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Fan blades lazily rotate, doing little to stir thick air laced with antiseptic and human suffering. A singular wide window on the 14th floor, latticed with safety bars to prevent patients from throwing themselves into the great openness, lets in dull slate gray light from a rainy September afternoon.
Tick tick
On the far wall of an unimpressive hospital room, bedecked in varying muted shades of blue and beige, an analogue clock ticks loudly. Each staccato tick of its mechanism announced boldly to the room of all the seconds they were laying there, rotting away as the world forgot about them outside of those barred windows. Phil Graves had been counting each and everyone in the same way one might count sheep to fall asleep. Not that he was looking to do anything close to sleeping. Every time he closed his eyes, flames licked, and metal buckled under explosions; that tank collapsed in around Graves’s head. Actively avoiding sleep has become a point of contest between himself and the charge nurse, which he assumes Shepard had specifically assigned to him. If he were in her shoes, there wasn’t enough money to be dealing with a bastard like him. Pain never made Graves nice.
Tick tick
Not that there was much to do to occupy all this time he was stealing. Wrapped in bandages from neck to ankles, Graves didn’t have the luxury of extended ranges of motion. If anything, even reaching toward the plastic side table stressed the pink healing burn scars across his body, that razor-sharp stab of pain he’d get as a punishment for trying to lean and grasp at the various books piled there. When he’d first woken up there was a fair amount of surprise from the staff attending him. That alone should have raised every warning alarm in the Shadow Leader’s mind, if he hadn’t been on a hefty morphine drip at the time maybe he would have felt some of that panic. Instead eyes lazily blinked open, unfocused, tired, wet, and fingers gingerly lifted to garner some kind of attention. Which he instantly got as a nurse gasped before hustling out and fetching a doctor.
It was then they laid out the full architecture of his injuries. Burns were the larger bulk of damage he’d sustained from the tank explosion, however there were other additional closed trauma such as broken ribs, a partially collapsed lung, and the one they’d stressed to him would take the longest to heal, a closed head injury from the concussive blast of the tank itself. Of course, as he’d been walking out, the doctor tacked on ‘mental trauma’, which could have unknown side effects even long after Graves left this place and everything else healed.
Tick tick
Graves only saw that doctor occasionally now. Not much for him to do while the man was just laying there in bed waiting for his skin to coagulate back into skin instead of whatever hellish melted amalgamation it might be. As much as curiosity ate away at Graves’s insides, he hadn’t had the balls to actually lift up any of the bandages, and he usually wasn’t conscious when they changed them. What irked him, though, was that silly insinuation of mental trauma. Didn’t they know who he was? Phil Graves had been deployed to every sandy shit hole, every war torn jungle, beaches, deserts, mountains, arctic plains, if someone could think of it, he’d probably been there. Whether in the military or during his contracting career, he’d seen a lot of action. There wasn’t anything he hadn’t experienced or seen, and he was perfectly fine so far. Pride stinging at even the insinuation that there might be some kind of lingering issue just because someone tried to kill him? Ridiculous.
Tick tick
What would end up driving him insane is this damned clock, but there was also something about it which brought a bittersweet kind of comfort. After returning from a particularly trying overseas operation during the early years of his military career, the shadow leader found that some nightmares often bled into waking hours, too vivid to allow the mush of his exhausted mind to let them go as simply twisted memories his subconscious wove together. A sound or a wayward smell of smoke would bring those crashing to the forefront, suddenly making the young man unsure if he was awake or not. There was a slow disconnect between reality and those dreaming moments, his mind becoming unmoored from the safety of knowing he was awake and home in the States.
A solution presented itself in the form of a simple wristwatch. When in doubt, Graves would simply glance at the watch, then at some distant point before looking back. It was an innocuous enough gesture which made it seem he was simply checking the time when he knew that time worked differently in the dreaming state. Time would skip forward hours in between those momentary glances.
Tick tick
Unfortunately, now it only reminds him that this particular nightmare is real in every tangible way. Just as the simple black shoebox filled with dog tags sitting on his lap like Atlas’s Stone upon his back is painfully real. Shadow company had been fractured spectacularly in the siege on the base, dozens of his men dead in a single evening. Men that he’d chosen by hand, selected for their skills in the positions they filled. Experts in their field. Brothers in the sense of comradery and bonding through shared experiences. Names of friends who’d he’d been on countless deployments with, now nothing more than ash and punched steel. Sitting there swathed in yards of gauzy bandaging with the low ringing in his ears and the incessant ticking of that clock, Graves wishes he was just another name in this box. Any good leader goes down with his ship, with his company. A caustic kind of resentment crawls up through the damaged pieces left of Phil Graves, burning the aching tissue of his throat in a demanding way, wanting to be let loose as a scream, as anything. To give voice to this terrible emotion would make it too real, too overwhelming for the man who is little more than fresh pink skin and puckered burn scars tucked into a crisp white hospital bed. An insignificant soul in a building stuffed with hundreds of others with grief and anger just as palpable.
Tick tick
Muscle and skin screaming with such small movements, Graves reaches forward to gingerly pull the box closer to him, accepting its weight and reality fully now, unable to keep pretending it will simply disappear if he doesn’t look at it long enough. That small application of friction across abused thighs makes tears wet the edges of the Shadow Leader’s eyelashes, or what’s left of them. While his face had been thankfully spared the worst of the inferno’s rage, the tank explosion still singed nearly every follicle of hair from his head. Eyebrows, eyelashes, stubble, and large swaths of Graves’s ash blonde hair. Whatever had been left was summarily shaved off as the doctors and nurses worked to Frankenstein him back together. Now, slowly at first but whatever medications they’d been giving him bolstered the growth, it had begun to grow back. Downy soft blond hair decorated his scalp, making Graves look much like a fresh bootcamp inductee. He’s thankful his eyebrows had decided to grow back first to allow him to properly scowl at some of the nursing staff when they chastised him for any myriad of valid reasons, more often than not, his own stubbornness at keeping still or sleeping properly. Not that he’d particularly given a shit what they had to say. He wanted nothing more than to die already, this prolonged purgatory of hospital walls and rotating loops of bandages to hide his skin away was worse than anything hell had waiting. It would be less hassle for them as well. They’d be correcting Shepard's mistake in saving him.
Tick tick
Shakily taking the lid from its place and setting it aside, Graves makes a quiet, choked noise. Hot fumes and blast furnace air from the tank’s interior had scorched his vocal cords and esophagus. Reducing the Shadow Leader to a non-verbal status, which everyone assured him would be temporary if he allowed those affected parts to heal. Which translated to: shut the hell up and maybe you’ll speak again. This piece of advice Graves was dutifully adhering to thus far.
Raw fingertips graze over the haphazardly thrown dog tags. Some are marked with clods of dried mud, dark red from all the clay in the soil of the base they’d been forward stationed at. It reminded him of the mud puddles that would collect on the ranch back in southern Texas, even now he can smell the rain and that musty animal scent of horses in the distance. He hadn’t been home in over a year now. These men would never go home again. With soft metal clinks, his fingers traced over the tags; some were oxidizing, whereas others still had pieces bitten out of them by what Graves could only assume were bullets.
Chains hopelessly tangled together from whatever rough handling there had been to throw them in this box; the intertwined steel looks far too much like they’re clinging to one another for life. A wadded box of metal agony, shouting each name silently up at Graves. Selecting one out of that tangle is difficult, and shaking the others off felt like he was casting them aside again. First in life when they died for him, and now in death as they try to make themselves known. Thumb brushing away grime with a reverential touch, Graves looks at the name stamped into the tag. Into what might be all that’s left of this man.
“Beecher, Samuel. Shadow twelve.” Forcing damaged vocal cords to work out the syllables of this name, his throat violently protests this usage. His voice is nothing more than a rasping whisper hissing out into clammy hospital air, but giving sound to Sam’s name feels much like releasing his ghost. In his mind’s eye, Graves can see Sam’s face, boyish and light-haired, eyes that always held humour as if they shared some inside joke. A shadow shifts in the periphery of Graves’s vision, a pressing presence in that shade that looked too much like a soldier standing there in the wings of the room.
“Kruger, Francis. Shadow eight.”
“Schreck, John. Shadow fourteen.”
“Gibson, Wayne. Shadow fifteen.”
“Watkins, James. Shadow three.”
“Travino, Gerard. Shadow ten.”
“Maxwell, Liam. Shadow seven.”
Name after name. Graves tasted blood. He’d failed each of these men. Each of these friends. Each of these brothers, fathers, sons, nephews, uncles, husbands. He’d failed them all by lying here alive. He wanted to ignore the writhing darkness hemming in the edges of his vision, which felt too much like grasping hands. There’s nothing that the Shadow Leader wouldn’t give to rewind back to the moment he’d been yanked free from the tank, to slap away those arms, to stay there and go down with his ship. Screw Shepard, screw his entire operation. From every corner of the hospital room, with its fading light and lengthening darkness, eyes stare, wounds bleed, fingers point in accusation, fire roars in Graves’s ears.
“You left us.”
“You killed us.”
Whispers of dying and dead drown out the inferno’s din as Graves stares into the box as if he’s looking down into an open casket. His men stare back. Their bloody hands reach out to him, grasping, pulling, dragging. This can’t be real. Where was the clock?
Tick tick