Children Ardent For Some Desperate Glory [Faland x Reader]
Title: Children Ardent For Some Desperate Glory [Faland x Reader]
Synopsis: You're a nursing assistant on a ward filled with battle-wounded soldiers. One of them strikes up a conversation that leaves a terrible mark. (Aka, "Faland is just mean to you." Faland from The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden.)
Word count: 2900ish
notes: descriptions of war, death, physical and mental battle injuries; reader is religious & Faland picks at it
There is hell and there is Hell and if your pastor hadn’t set you straight in his letters (courtesy of your mother, the dear thing who delivered your feverish scrawls post-haste to him when you’d suggested the notion) you might still genuinely think you were in the darkest pits with the devil himself.
So maybe–just maybe the fields, the trenches, the overflowing stinking hospitals, weren’t actually Hell. But sometimes they felt just like it. Even the hospitals, far away from the wet mud you can still feel sticking to your shoes on days you were sent out into the field, did not bring the relief hospitals did back home.
Because, great Father in heaven, what relief could be found within these walls?
The doctors barely have time to spend with patients before they are yanked away to someone else. They must fight to have proper equipment, and only sometimes win the battle. They have to decide which men are worth spending their precious time, precious skill, on–and which men are just a waste of bed space until they mercifully die and make room for the rest.
The nurses–you–are… are what? What can you do for these men? Sew up a wound, surely; but you can’t stop it from festering when there isn’t enough iodine to go around. Can’t stop their fevers, though you can sometimes bring an ounce of relief with a washcloth, when you can spare one.
Can’t do anything for the men missing half a face, the men whose tongues you can see clear through a hole in their jaw while they speak, except listen to their agony and squeeze their hands tight.
You can’t even get the blood out from under your fingernails for more than a few hours; your nails, clipped short for the war, constantly look as though you’d been digging in the mud. A little girl’s nails, from the days when you’d get in trouble for playing in the grass, all fresh dirt and bugs, with the boys.
Oh, you’re with the boys now and no mother to chastise you–but what runs out from underneath your nails in the sink is not earthy brown but a worn, dying red. And the flush on your cheeks is not from sprinting across the fields in a rowdy game of tag but from witnessing another death, another death, another death, another–
Mother doesn’t understand any of it. She asked you to stop writing about the details. Because you tried. Really, you did. Tried, rather stupidly it seems, to explain what war was really like. Not the pretty poems they published in the newspaper about triumph and glory and freedom. Not the lovely photos of men in their uniforms, all lined up, prepared to fight for some just cause.
War was death.
War was blood and mud and shit.
War was telling a young man you’d write to his sweetheart back home at noon and returning in the evening to find his bed empty, and another writhing soldier in his place.
War was here and now, in the hospital, going from bed to bed and making your own awful decisions every moment of the day. Who do you treat, who do you leave? With so few hours, so little energy, which men should take precedence?
It was a bit like playing God (forgive the blasphemous thought) and that made something awful lurch in your stomach when you woke up in the morning. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.
And through it all, you had to remain calm. Calm and gentle and soothing. The words you speak to a soldier might be the last ones he ever hears. Your presence, a cool cloth on a forehead, a promise to write a letter home, could be the difference between someone fighting through an awful surgery and merely giving up.
Yet.
Why were you expected to make such decisions? Who were you to say which men ought to be seen first, or seen at all?
Like this man here, older than you’re used to seeing on the battlefield but then, every country was desperate to fill its rapidly emptying soldier coffers.
Despite his place in the ward (he was not here this morning–another fresh face replacing a dead one, no doubt) there’s not a visible wound on him. He was merely sitting up in his bed, quiet, staring, watching everyone around him.
Another one of those, you think, and you write him off, pain in your heart, gathering your little pack to move on.
There’s nothing you can do for him right now. Better to attend to the physically injured until you had more than a moment or two to spare.
A mental wound can’t be stitched or treated with a poultice. You can dig a bullet out of a man’s shoulder. It was not possible to dig a bullet out of a man’s soul.
Maybe, later, you would bring him tea and try to coax a name out of him, or dig through his pockets to find an address or–
“Please, stay a moment, won’t you?”
He’s finally looking at you now. There’s an almost comfortable weariness in his eyes; he hasn’t gone mad, then. Or he’s good at hiding it.
You really ought to move on. There was someone who needed his dressing changed, a dozen letters to write home to women who didn’t know they were widows yet, and much more besides.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’ll be back soon,” you offer. And you would, though ‘when’ was impossible to guess.
He doesn’t give up.
“A moment is all I’ll ask of you. If you please.” Something old in his tone–something old and familiar and wanting. The earnestness in his voice is as strong as any desperate hand clinging to your sleeve, and you can’t find it in yourself to wrench away from him now.
“All right,” you say, sweeping yourself down onto the stool next to the bed. “A moment.”
Just a few years ago, your skirts would have been impossibly full, your outfit all frills and prettiness.. Layers and layers of lace, softness, and loveliness meant for strolling in the park and taking tea and spending hours sitting–to read, to write, to remark on the weather.
Now you wear a practical uniform, from your combination undergarments that are sturdy enough to withstand the heavy duty laundry mangler (Lord, what would mother think of them?) to your one piece gown, supplemented by an apron. The apron, of course, was to protect your skirts from being soaked in blood and viscera.
Not that it helped much.
There’s no blood on this man, at least. No wound, not a scratch. Strange that he’s even in the ward, really, but the matron wouldn’t allow someone frivolous to take up one of her precious beds. So there must be something wrong with him.
“How might I assist you?” You ask. Polite, like the world used to be, like you allow yourself to be again, when it’s possible. Right now, speaking to a man who isn’t screaming in pain or telling you to beg the doctor to save his leg for-the-love-of-fucking-God–it is possible.
“You seem kind,” he says, after a few moments. “I had a sudden desire to speak with someone kind, and so…”
It’s a bit hard to place his accent–not quite French, not quite German, certainly not English. Maybe he’s from one of those other European countries, and conscripted into the French or English army? It wasn’t unheard of.
He needed someone to talk to, then; our good Lord in heaven, who couldn’t use that, with the world being what it was? It’s why you had written so often to your mother, trying to make her understand, getting everything inside you out onto the page. Maybe this man needed you to be his page, and his lips would spill out black ink until something in his soul had calmed down.
“It’s quite rare to find someone kind nowadays,” he continues, voice gentle, almost unusually so for the world you’ve been living in. “Yet I’ve been watching you…” The sound of his words trail away.
“And you think I’m kind?” You offer up the words, almost a question. To him, maybe to yourself, too. Sometimes–despite your smiles, despite your practiced, gentle touch–you do wonder.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, his gaze turns to the necklace you’ve worn every day since you were a child. A simple cross on a gold chain. It was your mother’s–and her mother’s, and now yours, something you hold on the nights that you pray.
The necklace makes him smile. A weathered gesture that you’ve seen before–someone older that thinks they’re wiser, pitying the youth before them. His next words are not wholly a surprise.
“Tell me, dear, do you still pray?” He cranes his head just a little, and there’s an awful sort of beauty in the gesture; a mimicry of what might have looked affecting when he was younger, but now comes across as tiresome. “Do you fold those chapped, bleeding hands together and ask him for help?”
So much for helping a lonely soul, you think. He just wanted to argue. Well. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The urge to leave twitches within you but you let it pass. Thick skin grows quickly in war, and you’re no exception. Maybe before the war, you’d grab your necklace in your hands and leave in a huff, telling him he ought to not talk to a lady in such a way.
That was before. This was now.
Now, you’ve seen men with holes where their eyes should be, you’ve cleaned blood and shit from a man’s face after he was recovered bodies-deep in a trench, raving like a madman.. You’ve discovered what was behind the lines of those deceptively pretty poems printed in the newspapers back home.
So all you do is snort through your nose, and shake your head. Men were condescending before the war, and they will be after the war–but you’re not going to put up with it in the meantime.
“If you’re going to tell me that no one’s listening,” you say, ready to argue back at whatever he throws at you, “You can save your energy.” You swallow, explaining yourself before he even asks for justification. “I’ve seen awful things here.” The images flash through your mind, the sights, the sounds, the smells– “But none of that means God isn’t listening. He always listens.” Despite the world, the war, despite everything.
Your fingers curl around the cross, pressing into the worn gold. The thudding in your chest feels louder, faster, anticipating an argument that might end in someone taking notice and asking you to attend to some errand.
But he doesn’t seem like he’s going to start shouting or raving at you. He doesn’t seem bothered by your words at all.
Instead, he looks almost elated. He leans in closer, hospital-issued bed creaking. His mouth curves slowly in a smile that might have been soft once upon a time.
“Oh, sweet. I know he listens.” Something like disdain seeps into his words, reaching underneath your reddened nailbeds and wiggling its way inside your veins.
“He hears every little word that comes from those lips, I assure you. Every prayer, every plea. What I would ask yourself, when you’re holding that cross in the night, your poor heart beating quickly inside your chest is…” He waits until you’re drawn in, leaning forward without even realizing it. “Why would you think He cares?”
It’s a blow that hits directly below your stomach, twisting something deep inside you, pulling up a thread that has been fraying, unnoticed, for some time now. It’s a thread that only this man could ever pull up. You don’t know how you know this, but it is a fact.
From anyone else, the question would be silly, the ravings of a madman to be dismissed as easily as the suggestion that there were giraffes in the sky. From this man, this strange man in a strange land, it’s an awful dunk in cold reality.
A reality that you blink away as readily as dust in your eye.
“What do you mean?” You ask, throat tight, almost unwilling to give up the question.
The fireplace is on the other side of the room, yet despite the distance, there is firelight dancing in one of the man’s eyes–the other, darker, holds no reflection. It’s absurd, it’s wrong, and you want to tear yourself away from his gaze but can’t force the movement.
The firelight mocks you; he mocks you, too, with just enough sincerity to make his words hurt.
“Now, I said you were kind, not naive. Playing that part doesn’t suit you at all,” he murmurs, looking at you with all the gentleness in the world. “Or perhaps it’s not an act? Do forgive me,” he continues, bowing his head, “Admittedly, I am often among the rougher sort, and not the gentler sex.” There’s a laugh in his last words, some secret hidden in the corner of his mouth that you’ll never know.
Shame and fear flush to your cheeks in equal measure, bringing warmth and a desire to flee. How silly, you think then, almost like a slap to the skin–how silly to be so rattled by a simple question from a man you’ve never met.
“The gentler sex can reach their hands into a man’s stomach to dig out bullet wounds just as well as anyone,” you say, thinking of the gore under your nails. “And we die just as easily as men.” Maybe not from bullets, but still. There was death here.
You think of two women in your ward who died recently from infections sustained during their efforts–and another who caught pneumonia. One girl lost the use of her leg, injured from shellfire, and was sent home for it.
“Yes,” he says, something different in his eyes now, more thoughtful. “The poor nurses dying from cholera and the like. Tragic,” he continues, without an inch of sympathy in his tone.
“And so wasteful, isn’t it, to die far away from home for something as silly as war. Though you've seen far worse deaths than cholera, haven't you?" His eyes seem to pin you into place, and somehow you know that he sees it all.
He’s cracked open your spine and seen what’s inside you now. The first soldier who died in your arms, some black muck leaking out of his mouth and onto your sleeves; the men screaming for Mama with half a face as the doctors desperately tried to save them; the ones who didn’t speak at all, simply staring at the wall until they died or were taken away.
There’s something hard in your throat when you swallow and in a swoop, you stand, hand instinctively covering your cross; protecting it, or hiding it, you weren’t entirely sure
He sighs then, languid, an old flair for the dramatic that might have seemed charming on someone half his age, “What sort of God allows this to happen, I wonder?”
“I sat down because I thought you could use a listening ear,” you say, fragile indignity dragged up with the thread you’d rather stay tucked inside. “Not so you could ramble on about how God isn’t real.” Your mouth becomes a thin line, unmoving. “Peddle that somewhere else, sir, but not to me.”
He smiles again, that secret tucked into his laugh lines. “I didn’t say God wasn’t real, my sweet.”
Oh, you hate this man. Or do you? It’s not exactly hate that’s prickling at your chest. It’s fear. Fear that he’s right, fear that he’s wrong. Fear of something inside him that you can’t put your finger on. A strange man, with his eyes that reflect firelight, and–
“Where did you come from?” You ask, far too late to mean anything. It ought to have been asked the first time you wondered how he came to be in a bed. “What is your name?”
Because this man, with his mocking smile and wounding words, is not wearing an army uniform. Or any uniform at all. You hadn’t noticed before, had taken for granted that anyone on the ward was meant to be here; but he’s wearing civilian clothes, shabby, generic.
And with the accent you couldn’t place. Was he from the enemy lines? A spy? A deserter, perhaps? Both would leave him in front of a firing squad; the thought makes you swallow ash, and you toss it aside.
“I am called Faland,” he says, watching you, as if he can read your mind. “Now and then, at least.” He reaches into his worn suit and produces a slip of paper that you take without thinking. “I won’t take up any more of your time, dear miss,” he says. There’s a hint of faux reproach in his tone that makes your back stiffen. “I do believe I hear them calling…?”
As if on cue, it’s like sound returns to the rest of the world, and your name is heard over the normal din of the ward. When had it disappeared?
Shaking your head, you carry your stiff legs towards the threshold of the next room. You didn’t even say goodbye to the man. As you approach, it’s like a veil is being lifted. The sounds return in fuller force, the unmistakable weighty presence of other bodies, the squeaking of gurney wheels, all of it chaotically familiar.
Yet how could you simply leave without knowing who he was, and what he was about, and without begging him to explain what he knew–
“Mr. Faland,” you begin, turning, wanting to ask him about his peculiar questions and perhaps even argue with him now–but.
Stunned, you look down at the card he’d given you. It’s small with clean, printed black letters. The edges are worn and stained with something that looks, faintly, like wine.
But he’s gone. Like some specter, gone in an instant.
“M. Faland–celebrated violinist, illusionist, purveyor of liquid courage.
Could be anywhere: seek and ye shall find.”
