[Challenge 007] Unseen
Title: Unseen
Game: FE8
Word Count: 2,387
Characters/Pairing: Seth/Eirika
Note: AU World War I-esque setting. This is a companion piece to Grey which I posted recently. However, I wrote this piece in such a way that it should function as a stand-alone piece as well.
Also on ffnet here.
Unseen
"Try to get some sleep, Major," the nurse said before she put out the lights. "You need your rest to get well."
Fine words indeed from his chief tormentor, Seth thought. The darkness settled over the medical ward as she left, and soon there were snores coming from every quarter. Seth kept his eyes open until they adjusted to the scant light.
His leg ached. Sometimes – especially in the morning when they came to clean the wound – he wished they had taken the leg off completely.
Though the bullet that had hit his left leg had gone straight through, there was great risk of infection from the microbes in the very soil on which they'd fought, farmers' fields that for centuries had been enriched with animal dung. The doctors' solution? Drainage holes: cut away the flesh from the entry and exit wounds and leave a hole in the limb so oxygen could kill off the infection. Every morning, to clean the wound they pulled a sterile cord through the hole in his limb and then left it there overnight. It hurt worse than being shot had.
Someone to his left launched into a coughing fit that eventually faded into a wheeze and finally a snore. Still Seth kept his eyes open. Even here, far from the front lines, he thought he could hear the blast of exploding shells.
The white sheets of the empty bed across the aisle were visible while all else remained a vague, grey-black outline. He raised his eyes to the ceiling as rain began to patter the hospital rooftop. Before the war, back home in Renais, he had found the tinkle of raindrops soothing, but now it grated on his nerves like nothing else. He had spent too many days and nights soaked to the skin, his feet frozen as water turned the bottom of his trench into a muddy pit.
At the far end of the ward, someone moaned and then cried out. There was a rustle of sheets as the man sat up and then, after several minutes, lay down again. But Seth was used to that. It was commonplace in the dugouts where he'd spent his nights until recently. There was not a soldier in the trenches, even among the officers, who could say he'd never been visited by nightmares – not truthfully in any case.
Officers' dugout were relatively comfortable, though even the officers reeked in the summer for lack of water to wash with. In autumn and winter, though, everything just smelled of damp rot. He remembered once nearly a year ago during his first winter in the trenches, sitting at the central table holding a package wrapped with brown paper with his name on it. He'd sliced it open with his belt knife and revealed the contents. Shaving cream, woolen socks, chewing gum, toothpaste, and something else, carefully wrapped. A treat.
A pair of lieutenants came by and saluted stiffly as they saw him before heading to the opposite end of the dugout to chat in low tones. Seth's eyes followed them a moment but then returned to the item in his hand. He unwrapped it with care and, in spite of the ache of his frozen feet and the distant rumble of shelling further down the line, he smiled at the hunk of rum-soaked fruitcake. Though letters reached the front easily, packages were another matter and many a soldier was left peeling green fuzz off food sent to him from home. But fruitcake? That would stay good until a week after doomsday.
"Clever girl."
Seth glanced over his shoulder when he heard footsteps on the stairway leading into the bowels of the earth to their shellproof dugout. "Good day, Major," Captain Garcia said with a salute as he reached the final step and noticed Seth there.
"Captain, come join me," Seth said, motioning to another chair. Garcia hesitated a moment but then took a seat, his spine straight, hands in his lap. "At ease," Seth said with a sigh.
Garcia relaxed – slightly – and leaned back into the chair. "What can I do for you, Major?"
"I've gotten something from home," he said and, slicing off a piece of cake with his knife, offered it to Garcia. Garcia's eyes darted from the cake to Seth's face as if Seth had offered him a grenade with the pin already pulled. "Please," Seth said quietly. "I should be ashamed to be the only man not to share his treats."
Garcia nodded then and took the cake, popping it into his mouth and chewing slowly. Fruit and sweets were something even the officers rarely saw on the front lines, though they were lucky enough to get more than the tinned beef and biscuits that were the usual fare for the men. "I know the other officers are a bit skittish," Garcia said, "but they're just a little overawed."
"Because of my previous rank."
"Mmm. They're not used to dealing with generals. And you were King Fado's right hand no less."
"I'm only a major now."
"As you say, sir," Garcia replied with the hint of a smile. Seth heaved a sigh. "Pardon my asking, Major," Garcia began as he chewed on another piece, "but who sent the cake?"
"Hmm?" Seth glanced away for a moment and swallowed another mouthful. "Oh. It was Eirika," he replied at which point Garcia nearly choked and had to reach for the canteen of water at his belt.
"The princess?"
"Yes," Seth replied, knowing that this was not helping his cause of making himself seem like a normal officer. "I'm sure she didn't make it herself, of course." And then, at the horrified expression on Garcia's face, "I don't have any family anymore, so she offered to send care packages to me as well as to her brother." He did not mention the fact that he'd been courting her before the war with Imperial Grado had broken out.
After that, though, he'd always managed to share his packages with Garcia, though the Captain was embarrassed to be unable to return the favour. His son Ross was his only family and the boy had enlisted, much to Garcia's distress.
As Seth thought on it, while he lay in the darkness of the hospital ward, his eyelids began to grow leaden in spite of himself. The tin and timber of the dugout melted into the mud and sandbags of the trenches...
#
Seth shot up into sitting position, his breath coming in pants, his body covered with a sheen of sweat even as the dream released him from it steely grip. He was shaking.
He started as he felt a hand on his arm. "Seth?"
"Eirika? What are you doing here?" He tried to keep his voice down, but he heard the man in the next bed shift restlessly. Straining to see in the dark, he could just make out her features. It was still strange to see her with her hair cropped. At least she was no longer in a uniform.
"I snuck in," she replied.
Seth groaned. "It's a wonder anyone really believed you were a lieutenant."
"I did go through basic training along with Ephraim, you know. We took it seriously." And then, very quietly, "More seriously than anyone believed."
Seth had been appalled when Ephraim had insisted on fighting in the front lines. With King Fado dead, Ephraim was now the head of state, even if he was a head of state in exile. But that did not compare to the horror he'd experienced a scant few days ago when he'd seen Eirika march into his trench in the garb of a Frelian soldier.
"The nurse said you hadn't been sleeping," Eirika said after a minute's silence. Seth grunted. The darkness lay heavy before his eyes but he could still see the nightmare all too well. "Bad dreams?" He did not reply. She reached out to touch his arm again, something she would never have dared to do before the war. Their courtship had been new and tentative still when Grado had launched its sudden invasion. Though they had exchanged letters steadily, he had not seen her in over a year.
"I didn't sleep well for days after the fighting in Mulan," she confessed. His chest constricted at the words. While trying to reach him, she had managed to end up on the firing line in a battle that had cost the Renais and Frelian armies several thousand troops. He could see her in his mind's eye, firing her rifle, charging enemy lines, diving into the dirt for cover, see the bullets that had grazed her. A mere centimetre from death, a dozen times over. He felt cold beneath his sheets.
"I had the same nightmare over and over," she continued. "I kept seeing myself on the battlefield again. The air was so thick with bullets and shrapnel that it was like hail. And my rifle locked up. Or it was out of bullets. Or I had lost it. Every time I closed my eyes I saw myself there with no weapon and no cover." Her voice quavered as she spoke.
Seth could barely see her in the darkness but he reached out to touch her face, to know she was real and not a spectre. Her skin was warm beneath his fingertips. "At first," she said, her voice now only a faint whisper, "during the fighting... I wished you were there with me– to protect me. And then I was glad that you weren't. I was glad you were somewhere else, somewhere safe– or safer in any case."
"You should go back to Frelia."
"No. Not until I know what's become of Ephraim."
"Eirika–"
"I need to find Ephraim. And if– if anything's happened to him, I need to finish what he began and find this weapon Grado's working on– the Dark Stone."
To this he said nothing. He clenched his fists and sat in silence on his hospital bed, staring at the woolen blankets, grey in the dim light, trying to ward off the vision that came whenever he closed his eyes. A year he'd been on the front and he'd seen things that should never be seen. He had watched shells tear men's limb's from their torsos, seen rats as big as rabbits, gorged on the flesh of unburied soldiers in no man's land, found pieces of fallen men when digging new trenches. The front was not a battlefield any longer, but a charnel house.
"And you're going to help me as soon as you're well enough to hobble around on crutches. Which means you need to get your rest."
"No."
"Seth–"
"No," he said again, more sharply this time.
She leaned close, both hands gripping his forearm. "I know the dreams are bad. But it'll get better once you're more rested, once–"
"Don't you understand?" he cut in, turning to glower at her through the darkness. "All those times when we were being shelled– for hours at a time– shot at– when– " He clenched the blanket in balled fists, trying to steady his voice, to speak quietly before he woke the whole ward. "The only thing I could take comfort in was that you were safe. Now I feel I'll go mad for worrying."
"I'm right here," she said, leaning in to hold his face in her hands. "I'm safe."
"But you weren't then. I was imagining you safe in Frelia and all the while you were at Mulan. You were– How could you do this? How could you?" He had snagged her arms before she could pull away. She dropped her eyes.
"I didn't want this, Seth. Believe me. Please." Her head drooped, shoulders sagging. "If I could do it over, if I could..." Her shoulders shuddered and he was torn between the desire to shake some good sense into her and the desire to wrap her in his arms and offer what comfort he could. When she looked up at him again he thought he could see a glimmer of tears on her cheeks. "I can't unsee the things I've seen." She shut her eyes a moment. "Or undo the things I've done," she whispered.
Still gripping her forearms, he leaned his brow against hers. For several minutes they remained like that and all he could do was revel in the sound of her steady breathing. When he found the nerve to speak again it was in a hushed whisper. "Whenever I close my eyes what I see is you. I see you– hurt. Or worse. And I can never stop it. I can never do anything. I see– All the ways I've seen soldiers die, I see you– I see your face instead of theirs."
He didn't think he would ever find the words to describe the horror that overcame him in those dreams, so powerful that he woke queasy, his heart racing as if it would beat itself out of his chest. He'd seen her bayoneted, shredded by shrapnel, blown to pieces by shells. Every wound he had seen in a year on the front, he now saw on her. And always he was relegated to watching, helpless to stop it, to save her.
In the darkness, it was difficult to read her features as she pulled away from him. He opened his mouth to speak, afraid that he had said too much, and was startled when she moved from her chair to sit on the edge of his bed. And even more so when she drew back his blankets and lay down next to him – on his right side, away from his injured leg. There was hardly space for two on the narrow hospital bed but she curled in close to him and automatically his arms moved to wind around her.
"I'm here," she whispered, her breath hot against his neck. "I'm safe. Now go to sleep and get better."
The nurse will have a fit in the morning.
But that seemed a trivial concern as the steady rhythm of Eirika's breaths soothed his frayed nerves and lulled him to sleep. She was warm and soft in his arms and he thought that perhaps the sheer aliveness of her might be enough to fend off the nightmares, to make him, at least until daylight, unsee.
Game: FE8
Word Count: 2,387
Characters/Pairing: Seth/Eirika
Note: AU World War I-esque setting. This is a companion piece to Grey which I posted recently. However, I wrote this piece in such a way that it should function as a stand-alone piece as well.
Also on ffnet here.
"Try to get some sleep, Major," the nurse said before she put out the lights. "You need your rest to get well."
Fine words indeed from his chief tormentor, Seth thought. The darkness settled over the medical ward as she left, and soon there were snores coming from every quarter. Seth kept his eyes open until they adjusted to the scant light.
His leg ached. Sometimes – especially in the morning when they came to clean the wound – he wished they had taken the leg off completely.
Though the bullet that had hit his left leg had gone straight through, there was great risk of infection from the microbes in the very soil on which they'd fought, farmers' fields that for centuries had been enriched with animal dung. The doctors' solution? Drainage holes: cut away the flesh from the entry and exit wounds and leave a hole in the limb so oxygen could kill off the infection. Every morning, to clean the wound they pulled a sterile cord through the hole in his limb and then left it there overnight. It hurt worse than being shot had.
Someone to his left launched into a coughing fit that eventually faded into a wheeze and finally a snore. Still Seth kept his eyes open. Even here, far from the front lines, he thought he could hear the blast of exploding shells.
The white sheets of the empty bed across the aisle were visible while all else remained a vague, grey-black outline. He raised his eyes to the ceiling as rain began to patter the hospital rooftop. Before the war, back home in Renais, he had found the tinkle of raindrops soothing, but now it grated on his nerves like nothing else. He had spent too many days and nights soaked to the skin, his feet frozen as water turned the bottom of his trench into a muddy pit.
At the far end of the ward, someone moaned and then cried out. There was a rustle of sheets as the man sat up and then, after several minutes, lay down again. But Seth was used to that. It was commonplace in the dugouts where he'd spent his nights until recently. There was not a soldier in the trenches, even among the officers, who could say he'd never been visited by nightmares – not truthfully in any case.
Officers' dugout were relatively comfortable, though even the officers reeked in the summer for lack of water to wash with. In autumn and winter, though, everything just smelled of damp rot. He remembered once nearly a year ago during his first winter in the trenches, sitting at the central table holding a package wrapped with brown paper with his name on it. He'd sliced it open with his belt knife and revealed the contents. Shaving cream, woolen socks, chewing gum, toothpaste, and something else, carefully wrapped. A treat.
A pair of lieutenants came by and saluted stiffly as they saw him before heading to the opposite end of the dugout to chat in low tones. Seth's eyes followed them a moment but then returned to the item in his hand. He unwrapped it with care and, in spite of the ache of his frozen feet and the distant rumble of shelling further down the line, he smiled at the hunk of rum-soaked fruitcake. Though letters reached the front easily, packages were another matter and many a soldier was left peeling green fuzz off food sent to him from home. But fruitcake? That would stay good until a week after doomsday.
"Clever girl."
Seth glanced over his shoulder when he heard footsteps on the stairway leading into the bowels of the earth to their shellproof dugout. "Good day, Major," Captain Garcia said with a salute as he reached the final step and noticed Seth there.
"Captain, come join me," Seth said, motioning to another chair. Garcia hesitated a moment but then took a seat, his spine straight, hands in his lap. "At ease," Seth said with a sigh.
Garcia relaxed – slightly – and leaned back into the chair. "What can I do for you, Major?"
"I've gotten something from home," he said and, slicing off a piece of cake with his knife, offered it to Garcia. Garcia's eyes darted from the cake to Seth's face as if Seth had offered him a grenade with the pin already pulled. "Please," Seth said quietly. "I should be ashamed to be the only man not to share his treats."
Garcia nodded then and took the cake, popping it into his mouth and chewing slowly. Fruit and sweets were something even the officers rarely saw on the front lines, though they were lucky enough to get more than the tinned beef and biscuits that were the usual fare for the men. "I know the other officers are a bit skittish," Garcia said, "but they're just a little overawed."
"Because of my previous rank."
"Mmm. They're not used to dealing with generals. And you were King Fado's right hand no less."
"I'm only a major now."
"As you say, sir," Garcia replied with the hint of a smile. Seth heaved a sigh. "Pardon my asking, Major," Garcia began as he chewed on another piece, "but who sent the cake?"
"Hmm?" Seth glanced away for a moment and swallowed another mouthful. "Oh. It was Eirika," he replied at which point Garcia nearly choked and had to reach for the canteen of water at his belt.
"The princess?"
"Yes," Seth replied, knowing that this was not helping his cause of making himself seem like a normal officer. "I'm sure she didn't make it herself, of course." And then, at the horrified expression on Garcia's face, "I don't have any family anymore, so she offered to send care packages to me as well as to her brother." He did not mention the fact that he'd been courting her before the war with Imperial Grado had broken out.
After that, though, he'd always managed to share his packages with Garcia, though the Captain was embarrassed to be unable to return the favour. His son Ross was his only family and the boy had enlisted, much to Garcia's distress.
As Seth thought on it, while he lay in the darkness of the hospital ward, his eyelids began to grow leaden in spite of himself. The tin and timber of the dugout melted into the mud and sandbags of the trenches...
Seth shot up into sitting position, his breath coming in pants, his body covered with a sheen of sweat even as the dream released him from it steely grip. He was shaking.
He started as he felt a hand on his arm. "Seth?"
"Eirika? What are you doing here?" He tried to keep his voice down, but he heard the man in the next bed shift restlessly. Straining to see in the dark, he could just make out her features. It was still strange to see her with her hair cropped. At least she was no longer in a uniform.
"I snuck in," she replied.
Seth groaned. "It's a wonder anyone really believed you were a lieutenant."
"I did go through basic training along with Ephraim, you know. We took it seriously." And then, very quietly, "More seriously than anyone believed."
Seth had been appalled when Ephraim had insisted on fighting in the front lines. With King Fado dead, Ephraim was now the head of state, even if he was a head of state in exile. But that did not compare to the horror he'd experienced a scant few days ago when he'd seen Eirika march into his trench in the garb of a Frelian soldier.
"The nurse said you hadn't been sleeping," Eirika said after a minute's silence. Seth grunted. The darkness lay heavy before his eyes but he could still see the nightmare all too well. "Bad dreams?" He did not reply. She reached out to touch his arm again, something she would never have dared to do before the war. Their courtship had been new and tentative still when Grado had launched its sudden invasion. Though they had exchanged letters steadily, he had not seen her in over a year.
"I didn't sleep well for days after the fighting in Mulan," she confessed. His chest constricted at the words. While trying to reach him, she had managed to end up on the firing line in a battle that had cost the Renais and Frelian armies several thousand troops. He could see her in his mind's eye, firing her rifle, charging enemy lines, diving into the dirt for cover, see the bullets that had grazed her. A mere centimetre from death, a dozen times over. He felt cold beneath his sheets.
"I had the same nightmare over and over," she continued. "I kept seeing myself on the battlefield again. The air was so thick with bullets and shrapnel that it was like hail. And my rifle locked up. Or it was out of bullets. Or I had lost it. Every time I closed my eyes I saw myself there with no weapon and no cover." Her voice quavered as she spoke.
Seth could barely see her in the darkness but he reached out to touch her face, to know she was real and not a spectre. Her skin was warm beneath his fingertips. "At first," she said, her voice now only a faint whisper, "during the fighting... I wished you were there with me– to protect me. And then I was glad that you weren't. I was glad you were somewhere else, somewhere safe– or safer in any case."
"You should go back to Frelia."
"No. Not until I know what's become of Ephraim."
"Eirika–"
"I need to find Ephraim. And if– if anything's happened to him, I need to finish what he began and find this weapon Grado's working on– the Dark Stone."
To this he said nothing. He clenched his fists and sat in silence on his hospital bed, staring at the woolen blankets, grey in the dim light, trying to ward off the vision that came whenever he closed his eyes. A year he'd been on the front and he'd seen things that should never be seen. He had watched shells tear men's limb's from their torsos, seen rats as big as rabbits, gorged on the flesh of unburied soldiers in no man's land, found pieces of fallen men when digging new trenches. The front was not a battlefield any longer, but a charnel house.
"And you're going to help me as soon as you're well enough to hobble around on crutches. Which means you need to get your rest."
"No."
"Seth–"
"No," he said again, more sharply this time.
She leaned close, both hands gripping his forearm. "I know the dreams are bad. But it'll get better once you're more rested, once–"
"Don't you understand?" he cut in, turning to glower at her through the darkness. "All those times when we were being shelled– for hours at a time– shot at– when– " He clenched the blanket in balled fists, trying to steady his voice, to speak quietly before he woke the whole ward. "The only thing I could take comfort in was that you were safe. Now I feel I'll go mad for worrying."
"I'm right here," she said, leaning in to hold his face in her hands. "I'm safe."
"But you weren't then. I was imagining you safe in Frelia and all the while you were at Mulan. You were– How could you do this? How could you?" He had snagged her arms before she could pull away. She dropped her eyes.
"I didn't want this, Seth. Believe me. Please." Her head drooped, shoulders sagging. "If I could do it over, if I could..." Her shoulders shuddered and he was torn between the desire to shake some good sense into her and the desire to wrap her in his arms and offer what comfort he could. When she looked up at him again he thought he could see a glimmer of tears on her cheeks. "I can't unsee the things I've seen." She shut her eyes a moment. "Or undo the things I've done," she whispered.
Still gripping her forearms, he leaned his brow against hers. For several minutes they remained like that and all he could do was revel in the sound of her steady breathing. When he found the nerve to speak again it was in a hushed whisper. "Whenever I close my eyes what I see is you. I see you– hurt. Or worse. And I can never stop it. I can never do anything. I see– All the ways I've seen soldiers die, I see you– I see your face instead of theirs."
He didn't think he would ever find the words to describe the horror that overcame him in those dreams, so powerful that he woke queasy, his heart racing as if it would beat itself out of his chest. He'd seen her bayoneted, shredded by shrapnel, blown to pieces by shells. Every wound he had seen in a year on the front, he now saw on her. And always he was relegated to watching, helpless to stop it, to save her.
In the darkness, it was difficult to read her features as she pulled away from him. He opened his mouth to speak, afraid that he had said too much, and was startled when she moved from her chair to sit on the edge of his bed. And even more so when she drew back his blankets and lay down next to him – on his right side, away from his injured leg. There was hardly space for two on the narrow hospital bed but she curled in close to him and automatically his arms moved to wind around her.
"I'm here," she whispered, her breath hot against his neck. "I'm safe. Now go to sleep and get better."
The nurse will have a fit in the morning.
But that seemed a trivial concern as the steady rhythm of Eirika's breaths soothed his frayed nerves and lulled him to sleep. She was warm and soft in his arms and he thought that perhaps the sheer aliveness of her might be enough to fend off the nightmares, to make him, at least until daylight, unsee.