Heartsong, Chapter 7: Something to Live For
When I woke from my first sleep since the battle — real sleep, not anaesthesia-induced unconsciousness — a wisp of brown curl slowly came into focus. The rest of Claire’s hair was smoothed into a prim updo befitting her rank and role, but just there, just over her right ear, a single rebellious coil stuck straight out from her head. Still half asleep, I smiled, my heart glowing sun-warm with tenderness.
Christ, and to think that I had first believed her to be a dream… as if my imagination could ever have conjured such exquisite detail, transforming the friend of my childhood into the one before me now. Visions of her had come to me so often during the war, when I was wounded or frightened, when I knew I must do something as a soldier that twisted my gut with shame. But it had always been the face of a lassie in my mind’s eye, and the golden-eyed nurse who’d found me was a woman grown — so similar to her adolescent self that I’d recognized her at once, but changed in a hundred subtle ways I couldn’t even begin to name.
None of that had registered in my morphine-addled brain, though. It wasn’t until Claire’s comically unexpected outburst of profanity that I knew her to be real. She’d been right, too, to no one’s surprise more than mine: somehow, impossibly, I’d survived ‘til morning. I couldn’t see a great deal from where I was, face-down in a cot at the back of a tent, but the light peeking in through the gaps in the canvas at least told me that much.
Not daring to move, I tried to take stock of my body in the rare moment of lucidity without overwhelming pain. I didn’t feel a full bladder the way I usually did when I woke; I reckoned that meant I had a catheter of some kind. Frightened by the implication, I moved my toes just to check that I could… not paralyzed, then, thank God. I could still see, hear, smell, touch, taste — though the last was no great mercy at the moment. Kind as Claire had been to swab out my mouth, it was still gritty and sour, my throat raw from the breathing tube they’d used in surgery. I winced on a swallow, moving my tongue about to try to ease any bit of moisture into a cavern composed of sandpaper. With only that minuscule bit of sound and movement, the curly head before me shifted once, then suddenly bolted up.
“Are you alright?” Claire sniffed awake.
Unsure if I had any voice to answer, I grunted first, then managed hoarsely, “I’m here. S… tha’s… something.”
The alarm in her face eased as she looked me over; slowly, her expression gentled into fondness — a teasing smile, a raised brow. “Is it too early for ‘I told you so’?”
I wasn’t sure if I managed a smile in return, but I felt it warm my gaze, at least. “No one likes a braggart, Claire.”
