ThreeShot |Castle of Glass|
I
***
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word; freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope.' " Winston Churchill
***
Take me down to the river bend
Take me down where the fighting ends
***
The pounding was almost splitting his skull open, and it resonated throughout his battered body. He was barely conscious of anything except that persistent throbbing banging through his head, so heavy he could not lift it even an inch, could not peel back the eyelids that seemed glued shut.
Vaguely, as though his body had somehow ceased to belong to him, he became aware of urgent fingers probing along the length of his leg. Before his fractured thoughts could make sense of what was happening though, the unknown fingers had scraped over his calf.
A piercing scream ripped out of his chafed throat.
Slashes of pain scissored up his leg, slitting through his nerves, trailing electric fire incinerating him from the inside out and charring through his flesh, and even the stomach-churning dizziness from his head-wound could not abate this newly-discovered pain. It fingered and branched a path all the way up to his lungs, slicing up the walls of his windpipe until each pull of air was so agonising he just wanted to stop breathing.
Alien voices muttered briskly over him.
'It doesn't seem too deep...superficial wound, almost...'
'Bullet?'
'Shell-fragments, more like...they haven't penetrated any of the major blood vessels...amputation won't be necessary, not even graft transplants...he can wait.'
Wait??
Another scream, one of protest, one of outrage, gurgled at the back of his throat, the bile bubbling until he was tempted to wrench his head up and vomit all the bitterness and the pain, until he had emptied himself of awareness, collapsing into the absolute blackness inching in at the fringe of his subconscious. He didn't want to wait, didn't want to feel conscious of the warm blood weeping from the gash on his forehead, stinging on air where the makeshift bandage slapped onto it at Battalion Aid had slipped off, didn't want to feel the bites of muscle and severed nerves crawling like relentless predators up and down his right leg.
All that left his mouth was a groan - so low it was devoured in one gulp by the crisp, clinical chatter criss-crossing over him, somewhere beyond this red, scorching haze of anguish.
And just like that it occurred to him it would be so easy to die right now.
There was no fear, no regrets, no hesitation, nothing at all. It was a simple, straightforward, utterly honest wish, stripped of the complexities and complications it was usually clad in, shackling him.
In that moment, he had really wanted to die. It was as easy as that.
The clarity of it was disarming. If he died, the pain would end. If he died, it would silence the ringing against his ears. Silence the repertoire of macabre music that had stored itself away in his brain, of shell-fire whistling through the air before shattering like grotesque fireworks, cheered on by the shrill, terrible screams of those right under their fiery showers. If he died it would blind him to the scarring images animating themselves behind his weary eyes, of olive-dressed bodies strewn over the dirt, streaked here and there with vivid red.
His nostrils felt raw, sensitive to the putrid, metallic tang of blood mingling with pulsing hot air.
He wanted to die, and it would all be over.
And then he heard it.
What -
It was low, rasped, a voice fraught with quivers, and so quiet and strangled it was almost not there.
But he heard it.
His eyes cracked open.
A mosaic of white and grey and olive-green swam giddily before him and he could feel the nausea sweep up and take hold of him again - but this time it did not bother him.
She had fallen to her knees beside him.
'Nurse! Nurse! Why isn't this man in Pre-Op?! Why hasn't anyone prepped him yet?!'
The peremptory bite he was so used to was still there, but even in his state of half-consciousness he could hear the volatile emotion it struggled to disguise.
Panic.
The ache in his leg shifted and resettled elsewhere. Just beneath his ribs, in the left side of his chest.
There must have been some response to her urgent questions, though he never heard them, but the next thing he knew, she was talking again, and he foraged for every last bit of alertness to rivet on to her words.
'I don't care what he said! I'm telling you to move this stretcher into Pre-Op now.'
'His wounds are superficial -'
'Are you defying a direct order, Private? Or have you forgotten who the Chief Surgeon is around here?'
N-no, Doctor "
'In which case, I order you to have him shifted and prepped for surgery immediately. We are a hospital, he is a wounded soldier, and it is our duty to make him our priority. Am I making myself clear?'
'Y-yes, Doctor...I'll go get the corpsmen.'
There were scuffles against the dirt and one of the barely defined silhouettes in white disappeared from his line of vision, but before he could shift his attention, he almost jerked out of his stretcher when he felt soft warmth skim over the bared skin of his forehead, before lightly brushing back his hair.
'Hang in there, Arnav...please...hang in there.'
The icy-coldness had melted out of that wilful, waspish voice, and without its frigid shield it trembled and shook, packed with fright and grief and anguish.
Even then, almost passing out from the pain of his wounds and the trauma of his experience, he didn't miss it. Didn't miss that it was the first time she had called him by his given name.
And even though the next few minutes passed in a blur of barely-registered sights and sounds, he found himself more alert and lucid than he had been even when wide awake, staring up into the white globes of light suspended above the operating table as a mask was slipped over his nose and mouth, too weak to resist the pull of unconsciousness he had been craving before, and yet battling not to breathe in the sedative all the same.
As the misty-grey blanket descended upon his senses to put him to sleep, he held on to the picture blown-up and framed before his mind's eye, yielding ever so unwillingly to the gentle reassurances murmured down to him to relax, because everything was going to be fine.
Of a face bent low over his weakly blinking eyes, sheathed from chin to nose-bridge in a scrap of cloth, but skin tellingly pale and liquid-chocolate orbs wide open, awash with concern.
Hang in there, Arnav...
He would, because he had something to hold on to now.
***
Wash the poison from off my skin
Show me how to be whole again
***
At first, he had liked to think he got under her skin.
It was only until much, much later that he realised she got under his, too.
'Khushi,' he nodded in her direction, deliberately forgoing protocol and leaving out the title of Captain. She hardly acknowledged him - the tight little bun she had her hair in jutted up into the air as she bent her head over the paper work crowding her desk, her elbows resting on its edge while her slim fingers supported the sides of her head. Concentrating as she was, she might not even have heard him.
Annoyance sparked behind his ribs, and his feet steered him towards her before his head could give that action its approval.
'It's polite to respond when one is addressed, you know.'
Even if she had been ignoring him, there was no way she could do so now, when he hovered maybe an inch behind her tense little shoulders.
And he knew how much she hated being lectured about decorum.
'Captain,' she returned tersely, with a small, inconsequential glance over her shoulder as she returned to whatever tedious red-tape procedure she was tackling.
It bothered him, that she found all those requisition forms and whatever else formalities the army had dreamed up more interesting than him.
It was not as though she was particularly inquisitive or attentive of him on a good day - their relationship, if it could be called that, was entirely composed of acidic stabs and poorly-contained insults flung at each other on those occasions that Arnav happened to lodge at the camps of this particular medical unit. There had never been any love lost between them " he could remember the very first time he had been introduced to her, and had chalked her up in his mind as the strict, school-teacher-type, infatuated with obeying the rules and doing everything by the book, and doing it infuriatingly well.
In other words - boring.
Somehow or the other, though, that opinion had morphed and become something else he couldn't entirely recognise when he had not been paying attention.
Captain Khushi Gupta had gone from being the dullest aspect of this hospital camp to being its most entertaining.
He was not sure if it was her disarming honesty, unafraid to speak her mind, or the cutting edge and lightning-speed of her wit and sarcasm, but he found he enjoyed nothing more than provoking her and drawing her into a verbal duel, each competing to get the last word in. It was exhilarating and involving, having someone who could keep up with his mental agility, someone who could present a challenge and give as good as she got - and considerably better than doing nothing in those long monotonous hours when he was off duty. And over time, with days upon days of experience and experiments to bank upon, he had discovered exactly which areas were areas of contention for this surprisingly young surgeon.
Being the opportunistic person he was, he exploited them thoroughly for his own amusement.
So once again, he went in for the kill.
'I hear the number of underage recruitments have gone up again,' he remarked conversationally, taking the liberty of leaning up against the edge of her desk before casually inspecting his fingernails. Sensing her tense beside him, he subdued a smirk before continuing, 'It seems that there were fifteen or so drafted into Akash's unit in just the last month.'
Silence followed this proclamation - but Arnav had not learnt the shades of her silences for nothing. He could tell that her reticence was no more than a fragile, thin sheet of glass, tensing up under pressure, ready to shatter at any minute.
'Impressive, I think. Very patriotic,' he pressed on airily, taking care not to look directly at her, 'Shows a certain degree of maturity, if teenagers are lying about their age to serve the country-'
'Shows a certain degree of naivety, I think you mean.'
Arnav almost grinned in triumph. The hostility he found so compellingly delicious had crept its way into her tone and crackled menacingly, despite its low volume.
'We need the soldiers,' he reiterated bluntly, aiming to rile her up even more, to tear her away from whatever useless, mundane chore she was wrapped up in until he possessed all of her attention. It was a bizarre thrill, this power - to divert her, capture her, control her. There was a smug satisfaction in crumbling down this woman's facade of righteousness and prove her wrong, prove that she was the naive one for being so thoroughly obsessed with her ideals, with her morals, with her infuriating know-it-all attitude. 'This is a war, in case you haven't noticed, Captain, and we need people to fight it. And if the kids of this generation decide they want to help their country's cause -'
'And what kind of country is it that allows teenagers who have yet to reach puberty qualify for combat where they might as well get killed? Oh wait - the same country whose government feeds them all propaganda of honour and duty and responsibility and blinds their judgement to maintain its own reputation -'
'Unfortunately, Captain, this happens to be the real world, and in the real world we cannot abide by such pretty little ideals were fairness reigns over all-'
'And where there is no honour or pride on the battlefield, only blood and casualties and meaningless deaths -'
'And fighting to defend your land is meaningless? Fighting to protect your family and friends is meaningless? Well, I must say -'
'That they would be little use doing anything for their family and friends if they get killed before they can even graduate, before they can even become legal adults and -'
'Die trying to establish a future where other kids can? Is that what you are trying to say, Captain? That there really is no honour and pride in staking one's lives for a cause that -'
'What cause?'
She had been hunched over her desk, speaking to the table-top with the mounting aggression and anger in her demeanour only just in check, but she'd sprung up now, so briskly it caught him off guard. The chair-legs scraped across the floor as she pushed her seat away with deceptively smooth motions, before looking him square in the face.
The defined, deep lines of fatigue and distress carved into her face threw him off.
'Excuse me?'
'I asked,' she said, as evenly as the sea before a storm, 'What cause? What cause are we fighting for? What cause is it that will earn those...those adolescents their medals of honour?'
He opened his mouth, resenting her for throwing him off balance, keen to heatedly counter her - but before he could figure out what he had intended to say, she had continued, and there was a tightly-wound tension to her words, still quiet and still composed, that compelled him to listen.
'Do you think they know? Do you think they know WHY this war started? Do you think any of us know why this war started? There have been enough wars throughout history for us to know that it's the decision of just a token few that sends a country and everything it has headfirst into a battle it might never recover from. Do you think they do it because of honour? What is honour, then? What will you DO with it? Are you going to feed your children honour? Is it going to put a roof above your head? Is it going to bring back all the people who are dying for the sake of this damned war?'
Arnav did not say anything - he did not know what to say. He had never seen her like this before, and to say he was shocked was an understatement. His mind had stuttered and stopped in its tracks, his arsenal of confrontational words shrivelled up from his tongue.
There was a feverish glint to her eye that he had never seen there before in their numerous altercations, and it was bright enough for him to spot though she was not even looking at him, staring instead at the leg of the chair she had manoeuvred between them. His dumbfounded stare dropped from the rigidity tautening her facial muscles to the slight tremors running up and down her arms, simply from the sheer force of her clenched fists.
He realised too late that he had struck a nerve he hadn't realised existed.
'Well?' she demanded, and the word was like the crack of gunshot, 'Will it? Will it bring back the fathers and brothers and husbands who die not even knowing if they will return? The fathers and brothers and husbands and sons who would all have been alive if this stupid, stupid thing called war never EXISTED?!'
When she looked up at him again, he sucked in a ragged breath. A sheen of moisture glittered back at him.
Tears.
But even here Khushi did not appear weak. Even here, her tears did not belong to something as defeated as grief or sorrow.
They belonged to anger.
'They'll never come back,' she told him, and a chill crawled down his spine at the eerie quiet of her voice, so at odds with the emotions written plainly over her face, 'They'll never be able to support their loved ones again, laugh with them, love them, hold them. They'll just become numbers, statistics in death counts, and all the people that loved them would only have that word to make do with " honour'. Now you tell me...tell me if that one empty, useless word is enough to compensate for it.'
He didn't have the answer. It was not as though this was the first time they had had this kind of argument - and yet at the same time it was the first time they had had this kind of argument too. She had always been so cool and so matter-of-fact on every other occasion they had sparred. Always kept her head straight and her argument logical. And it was not until he had seen that control crack that he realised that was what he had been after all along. THAT was the reason he kept singling her out, kept picking fights, kept dangling baits before her - because he wanted to undo that irritating control with which she did everything, wanted to defeat her in this clash of wills - to snare out a reaction, an emotion, something that could measure up to the powerful emotion she managed to rouse within him without even appearing to try.
He had gotten more than he bargained for.
That day, long after she had spun on her heel and left him in the cramped little office without a backward glance, something had changed between them. He had had no idea what it was, but his instinct told him that the change was not done yet - that there was still a long way to go.
***
Fly me up on a silver wing
Past the black where the sirens sing
Warm me up in a nova's glow
And drop me down to the dream below
***
With a faint groan, Arnav hitched one arm up stiffly, fingers brushing the gauzy material he could feel bound about his head.
The banging pain had subsided, leaving behind only a dull, heavy ache that pulled his head deeper into the depths of the soft, plumped up pillow it reposed on.
It was hard to get his bearings back immediately. It was almost as though his abilities to sense, to feel, had been torn asunder, and then the scraps had been thrown together in a pathetic attempt to reassemble them. Tiny little spasms ran down his throat - he was parched. But his eyelids felt far too weighty to lift, his entire body limp and wholly devoid of the energy it would take him to peer around and take stock of his surroundings, let alone find a glass of water.
He had been lying there in this catatonic state, staring blankly at the backs of his eyelids, when he heard her again.
His pulse strummed a little more quickly.
There were two voices again, and judging by how they were getting louder by the moment, he surmised they must have been walking in his direction. It was evident he was in Post-Op; occasionally he could hear the muted footfalls of nurses padding between the beds he knew lined both walls, indiscernible murmurs replaced by clinks of metal, sleepy grunts and heavy breathing.
For reasons entirely beyond his understanding, he did not move as he sensed her come even closer, or give away any sign of wakefulness. She was muttering to her companion, he noted, failing to be surprised that he had recognised it was her despite the low undertones of those exchanges " his attention was otherwise engaged. They sounded agitated, and though he could not yet tell apart their words, it niggled his curiosity nonetheless.
And as they got nearer, he managed to place the voice of the other half of the conversation - Shyam Jha, Major, Surgeon, and the biggest idiot to grace the planet.
And also the man whose - interest - in Khushi was the talk of the whole unit.
His previously lifeless body stiffened.
Arnav all but abandoned his plans to eavesdrop, willing his eyes to open, willing himself to move just enough to make it obvious that he was awake - whatever it took to get Khushi away from that creep.
It was the mention of his name that stopped him.
'...what you did for Captain Raizada was admirable to say the least, I am not denying that...'
'Good,' he heard her cut him off bluntly.
Hitherto absent warmth flushed down to the tips of his toes.
They appeared to have stopped somewhere close at hand. '...but Khushi...there are certain rules here that we are expected to follow...'
Whatever satisfaction he had been blessed with as Khushi put that simpering lecher in his place withered completely at the bas***d's gall to use her first name so casually. Ire pooled in his gut, simmering up to boiling point. Beneath his blanket, his fists clenched until his nails were leaving welts in his palm.
'...after all, the triage procedure requires us to admit the most grievously wounded soldiers first and -'
'I am familiar with the triage procedure, Major,' the emphasis on the man's title was not subtle, and Arnav was sure even a delusional dimwit like Jha was bound to get the message. Another furious bout of pride pulsed through him, 'I am Chief Surgeon.'
In other words, it's not your place to question her authority or her decisions.
That tough, tenacious part of Khushi's personality was one of the things Arnav had - ironically, unwillingly - grown to admire about her.
'Yes, yes, of course,' Jha had immediately adopted that ingratiating tone that always induced a cringe in Arnav - it was one he had heard him employ before, mostly when playing the sycophant to their Colonel and Commander, the senior surgeon on camp. Arnav would bet his helicopter that it was this talent for subservience and bootlicking, not to mention a pocket-full of cash, that had gotten someone as incompetent as him the post of Major in the first place, 'I apologise if I sounded offensive, Kh- er - Captain. I would never dare to question your competence...it's just that...'
'Yes?' There was hostility is her question, daring him to finish whatever suicidal line of thought Jha had embarked upon.
'Well...your skill as a surgeon is, of course, unparalleled...I've never met someone so skilled before in my career, and for one so young it is truly commendable -'
Arnav had to keep himself from snorting at the profusion of flattery the man was pouring forth - if Jha knew Khushi half as well as he did, he would know that such flowery words would do little to tame her already ruffled feathers. It was no secret that Shyam Jha had not, to put it mildly, been pleased when the position of Chief Surgeon had been delegated to someone of a rank lower than him, and if the slight to his abilities and pride had not been bad enough, to a woman who was far younger than he and with far less experience. No matter how interested this man was in her, Arnav found it hard to believe that someone as wily as Shyam would easily forget that perceived insult. He was forever trailing behind Khushi, supposedly discussing procedure and technique, quoting parts of medical journals he had recently acquired and offering them to her to borrow, waxing nostalgic as he reminisced about how many lives were in his debt from his years of practising medicine, always at the ready to offer advice and opinion when sometimes it was blatantly obvious Khushi had no need of it.
It reminded Arnav of a snake sometimes - patient and devious, camouflaged in the grass, attuned to every tiny flicker of change around it, just waiting and watching for the right opportunity before it would strike.
And while this time it was no different, this time it directly involved him, and Arnav could not help but seethe at the man's impertinence.
'...which is why I was a little...surprised that you let your personal feelings get in the way of your professional duty.'
A charged minute of silence followed. In spite of his shuttered eyes, Arnav could feel the tension burgeoning in the atmosphere, halting time itself in its tracks.
The only thing that kept him from moving and kicking the cogs back into action, of being the distraction that would rescue Khushi from that dirty little snake's insinuations, happened to be something the snake himself had said.
Personal feelings...
His heartbeat was thumping enthusiastically again, and he was glad that he hadn't chosen to give himself away yet - one finger to his pulse, a stethoscope to his chest, and it would have given away more than he felt comfortable revealing.
He held his breath, pushing back the air struggling to whoosh out of his body, trying to smother the loud and anxious claps of his heart, his ears straining to hear what Khushi would say, how she would answer - anticipation stretched the gap of a few seconds to never-ending hours as he waited.
'Excuse me? What did you say?'
She was furious, and he disappointed - and what puzzled him was that he should not have been. One thing that never failed to irk Khushi was criticism about her job - and perhaps that was justifiable as well, considering that he had been observing her long enough to know that she was whole-heartedly dedicated to her profession, several times going above and beyond the call of duty.
But that did not change the fact that he was disappointed - because it meant it was not the response he had been looking for, even if it was the one he should have been expecting.
'I understand that Captain Raizada, is...um...special to you,' Jha paused, and in that pause Arnav's emotions were tangled worse than an unravelled ball of yarn. There was an overt edge of spite underneath those sugary words and feigned understanding, and while they did their best in goading his irritation...there was also that part of him that lapped up the implications of his words as though crippled with its thirst for them. 'But as Chief Surgeon, it is part of your responsibility to...put aside your personal life from your professional life. Of course, you are still young, with much to learn, so this is understandable -'
'Major,' Khushi interjected. Even the sound of his breathing seemed to be interfering with his hearing, 'I mean no offence by what I am going to say, but the decisions I make as Chief Surgeon are outside of your jurisdiction. The Colonel has not raised any objections, there have been no complications with the treatment of any of the patients and -'
'I seem to have touched a nerve...I apologise, Captain. As you say, your decisions are outside my jurisdiction. But as a surgeon, the lives of the soldiers that pass through here are also my responsibility. Perhaps this time we were lucky not to lose any soldiers, but if we continue to prioritise based on emotions - when I examined him at triage his wounds were superficial, and the operation would have been elementary...even one of our nurses could have coped. Instead, you spared one of our doctors to treat to him when he could easily -'
Jha's voice blacked out and plunged down a void of nothingness. He had ceased to listen -was incapable of listening.
One of their doctors...?
Meaning...SHE didn't operate on me?
And in that split moment, reality pounced back at him in sadistic glee, and all the sensation he had warded off beyond the scope of his consciousness galloped back with a vengeance. A torturous itch prickled away at his right knee, encased by thick plaster and completely beyond the reach of his fingers. His head had left a large dent in his pillow, which was too flat and low, the unaccustomed angle making him feel somewhat sick. A ball of pain coalesced in his injured limb, his head a mass of lead.
But worst of all was that twinge that had gathered at the base of his throat, and stretched all the way down into his chest, until everything was smarting with raw, stinging pain.
The worst kind of hurt is from wounds we cannot see.
She didn't operate on me. She just left me to one of her doctors...just like she would with any other patient. Like she would with any other unimportant operation...
Why would he have assumed she would do otherwise? Why did he think she would put him above everyone else?
Because he had hoped...
'However superficial a wound may be, Major, I do believe having bits of metal stuck in your body could hardly be a pleasant experience.'
'Ah, so compassionate you are, Captain...as always, I respect -'
Compassion. Nothing but compassion. Why would he expect anything more?
Because he had wanted more. That was why.
***
Cause I'm only a crack
In this castle of glass
Hardly anything left
For you to see
For you to see
***
43