(no subject)
Title: Mêlée (1/5)
Author: hawk1701
Prompt: 214. Wilson finds himself in a war trench and House is his Colonel.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Parings: H/ W, AU
Warnings: violence, blood, a few swear words.
Disclaimer: Kraft Macaroni and Cheese at 49 cents a box is pushing it for me . . . how could I own House?
Authors’ Notes: I am not a history major. I don't know a horrible lot about WW1, so I'd just like to say that I don't claim to know everything about it, any mistakes or errors are completely mine and I really hope they don't take away from the story. This is my first AU, so it's a bit nerve racking.
And again, this story is dedicated to youngfreak92, *love*. All the parts are done, I'll post them every other day or so.
“Larson! God damn it!” I screamed as my fingers scrambled frantically around inside his neck, searching for the other end of the artery that had been severed in the last blast.
Can’t find it, can’t find it, come on, just find it, find it-damn it! Damn it!
A blast not thirty feet from us almost made me fall off my knees, the roar in my ears deafening, crippling, as I recovered and threw myself over Larson’s body, one hand still in his neck, pinching the severed end of his jugular.
Dirt rained over us. Screams. Gun fire.
My fingers slipped, faltered-sticky blood and shredded bits of flesh slid around like so much raw meat under my fingertips. I couldn’t hold on to anything!
Larson sputtered blood; it hit my face like rain, dripping down my cheeks. Blood was soaking through my sleeves to my skin, climbing up the wool of my uniform, all the way up to my elbows. Out of him onto me. Gushing out of him. His panicked heart was franticly pumping it from his body with no where for to go. It wouldn’t stop. Have to find the artery, have to hold it off. Come on, Wilson, I begged myself, you can do it, you can do it.
“Hang in there, Larson!” I ordered him, sobbing, my tongue thick in my mouth. All I could hear was ringing. The bombs had deafened me. He probably can’t hear me. He can’t even hear his own screams.
Another spread of machine-gun fire struck our area and I did the best I could to keep the resulting debris from getting into the wound, feeling the dirt fall all over my back instead, down the neck of my uniform.
My hand suddenly slipped from his neck. I lost the one end. God damn! Dirt crunched under my teeth, my boots were full of water, eyes squeezed shut, dust and smoke and gunpowder filled my lungs. I couldn’t breath. I realized suddenly that our combined weight was sinking us further down into the mud.
Stop! Stop firing! I begged silently, knowing they’d have to reload soon, it’d give me a few minutes, I only needed a few minutes.
Suddenly I realized my chest felt hot. It was Larson’s blood. The bullet that had hit his neck, barely one minute after we’d jumped from the trenches, had severed his jugular and almost decapitated him. The artery was spouting blood and since I was on top of him, shielding him from debris, it was covering me.
Firing stopped. They were reloading. I was on Larson again, hands at his neck. Oh god, what’s left of it. There’s just a few strings of flesh and his trachea, everything else was-but he’s still breathing. He’s breathing. His eyes looked up into mine, his teeth red with blood, his whole face a mask of crimson except his eyes. His eyes are blue. So scared. Terrified. Each breath he took was forcing more blood out of him. But he was looking at me. He was looking at me. I started mouthing “no” over and over as he took three sharp wet, breaking gasps and his mouth hung open, jaw locked, tear filled eyes locked into mine, blinking once, twice, then-
“Tim!” I screamed, “Tim, don’t do this!!” I shook him, shook him hard, “No!! No, no, no, no, no!!” My cheek met the front of his uniform and I knew I was sobbing.
“Wilson!!” I heard, just barely, the voice a million miles away through the ringing in my ears, “Sergeant!!” A hand was at my shoulder, fingers like iron, “Wilson we need you!”
I put a bloody hand over my mouth, the other still clinging to Larson’s uniform. Don’t make me leave him. No, I’m not leaving him! If I do we’ll never get him back! He’ll get carted off and thrown in a grave somewhere! But the hand still dragged at my uniform until I fell back off my knees and kept pulling. With one last effort I surged forward and tore at the outside of Larson’s uniform, frantic, and managed to tear off one of his rank insignia from his singed and bloody collar, and gave in to the other pulling me.
I left him. I’m a medic. There were other lives to save. He was already dead.
That was a week ago. It was the most action we’d seen in months and now it was over. Over and we were back in the trenches. I never thought I’d be happy to see them again. We’d lost a lot of people. Too many people. But more kept coming. More and more. Each time we lost a batch of young men a new set popped up.
We’d lost our Colonel. Colonel Green. They were sending someone to replace him, apparently. Probably some fat, pretentious, swaggering asshole that had spent the last few years of his promotion picking bits of fig out of his teeth.
And now? Now I’m drinking. One of the boys . . . Robertson I think-well, he got a bottle of something and since he knew that Larson had . . . had . . . he offered it to me. God damn it there’s nothing else to do. Nothing.
Every scorching gulp made its way down my throat, into my stomach, my liver be damned. I don’t care. I don’t give a shit. I rolled my liquor coated tongue around my mouth, raising a numb, clumsy hand to my forehead to push through damp, sweaty hair. I just don’t care anymore . . .
Oh god, Tim, I thought, miserably pulling at my hair . . . I couldn’t save you . . . I couldn’t.
If only . . . oh, god, if only it were me . . . if I had taken that bullet . . . if it had been me . . .
I took another drink, eyes rolling shut, swaying on my cot where I was sitting, back up against the wall. I sniffed, realizing snot was running from my nose, fighting tears that had been battling my own stubbornness, my own messed up sense of worthiness, the very thing that had gotten me into this mess, and even though I wasn’t making a sound the tears fell.
I’d . . . we’d . . . Tim and I . . . Christ . . . oh, god, he’s dead . . . I left him, I left him on that field . . . oh god, his mom, his mom will . . . she’ll want . . . my finger slid inside my tunic pocket and I found the warm piece of metal . . .
Saw movement out of the corner of my eye and another figure came fuzzily into view through my squinted eyes. Who was that? Everything’s dark anyway. It’s always dark in the trenches. Dark and dead. Or almost dead. We were dead already. I thought about Tim. If there was something after, if this isn’t all there is . . . I hope he’ll be there . . . if I was already dead, then . . .
“Hey Wilson,” the figure said. It made noise. So it must be a person. What did it want?
“Wilson . . . ” it chanted and I frowned, recognizing my name and recognizing the sludge I was wading through to focus.
“Hey,” it said again, “You alright, buddy?”
“Fine,” I mumbled, sliding my hand up to my neck. It was Cooper. Cooper. He was . . . he was a friend. As much as friends could be here. When it came down to it we all hated it here. We’d believed in the same lie. That made us all fools. Fools together. That was comforting wasn’t it?
“Yeah right,” he responded, “You sure look fine.”
That was sarcasm right? “What?!” I asked defensively, “Can’t a man drink? I mean, it’s not like we’re doing anything.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, sitting down across from me on his bunk, “Go ahead, get it off your chest.”
“What da’ya mean by that?” I asked, rolling my eyes up to look at him. He was untying the laces on his boots. And he shrugged. Ah, trying for the casual, buddy approach. Nice. Yeah, I’ll just get this off my chest, no big deal, I’ll go and cry on your shoulder. Fuck you, I thought. Just fuck off.
“I mean about Larson,” he said.
My eyes closed. That name. He said it like lemon juice on a wound. Lemonade he was enjoying on a hot summer day while it stung and burned in my still open wound. Bastard. Was he trying to be supportive? The fuck he was . . .
“What about him?” I asked, voice slurring horribly.
“He was your friend.”
“Yeah,” I breathed, eyes lowering to the dirt floor, to my boots which I’d cleaned but were still cracked and caked with blood and mud, “He was,” I upturned the bottle and drank more, feeling some of it drip from the corner of my lip, wiping it away, “He was my friend,” my voice cracked.
“I’m sorry,” Cooper said.
I laughed, opening my eyes, “You have no idea . . .”
“Maybe I do,” he said, positioning his boots near the end of his cot, neat and in a line, then raised his elbows to his knees and thought for a moment, “I still can’t believe it . . . I just don’t know how it wasn’t me . . . it could have been any of us . . .”
I stared at him, eyes unfocused and almost half closed. He kept talking, voice low and pained, “Why did that bullet hit him? Why not me? Why not you? It’s all chance . . . but why, why him . . . doesn’t make sense . . . there’s no sense to any of it . . . it could have been any of us . . . the bell was for him this time, but next time . . . ” he paused, eyes lowering, “Next time someone will be writing my mom, telling her I’m . . .” he shook his head, tugging off his coat, throwing it at the end of his bed, “Hey, can I have a drink of that?”
“Yeah,” I said, reaching my arm out across the gap.
“Thanks,” he answered, taking a gulp. He lowered the bottle and wiped his lips, “God, I needed that . . .” he paused, holding the moment like someone would hold a sleeping friend, easily, patiently, “You ever think . . ” he wondered, ‘You ever think about what’s going to happen?”
“What’da’ya mean?” I asked.
He took another drink. Then another. “You ever think about what’s going to happen when this is over?”
“What? When we win?”
“No, not necessarily . . . just, when it’s over . . .”
“It’ll never be over.”
“No, I mean, do you ever think about getting out of here . . . or . . . or do you just expect . . . expect to die?”
I laughed, “I don’t think of the future . . . there is none . . . I don’t have some girl waiting for me, I don’t have a shop somewhere that my dad owns that I’m going to run,” I pressed my lips together, breathing through my nose, “I just have that bullet . . . that bullet waiting for me . . . it’s just a question of when . . .”
“You never dream about life after the war?”
“Maybe,” I answered. I’d thought about it. Images of Tim flipped through my mind. Already faded and dull and tattered. Photographs that I’ll look at years from now. I pictured us on a boat somewhere . . . his god damn fishing boat that his family had in Michigan . . . I’d always told him I got sea sick . . .
“I do . . .” Cooper was saying, “I think about getting out . . .” he took another drink, wincing, “Except . . .except when I do that I can’t remember why I got in . . .why did we get into this?”
“Love,” I said.
He laughed, “That’s shit.”
“No,” I said, “It’s true . . . we got into this for love . . . for love of country . . . when people take away what we love we fight for it . . . ”
“Damn Huns,” Cooper sighed, taking another drink then passing it back to me. I accepted it, gratefully.
I’d lost enough today. Too much. I’d lost . . . I’d lost more than a friend . . . I’d lost a future . . . I’d lost something to look forward to . . . I’d lost something to fight for . . . I’d lost a reason to keep going . . .
Eventually I slumped down in my bed. I don’t even remember my eyes closing . . .
Author: hawk1701
Prompt: 214. Wilson finds himself in a war trench and House is his Colonel.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Parings: H/ W, AU
Warnings: violence, blood, a few swear words.
Disclaimer: Kraft Macaroni and Cheese at 49 cents a box is pushing it for me . . . how could I own House?
Authors’ Notes: I am not a history major. I don't know a horrible lot about WW1, so I'd just like to say that I don't claim to know everything about it, any mistakes or errors are completely mine and I really hope they don't take away from the story. This is my first AU, so it's a bit nerve racking.
And again, this story is dedicated to youngfreak92, *love*. All the parts are done, I'll post them every other day or so.
“Larson! God damn it!” I screamed as my fingers scrambled frantically around inside his neck, searching for the other end of the artery that had been severed in the last blast.
Can’t find it, can’t find it, come on, just find it, find it-damn it! Damn it!
A blast not thirty feet from us almost made me fall off my knees, the roar in my ears deafening, crippling, as I recovered and threw myself over Larson’s body, one hand still in his neck, pinching the severed end of his jugular.
Dirt rained over us. Screams. Gun fire.
My fingers slipped, faltered-sticky blood and shredded bits of flesh slid around like so much raw meat under my fingertips. I couldn’t hold on to anything!
Larson sputtered blood; it hit my face like rain, dripping down my cheeks. Blood was soaking through my sleeves to my skin, climbing up the wool of my uniform, all the way up to my elbows. Out of him onto me. Gushing out of him. His panicked heart was franticly pumping it from his body with no where for to go. It wouldn’t stop. Have to find the artery, have to hold it off. Come on, Wilson, I begged myself, you can do it, you can do it.
“Hang in there, Larson!” I ordered him, sobbing, my tongue thick in my mouth. All I could hear was ringing. The bombs had deafened me. He probably can’t hear me. He can’t even hear his own screams.
Another spread of machine-gun fire struck our area and I did the best I could to keep the resulting debris from getting into the wound, feeling the dirt fall all over my back instead, down the neck of my uniform.
My hand suddenly slipped from his neck. I lost the one end. God damn! Dirt crunched under my teeth, my boots were full of water, eyes squeezed shut, dust and smoke and gunpowder filled my lungs. I couldn’t breath. I realized suddenly that our combined weight was sinking us further down into the mud.
Stop! Stop firing! I begged silently, knowing they’d have to reload soon, it’d give me a few minutes, I only needed a few minutes.
Suddenly I realized my chest felt hot. It was Larson’s blood. The bullet that had hit his neck, barely one minute after we’d jumped from the trenches, had severed his jugular and almost decapitated him. The artery was spouting blood and since I was on top of him, shielding him from debris, it was covering me.
Firing stopped. They were reloading. I was on Larson again, hands at his neck. Oh god, what’s left of it. There’s just a few strings of flesh and his trachea, everything else was-but he’s still breathing. He’s breathing. His eyes looked up into mine, his teeth red with blood, his whole face a mask of crimson except his eyes. His eyes are blue. So scared. Terrified. Each breath he took was forcing more blood out of him. But he was looking at me. He was looking at me. I started mouthing “no” over and over as he took three sharp wet, breaking gasps and his mouth hung open, jaw locked, tear filled eyes locked into mine, blinking once, twice, then-
“Tim!” I screamed, “Tim, don’t do this!!” I shook him, shook him hard, “No!! No, no, no, no, no!!” My cheek met the front of his uniform and I knew I was sobbing.
“Wilson!!” I heard, just barely, the voice a million miles away through the ringing in my ears, “Sergeant!!” A hand was at my shoulder, fingers like iron, “Wilson we need you!”
I put a bloody hand over my mouth, the other still clinging to Larson’s uniform. Don’t make me leave him. No, I’m not leaving him! If I do we’ll never get him back! He’ll get carted off and thrown in a grave somewhere! But the hand still dragged at my uniform until I fell back off my knees and kept pulling. With one last effort I surged forward and tore at the outside of Larson’s uniform, frantic, and managed to tear off one of his rank insignia from his singed and bloody collar, and gave in to the other pulling me.
I left him. I’m a medic. There were other lives to save. He was already dead.
That was a week ago. It was the most action we’d seen in months and now it was over. Over and we were back in the trenches. I never thought I’d be happy to see them again. We’d lost a lot of people. Too many people. But more kept coming. More and more. Each time we lost a batch of young men a new set popped up.
We’d lost our Colonel. Colonel Green. They were sending someone to replace him, apparently. Probably some fat, pretentious, swaggering asshole that had spent the last few years of his promotion picking bits of fig out of his teeth.
And now? Now I’m drinking. One of the boys . . . Robertson I think-well, he got a bottle of something and since he knew that Larson had . . . had . . . he offered it to me. God damn it there’s nothing else to do. Nothing.
Every scorching gulp made its way down my throat, into my stomach, my liver be damned. I don’t care. I don’t give a shit. I rolled my liquor coated tongue around my mouth, raising a numb, clumsy hand to my forehead to push through damp, sweaty hair. I just don’t care anymore . . .
Oh god, Tim, I thought, miserably pulling at my hair . . . I couldn’t save you . . . I couldn’t.
If only . . . oh, god, if only it were me . . . if I had taken that bullet . . . if it had been me . . .
I took another drink, eyes rolling shut, swaying on my cot where I was sitting, back up against the wall. I sniffed, realizing snot was running from my nose, fighting tears that had been battling my own stubbornness, my own messed up sense of worthiness, the very thing that had gotten me into this mess, and even though I wasn’t making a sound the tears fell.
I’d . . . we’d . . . Tim and I . . . Christ . . . oh, god, he’s dead . . . I left him, I left him on that field . . . oh god, his mom, his mom will . . . she’ll want . . . my finger slid inside my tunic pocket and I found the warm piece of metal . . .
Saw movement out of the corner of my eye and another figure came fuzzily into view through my squinted eyes. Who was that? Everything’s dark anyway. It’s always dark in the trenches. Dark and dead. Or almost dead. We were dead already. I thought about Tim. If there was something after, if this isn’t all there is . . . I hope he’ll be there . . . if I was already dead, then . . .
“Hey Wilson,” the figure said. It made noise. So it must be a person. What did it want?
“Wilson . . . ” it chanted and I frowned, recognizing my name and recognizing the sludge I was wading through to focus.
“Hey,” it said again, “You alright, buddy?”
“Fine,” I mumbled, sliding my hand up to my neck. It was Cooper. Cooper. He was . . . he was a friend. As much as friends could be here. When it came down to it we all hated it here. We’d believed in the same lie. That made us all fools. Fools together. That was comforting wasn’t it?
“Yeah right,” he responded, “You sure look fine.”
That was sarcasm right? “What?!” I asked defensively, “Can’t a man drink? I mean, it’s not like we’re doing anything.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, sitting down across from me on his bunk, “Go ahead, get it off your chest.”
“What da’ya mean by that?” I asked, rolling my eyes up to look at him. He was untying the laces on his boots. And he shrugged. Ah, trying for the casual, buddy approach. Nice. Yeah, I’ll just get this off my chest, no big deal, I’ll go and cry on your shoulder. Fuck you, I thought. Just fuck off.
“I mean about Larson,” he said.
My eyes closed. That name. He said it like lemon juice on a wound. Lemonade he was enjoying on a hot summer day while it stung and burned in my still open wound. Bastard. Was he trying to be supportive? The fuck he was . . .
“What about him?” I asked, voice slurring horribly.
“He was your friend.”
“Yeah,” I breathed, eyes lowering to the dirt floor, to my boots which I’d cleaned but were still cracked and caked with blood and mud, “He was,” I upturned the bottle and drank more, feeling some of it drip from the corner of my lip, wiping it away, “He was my friend,” my voice cracked.
“I’m sorry,” Cooper said.
I laughed, opening my eyes, “You have no idea . . .”
“Maybe I do,” he said, positioning his boots near the end of his cot, neat and in a line, then raised his elbows to his knees and thought for a moment, “I still can’t believe it . . . I just don’t know how it wasn’t me . . . it could have been any of us . . .”
I stared at him, eyes unfocused and almost half closed. He kept talking, voice low and pained, “Why did that bullet hit him? Why not me? Why not you? It’s all chance . . . but why, why him . . . doesn’t make sense . . . there’s no sense to any of it . . . it could have been any of us . . . the bell was for him this time, but next time . . . ” he paused, eyes lowering, “Next time someone will be writing my mom, telling her I’m . . .” he shook his head, tugging off his coat, throwing it at the end of his bed, “Hey, can I have a drink of that?”
“Yeah,” I said, reaching my arm out across the gap.
“Thanks,” he answered, taking a gulp. He lowered the bottle and wiped his lips, “God, I needed that . . .” he paused, holding the moment like someone would hold a sleeping friend, easily, patiently, “You ever think . . ” he wondered, ‘You ever think about what’s going to happen?”
“What’da’ya mean?” I asked.
He took another drink. Then another. “You ever think about what’s going to happen when this is over?”
“What? When we win?”
“No, not necessarily . . . just, when it’s over . . .”
“It’ll never be over.”
“No, I mean, do you ever think about getting out of here . . . or . . . or do you just expect . . . expect to die?”
I laughed, “I don’t think of the future . . . there is none . . . I don’t have some girl waiting for me, I don’t have a shop somewhere that my dad owns that I’m going to run,” I pressed my lips together, breathing through my nose, “I just have that bullet . . . that bullet waiting for me . . . it’s just a question of when . . .”
“You never dream about life after the war?”
“Maybe,” I answered. I’d thought about it. Images of Tim flipped through my mind. Already faded and dull and tattered. Photographs that I’ll look at years from now. I pictured us on a boat somewhere . . . his god damn fishing boat that his family had in Michigan . . . I’d always told him I got sea sick . . .
“I do . . .” Cooper was saying, “I think about getting out . . .” he took another drink, wincing, “Except . . .except when I do that I can’t remember why I got in . . .why did we get into this?”
“Love,” I said.
He laughed, “That’s shit.”
“No,” I said, “It’s true . . . we got into this for love . . . for love of country . . . when people take away what we love we fight for it . . . ”
“Damn Huns,” Cooper sighed, taking another drink then passing it back to me. I accepted it, gratefully.
I’d lost enough today. Too much. I’d lost . . . I’d lost more than a friend . . . I’d lost a future . . . I’d lost something to look forward to . . . I’d lost something to fight for . . . I’d lost a reason to keep going . . .
Eventually I slumped down in my bed. I don’t even remember my eyes closing . . .