CHARLES, n.
The Charles house hadn’t been full most days when Nik was coming up. Freddie and Ethel had given up hope on having a child years before she had forced her way into their life. It had been a difficult pregnancy–hard won, hard fought. Morning sickness, preeclampsia, cholestasis, and the longest labor Ethel could’ve been forced to imagine. By the time baby Nikita was brought home, she was the youngest Charles family addition by nearly ten years. By the time she was ready for playdates and sleepovers, her cousins were interested in an entirely different manner of dates and late nights. Her inactivity branded her as annoying. Being one of the only black girls in a twenty-five mile radius? Meant less opportunities for friends. It didn’t bother her any–it’s hard to miss out when you don’t know how good things can be–but a quiet, empty room to sleep in every night could get awful lonely when the shapes and shadows crept and crawled from closet doorways and beneath wooden bed frames.
When Nik Charles hit boot camp, it wasn’t the activity that was hard on her. She could hang with the strenuous workouts and the yelling. None of that bothered her any. It was the early bedtimes, the bunkbeds, the lack of PRIVACY or solutide that she had not only grown accustomed to, but that had been slathered across her skin like the mud she’d crawled through. The constant noise and crowd was smothering–spread across her closed eyes and nostrils in thick layers of muttering, talking, snoring and shifting in cots that were made with precision in the early hours of the morning. It made young Nik wonder what the fuck she’d signed up for.
That was the thing of it all. All that solidarity–eating, sleeping, shitting, dying together–it dried and flaked off one day. It became her OXYGEN and when it was gone–stripped away like her clothes and her sanity that night she was brought to the hospital–she realized that her biggest comfort before the corps was a bigger hell than Iraq had ever promised her. Even the nightmare she’d stormed out into had been a sweeter freedom than that place. Seeing Bobby now, after all these horrible fucking years, felt like she could finally breathe again. It was just one lung of the pair, it felt like, but hell she was breathing.
“You thought some run of the mill Texas Chainsaw backwoods Wyoming sonofabitch could take me?” Nik shot back at him with a grin. “That because I’m a girl or because I’m a corpsman?” Dropping her pack and slinging her rifle over her shoulder, she thought that his rough face was a sight for sore eyes ( she might’ve even cried had she not had the tar kicked out of her tear ducts long ago ), and headed over to him to clap a hand across his back. “You know I’ve been saving a cigar for a special occasion. I sure as hell can’t think of a better one than thanking the devil for not taking your sorry ass years ago.” Nik smirked, eyebrows raised in playful challenge, before her voice and features dropped slightly. “How the hell are ya?” Solemn, genuine–some things are hard to let yourself be.
❝ Well, it ain’t your fault you’re a girl but ya’ chose to be a corpsman. ❞ The retort slid off his tongue easily, a FAMILIARITY that rose back in his throat like they hadn’t spent years apart, like she wasn’t another among the ghosts that hung in the corner of his eye and stared at him from the darkness as he tried to let the sound of TRAFFIC lull him to a sleep that seldom came—of course, there wasn’t any traffic now, only the white noise of the undead, but suddenly those ghosts of his brethren didn’t feel the need to hide anymore. CORRECTION: they didn’t feel the need to exist anymore, not when war was back and civilian life seemed to fade away into a memory again. Can’t live in the past when the FUTURE could kill you at any second, eh?
He returned the clap as she neared, allowing the smile to show plainly across his aged face ; a happy return would be more than enough of a reason to let the stoic nature of his features DROP. ❝ Nah, bastard still ain’t got me yet. ❞ How many times had He almost taken him, though? How many times could Willard Robert Bellevue III toe the line of Death and not be called to home to HELL? ( Surely that’s where he was going, surely that’s where he was LIVING now. ) ❝ Would’a been a damn shame if ya’ wasted it on somethin’ stupid like meeting up with Corporal Murphy again. I still swear he had a huge crush on you. ❞ The happy smile turned into something wistful-like, almost HOMESICK for a war that was long behind them and ruined his life ( among many others ) but also made those eight years the best of his entire life–the only years of his life that seemed to matter, to himself and to the people that constantly thanked him for his service as if those eight years could really be called that, as if they could ever even begin to understand what they went through.
❝ ‘m survivin’, all any of us can ever do now, I guess. ❞ The question of how he was seemed to weigh on his ears differently now, instead of being asked this by his mother’s friend after another one of those stupid southern brunches all the old boozy ladies held every Sunday after church or trying to catch up with someone he went to middle school with in the bank line before the teller called them up and they could LEAVE to never see each again, this time he knew that she wasn’t asking to be polite. He knew she wasn’t expecting him to put on a shallow close-lipped smile and tell her that he was doing fine, his mother was fine, and he’d send on her regards as he tried to discreetly slip away back to his apartment where would be perfectly and sorrowfully ALONE. Now he didn’t have to pretend to be fine because NO ONE was fine.
Still, he never liked the question ( or talking about himself and those annoying things called feelings ), so he segued into another topic to AVOID having to elaborate on how exactly he was surviving, ❝ I went Fed. ❞ It wasn’t a foreign concept for a Marine to go government once he came back from the desert, like it was one of the only paths they could take straight out of the corps ; practically every FBI agent or Marshal, even most cops, he had met was in some branch of military at one point in time. ❝ ATF, to be specific. ❞
