling, and Hanni came to the door, pale and her face set. “Well?” she asked him. “Make it quick.”
He meant to say, “Hanni, you are my life. Don’t leave me,” but what came out was, “How could you do this to me? To my research?” He watched her face change, and in that miserable, agonizing moment, he realized he had lost her forever.
And so it was. There was a dreadful, grinding, hellish denouement that dragged out for months, but in reality what was left of the marriage ended right there. From the moment they said their vows in the pastor’s living room to the the day he found himself standing in an empty house, with nothing remaining but his doves in the back garden and the prototype in the basement, it had been less than two years.
In a way, it was actually a good thing that Hanni left though; now he had the time and space to devote himself fully to his research. So he told himself, over and over, until he finally was almost able to convince himself he believed it. He moved his bed into the basement laboratory and began to stay down there for days at a time, not eating, barely sleeping, emerging only a few moments each day to feed his doves. Now that Hanni was gone, after all, the doves were the closest thing he had to a family.
His attendance at work became spotty; his performance suffered too – at least, so his bosses said. What did they know, the Schweinhunds? Couldn’t they see the methods they termed “unorthodox,” “unproven,” even “unethical” were nothing more than the necessary steps along the path of Science? Of course there had been some failures along the way, but that was the inevitable cost of progress. Nothing worth having ever came for free, and when his theories were proved correct –
But those narrow-minded bureaucrats didn’t agree, which was only to be expected of fools who lacked vision. After one of his experiments deprived a patient of his skeleton, and he received notice they were revoking his medical license, he simply stopped bothering to go to work. He supposed the hospital had fired him in absentia, but honestly did not care enough to find out. Not now, not when he was so close ….
Losing his job at the hospital did create other difficulties, however; most notable of which was losing his access to test subjects. For a while he was at a loss for what to do for fresh subjects – he would not use his little doves, he remembered too well the tiny pathetic bodies he had discarded at his father’s command – but he had no idea where to get more. Until ….
His landlord had evicted him shortly after he had lost his job; with his rapidly dwindling savings, he’d been forced to move to a chilly little decrepit house in a dangerous neighborhood. One night he emerged from the laboratory to startle a burglar in the act of attempting to break in. As he and the burglar stared at each other in those first few seconds, he realized – here was the solution to his problem.
After that it was easy. Whenever he needed a new subject, he would simply go for a midnight stroll. For some reason – he was never sure why, maybe the glasses? – criminals and other lowlifes always seemed to misjudge him, seeing him as easy prey – not knowing that in reality, they were the ones being stalked. He didn’t care; if anything, it made his work easier.
Perhaps it was these activities that led to word spreading among the criminal element: that he was the one to see for medical treatment without awkward questions. The first time he responded to a pounding on his door to find two large men holding a third with a filthy bandage wrapped around his midsection, he was angered to be pulled away from his work; but that anger faded as he realized here would be an excellent field test for his methods.
“How did you get this injury?” he asked the man, probing the wound.
The patient grimaced. “I fell on some bullets,” he said flatly, glowering as if to dare him to react.
He shrugged. “Ah, well, be more careful in future.”
That must have been the correct thing to say, for the patient and his two friends both chuckled. When they left, they shoved a wad of cash into his hands that would more than cover the next week’s rent with some left over to buy more reagents for his work.
Before long, there was a small but steady trickle of such cases coming to his door – knife wounds, shootings, blunt trauma, even the odd case of poisoning. These visitors were always tightlipped about how they had received their injuries, and he never pressed; it simply didn’t matter to him. All that mattered was his research, and with these new patients to try out his methods on, his research progressed by leaps and bounds. And of course they provided a source of income, which was useful as well.
He had always suspected it was through this underground business that they found him. He emerged from his lab one day – or perhaps it was evening; he had lost track of time – to feed his beloved birds when a voice from the corner startled him.
“Herr Ludwig.”
He started, spilling birdseed all over the floor; it had been a while since he had heard another human voice – let alone one like this: a woman’s voice, deep and sultry with a bit of a rasp to it. He spun, searching for the source.
A tall woman lounged easily at his desk, under the feeble glow of a single bulb. Her features were strong, her hair long and dark with a white streak, pinned up at the back of her head. Her bearing was so regal, so commanding that he couldn’t understand how he hadn’t seen her at once; and something in that stern presence seemed familiar. The slightest breath of memory whispered that she reminded him of that other woman … so very long ago …
“Who – “
“It will save us both a lot of time if you don’t ask who I am or how I know what I know.”
“Who are you with?” He had heard the victors were sniffing around in the aftermath of the surrender, seeking out any scientists they could find to spirit away back to their distant homelands. He hadn’t expected anyone to contact him though. He stared at the interloper, trying to discern her motive.
She smiled. “Have you heard of TF Industries?” Her German was almost perfect, but he thought he detected the slightest trace of an American accent. “No? I didn’t think so. It’s a very long story, but for right now, all you need to know is that we are looking for someone with your … particular … qualifications and expertise, Dr. Ludwig.” She glanced in the direction of the basement door, and a chill passed down his spine as he realized that somehow she knew all about the weapon. “Join us, and I can promise you will be well paid – “
He started to turn his back on her, insulted. “Ich habe kein Interesse an Geld.”
“I’m not finished.” As he looked back at her, she raised an eyebrow. “Also, you will receive all the resources you need for your … research. More funding than you could dream of in a lifetime, access to any parts or materials you require … and test subjects. Eight test subjects all your own, on whom you may experiment to your heart’s content. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, Herr Ludwig. What do you say now?”
His breath caught in his throat at the image she painted for him.. There was only one question he had.
“May I bring my doves?”
She nodded. “Certainly.”
And that was how he found himself touching down on a deserted airstrip, after a grueling trans-Atlantic flight, to step out into the blazing New Mexican sun.
It was hot. That was his first impression. The sun beat down with an intensity he had never experienced before, bleaching the surroundings to hues of pale yellow and brown and causing heat waves to dance on the tarmac. He hefted his valise with one hand and wiped his brow with the other, aware that beads of perspiration were already forming.
“First time in New Mexico? Heat does take some gettin’ used to.” A man was coming toward him, short and stocky, wearing welding goggles and a yellow hard hat; he chuckled warmly and extended one hand, covered by a yellow construction glove. “Reckon you’re that Medic th’ Administrator was talkin’ about. Howdy.”
He stared at the newcomer for a moment, trying to work out what he had said; his English was not good yet, and the man’s accent made it more difficult. The newcomer must have thought something was wrong, for he added, “Th’ Administrator, ya know – she sent me to meet ya. You can jes’ call me Engineer.”
“En…gin…eer,” he said slowly, trying to place the man’s face with the files he had been given to read on the plane. “Ja. Engineer. I am ze Medic. Das ist richtig.” He reached to shake the other man’s hand and winced at the strength of the grip. Something was wrong; it didn’t feel natural. A prosthesis of some kind? Already his curiosity was piqued.
Engineer chuckled again. “Well, that’s good ta hear, I was startin’ to worry I’d got the wrong person. Truck’s raht over there.” And he led the way over to a battered old truck standing by the side of the tiny airstrip.
That was how he met the Engineer. The rest of the team he grew to know soon enough: Heavy, the huge, taciturn Russian heavy weapons specialist, Demoman, the drunken Scotsman who was a genius with explosives; Scout, the lightning-quick Bostonian who never stopped talking, Soldier, the fanatical American patriot whose loyalty and courage was only matched by his lack of common sense; the tall, laconic Kiwi Sniper; Spy, the elegant stealthy Frenchman, and Pyro -- about whom the less said, the better.
It took him a while to get adjusted to his new surroundings. Everything about this state, New Mexico, was different. The Gravel Wars, the conflict in which he’d been hired to fight, were so completely unlike his previous experience of combat that they seemed like something out of one of the Black Forest tales. This pocket conflict between two aged brothers, localized to a remote region of New Mexico and stretching back to the 1800s – this conflict which could never be won and in which nothing was at stake -- was almost impossible for him to take seriously. He could scarcely believe it was real at first. A “war” where battles were fought according to a strict timetable, where in the evening the soldiers simply went back to their barracks, where nothing was gained, no terrain changed hands, no one retreated and no one advanced – compared to his experiences before, this was almost like a game. And his teammates …
At first they meant nothing to him. He’d seen so many of his colleagues die that he’d just stopped caring. By now, he knew better than to get attached. They were test subjects, nothing more, as the Administrator had promised him; handy bleeding bodies on which to try out his experimental techniques. What changed it was the realization – slow to dawn, but inevitable – that he, he could stop them from dying.
He could do it. He did, every day on the battlefield.
His weapon, that magic vision that had danced before his eyes all through the chaos of the war, that key to healing suffering, ending carnage and death – it worked. It really worked, just as he had thought, just as he had hoped. The weapon came first, and it was good, and then, working with the Engineer, he was able to create the respawn machine and that was even better. Sometimes, he could scarcely believe it himself as he stood over a bleeding, battered body on the battlefield and poured the healing stream of light from the muzzle of his weapon only to watch the one who had been at death’s door just a few seconds earlier get up as if nothing had happened. And if he somehow failed to get there in time, it mattered not, for there was always respawn, wonderful respawn as a final promise that death would not have its due.
All of it – all of it was worth it: the suffering, the struggle, the cold sleepless nights, the chilly blood-soaked days; the death, the agony, the nightmare. He could see so clearly now, it had all been for this: so that here, in this desert on the other side of the ocean, he had fulfilled his vision. His destiny. Perhaps even the vision that his long-ago mother and father had had for him. And as he realized that these – these people – wouldn’t die, that he would never have to stand by and helplessly watch them perish because he could do nothing to save them, it felt as if a knot tied deep inside himself began to relax. As if they were – friends. Did he have friends? Could he have friends?
He didn’t know … but it felt like it, somehow. And here, in this strange land, so far away from the land of his birth, he was finally – finally – warm.
Finis.
End notes:
The following books provided inspiration for elements of Medic’s pre-war history and war service:
Defying Hitler, by Sebastian Haffner. A civil servant’s son, Haffner gives a good portrayal of the political and social atmosphere of 20s and 30s Germany as seen through the eyes of a boy/young man at the time. The work is particularly interesting for Haffner’s attempt to explore how the various social and political forces helped shape the psychology of ordinary Germans and left them vulnerable to the rise of Naziism.
Adrift in Stormy Times, by Rudolf Trill, a German conscript who was captured and spent time in the States as a POW, then after the war immigrated and became an American citizen. His portrait of the interwar years is less analytical than Haffner’s but is a good portrait of Naziism’s insidious spread into the lives of the average German.
The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer. A French-German who fought on the Eastern Front, Sajer’s wickedly satirical and blackly humorous account influenced much of my portrayal of Medic’s military service. It’s important to note that Sajer has been accused of falsifying his story because, among other reasons, many of the details he gives (dates, locations, etc) do not track. However he has said that he was not trying to write a historically accurate account so much as to record his own experiences and impressions of his military service. My personal opinion upon reading the book is that it is pretty clearly a “brain dump” of his combat experiences and shows the disorganization and lack of attention to detail one would expect. Nevertheless, it’s definitely a gripping read.