Chapter Text
Shell shock.
That’s what they called it. Two letters from Sodapop had just turned his life on its head. They were burning a hole in his pocket, and he couldn’t feel a thing.
He’d been in a complete daze for the last hour, hearing a semblance of his friends’ muffled voices around him, but nothing could change what had just happened to him. His family. Nothing could make it better.
It was like moving through a fog. And he knew little else could be more dangerous in a war, but there was nothing else to be done. Paul was trying to talk to him, but Darry barely heard a thing. All he could do was get through today and get short leave from his commanding officer later so that he could get home and take care of his brothers. He could figure everything out then, make things permanent. He could—
Darry didn’t even feel the pain. One moment, he was on his feet, Paul and several of his other buddies beside him, the next moment, there was a sharp, high-pitched pop, a short boom, another high-pitched tearing sound, and Darry was on the ground. His ears were ringing. His chest was warm. It wasn’t until his shaking hand went to touch it that he realized he was bleeding. How much? He wasn’t sure. He blinked rapidly and coughed through the smoke and dust that billowed out after the explosion, climbing to his knees. He needed to get out of here. Where was Paul? Where was the rest of his troop? Wheezing, he began to crawl.
A shell. It had to be. Nothing else would have done something like this. He was lucky to even be breathing right now.
Darry felt around blindly, looking for an exit. The blast had both knocked him over and knocked him senseless; he barely knew which way was up and which way was down. The smoke had eased up a bit, and a hazy form made its way into his vision. A person! He crawled over as fast as he could, but just before he arrived, his hand hit something wet and squishy.
His stomach sank as his eyes followed the intestine all the way up to Paul’s shredded abdomen.
“No, no no no . . . Paul! Paul, answer me!”
Trembling, Darry gathered up his innards. Paul couldn’t be dead. He had to still be breathing, right? He just needed to put everything back and close the wound. He could do that. He ignored the way he already felt the muscle cooling underneath the slickness of its bloody coating. He ignored the way Paul’s face gradually grew paler, how he never blinked, as he desperately shoved his dirt-covered organs back into the huge hole the shell made in his side. He had to try. He couldn’t lose anyone else, he had to try—
But Paul would never wake up. Neither would any other man unlucky enough to be in the trench with him that day.
And just like that, the only people he had left on this side of the ocean were gone.
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BANG!
Darry winced, shoulders hunching in on themselves.
He hated his job. Every time he heard the sounds of metal grinding against metal, it brought him straight back to a few months ago, when he was surrounded by gunfire and death and that horrible goddamn sound. As a child, he’d wondered if soldiers who killed people for a good cause wound up in Heaven. He didn’t like to think about that now that he knew there was no such thing as killing for a good cause. He was damned to Hell, and he deserved it. If he could have quit his job, he would have—but Darry had two kid brothers to take care of, and if that meant he had to relive the worst days of his life over and over again, so be it.
Maybe this was just his penance, and he had to live with that. That shrapnel in his chest hadn’t killed him when the shell had killed everyone else. Hell, it hadn’t even wounded him enough to send him home.
The war had come to an armistice soon enough after that day, but it hadn’t changed what had already happened. No timeframe for the end of the war could erase any of Darry’s months spent over there. And nothing could erase all that still lingered in his mind from it.
He’d been back hardly any time at all. Seven weeks. And some days were certainly worse than others.
He flinched at yet another bang of dropped metal slats clattering as his crew disassembled a railcar for scrap metal.
Darry hastily excused himself, murmuring something about a drink of water. It was unusually warm for such an early day in January.
He went to the side, sitting down heavily, his whole body trembling as he tried to take a drink from his canteen. The water tasted like smoke and dust. He lowered his head, keeping his eyes shut, trying to breathe, trying to think of anything else but being back there.
He wasn’t sure if a minute or an hour had passed when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
He jumped, looking up to see his supervisor peering down at him.
Darry hastily pushed himself to his feet. “I’m—I’m sorry, sir,” he stammered. “Felt a bit lightheaded for a moment, I’ll get back to work, I’m sorry, sir—”
“Darrel.”
Darry lifted his head to look him in the eyes, finding that pity he saw in so many other gazes, that pity he hated, that pity he had to survive on, because there was little else to help him these days.
“Go home, Darrel.”
Darry shook his head. “No, sir, I’m not meaning to shirk any work.”
His supervisor sighed. “You’re not. I told you to go home. It’s not safe to work in the state you’re in. And I don’t blame you, but there aren’t going to be any injuries on my watch—yours or otherwise—not on my worksite. Do you understand? Rest. Come back tomorrow.”
Darry’s face blazed with shame. “Yes, sir.”
He quickly gathered his things and left, hoping the other men didn’t notice his absence. He needed to stop doing this. He needed to get a hold of himself. He had a family to support. He couldn’t let his own stupid brain get the better of him. He was twenty-two damn years old. He needed to start acting like it.
He hoped his brothers were having a better day than he was.
He’d thought coming home would at least help things a little. At least he’d be with his family again. At least he didn’t have to worry about death lurking around every corner. The flu was still around, but for the most part, it had run its course.
What he hadn’t expected upon coming home after a couple of weeks in a base hospital, then a couple more en route back to Boston, was to find that Ponyboy and Johnny had gotten sick, too. Badly.
After Ponyboy had gone to bed one night, Soda tearfully explained everything. How Mama and Papa had died. How Pony fell ill right after them. How Soda had found Johnny trying to get some rest on their front porch because his parents had kicked him out after realizing he was sick. How no matter how well Soda, Steve, Two-Bit, or Dally looked after the two of them, Soda was sure he had been about to watch both of them die.
But they hadn’t. Both Pony and Johnny’s lungs were all the worse for it now, but they had lived.
And thank God they had; Darry didn’t know what he would’ve done if he’d come home to the shock of finding Soda his only remaining family member.
No. Things had not been the same once he’d come home and retrieved his brothers from the orphanage. Things hadn’t even been good. They were all grieving in their own ways, and nothing was like it had been growing up.
Ponyboy looked at Darry sideways, like he was almost scared of him. Every day was another fight.
Soda was always desperately trying to keep the peace in a tumultuous household.
The rest of his friends treated him like they were walking on eggshells around him, afraid to make anything in his already unstable mind worse.
He dragged a hand down his face. At least he’d have the house to himself to calm down. At least Soda was at the factory with Steve. At least Ponyboy was at school. Darry could get something to eat, lie down, and try anything he could to forget his miserable life.
When he opened the door to his house, he froze in shock to see none other than his youngest brother rooting through the cupboard, Johnny Cade not standing far away.
Darry stiffened, still shaking from earlier, and everything that had been gathering from the past few hours bubbled over. He couldn’t be ever-loving serious. Playing hooky? The kid knew better. This was the last thing any of them needed today.
"Ponyboy Michael Curtis!" he snapped.