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Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve Import
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Published:
2020-11-05
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1,777
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1/1
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7
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911

Here I Dreamt I Was

Summary:

Written for creative writing project, set in Bastogne. Babe Heffron loses touch with reality to better understand it.

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Disclaimer: Characters are copyright HBO/themselves.

Here I Dreamt I Was
"And here I dreamt I was a soldier."
â€"The Decemberists

Scents rolling through you like deep noiseâ€"vibrating, heart-hurting noise. Meat on a spit spitting fat into flames, your lungs, similarly embroiled. Stomach awakened, deceptive organ, growling. The room is large, yellow, warm. So warm that you're shiveringâ€"makes no senseâ€"and you can't quite breathe.

You cough. Smells like a meat-freezer. Jesus Christ.

"Water?" Cool hands, cool voice. You shake harder. Where are you? Turning, the room doesn't change. Kaleidoscopeâ€"a fireplace in every wall, cooking carcasses, spinning, like planets in your orbit. You don't see any waterâ€"you can't even see the owner of the voice.

"Whoâ€""

"Whereâ€""

Spun, hands gripping, tiny, strong. You pull away, duck your headâ€"reflexâ€"try to hold onto your helmetâ€"

â€"where's your helmet? Fingers running wildly through damp hair, until the small hands still them. "Shh. Don't y'know y'r own ma, Babe?" You blink, don't trust her, can't see even though you think you're facing her. You don't knowâ€"things keep jumping to match your movements, mind filling in the picture with the same image, over and over and over....

"Ma? Stand still, where are ya'?" Hands from your head, removed, first hers and then your own. Laughter, softness, warmth. The room is full of pleasant things, but still puts you on edge. Something isn't quite right about it.... "Ma, where are we?" Nice as the room is, it isn't familiar.

Cool voice, growing colder. Sad, deep, stench of well-water. Sulfur and wet earth. "Just a dream Babe. We're just a dream."

It hurts that you aren't disappointed. "Ohâ€""

---

"â€"shit!" you mutter, hands finding your helmet this time, body pressing into the irregular side of your foxhole. Your eyes snap back to the lineâ€"mercifully wide and changing and unmoved, Kraut artillery not two-hundred feet away, flying at you between rows of trees. You hate the Germans, but sometimes you hate the Belgians even more, because who the fuck plants trees in neat little lines? That's not a forest; it's Hell.

Hands sliding into the grooves of the rifle, old patterns, well-taught, well-learned, second skin. Not skin, boneâ€"metal and plastic extension of your arms, over the lip of the foxhole, into the snow, can't feel the cold, just absorb it, while inside the gun is nothing but fire and heat.

Fire.
Fire.
Fireâ€"hold.

"Hold your fire!" someone screams, an officer, barking, sharpâ€"louder than the sound of errant rifles. You rock back one last time, shoulder aching, not caring, not caringâ€"yet relieved. Your mind relaxes, clears, clouds again, like a cleaned window with smears from the sponge.

A body tumbles into the hole beside you, bloodying your ice-soaked fatigues. Your mind is split, unfocused, but the training takes over, experience works your mouth and throat, screaming "medic!" as the wounded man's mouth falls open around a moan...

---

...she writhes under you, head thrown back, swollen lips slack around pearly teeth. The girlâ€"your girlâ€"watches you blankly, sweet and sweating. She's soft and warm, but so young, so young, how can you touch her now? She's round and fumbling, a worn-out memory with no place in your mind. Not anymore. The fantasy is hot and heady as an Irish coffee, something for any time of day, save now.

You want to pull away, slide off the bed, into your clothesâ€"

but that's not how memory works, it can't be controlled, it can't be changed. You're disgusted but still inside of her, still going, and she's soft and warm and calling your name over and over, "Oh Edward, oh Edwardâ€""

---

"Goddammit Gene, I told y'ta cut the 'Edward' bullshit! My name's Babe," you snap at the medic, pulling the man out of your foxhole. Roeâ€"Geneâ€"rips open a pack of sulfa with his teeth, old habit, quickly formed. He looks pointedly at the wet, red fabric of the paratrooper's pants, and you don't need any words to know what he wants. You dig your hands into the mess, gripping the fabric tightly, and rip the stain open, revealing the source.

"Leg woun', hain't the artery, hain't that bad," he says, another habit. You're not sure how many times you've heard the phrase "hain't that bad" from his lips, having lost count within the first week of combat. Sometimes he says it and the man sleeps. Sometimes he says it and the man dies. It's just the way things are...

---

..."That's how it is, kid. Step the wrong way, won't be steppin' f'r long."

The gutter is a humiliating place to lay, when deadâ€"old snow kicked over you like a shroud. If a man sleeps in the gutter, he can say he put himself thereâ€"he can leave. But a dead man has no will, has no dignity. He just pokes out of the stone and dirt like trampled straw; sickly, skinny, broken.

You swallow, look away. The man's embarrassment is contagious, flushing your cheeks, making you shake as though with fever.

You cough....
"What...what did he do?"
Cold eyes that you never want to see again, long as you live, catch your own. They're full of laughter and warning. "Tried t'dodge the draft. Goddamn Quaker."
Another cough bubbles between your lips. This time, you're gratefulâ€"it excuses you from answering those laughing eyes, from agreeing for the sake of your own skin.
"Goin' t'war , kid?"
"Goin' toâ€""

---
"E'ward, you gonna stan' there all day, o' help me move him?!" Roe's angry, yelling, unsympathetic when you wake up looking hurt and confused. He doesn't have a cure for it, so it doesn't matter. The bleeding man matters. The crying man matters. You're silent and not yet torn, shivering.
"Sorry," you say, finally, arm sliding under thighs, against Roe's own limb. The wounded man settles into a makeshift chair, head rolling; limp, cold. He feels dead. The blood blossoming through his bandage means he isn't.

---
You're a body, just a body, lying mindlessly in a field of poppies. Everything's thick and lush and bright, but you don't connect it to anything, not really. Sensation, perception, then a wall.

When foreign voices reach you, nothing's sparked. You're used to indecipherable tongues in the soft shell of your ear, the gentle vibrations of accents. These are thick, spicy voicesâ€"long sounds said quicklyâ€"obviously southern, but farther south than you've ever been. Something sharp and impersonal is saidâ€"a command.

Everything seems to be floating. Red poppies craning over your head, shadowed side in your vision, darker, against a white sky. The wind blows softly, sending their debris to trail over you.

You cough....

An engine roars, the flowers thrash, fly, arcing through the air like blood splatter. Droplets on your clothes. Stains. Another cough.

The sound of the engine seems small, far away, but it is growing nearer...

---

...You plant your feet, helping Roe to lift the man onto the back of the jeep. Its green doesn't remind you of anything save more jeeps and your own uniform, no different from the others. Soldier next to soldier next to soldier, and you can tell each one apart from the next, but the Germans can't and that's what matters. Nothing personal about the bullets that leave brief trails of cold on your skin, passing by. Nothing personal about the ones that hit, or about the ones that miss.

There's nothing personal about the war at all. You've got nothing to make it personal, so you spend your days dreaming, caught in between. You're on this side but the other side has no face, and you drift, trying to find it, but there's nothing there. Because the women are too sweet and the man is too familiar and the foreigners are too intoxicating....

Roe is looking at you like you've just begun to exist, telling you to get some sleep. That you should sleep, and the words are a pillow between your head and helmet as you slide back into a foxhole...

---

...eyes closed, mouth pressed in a crooked line. They don't even give you a coffinâ€"no ceremony, no traditionâ€"just a hole in the ground that's colder than stars, colder than a distant planetâ€"distant forest. Thick, hard soil tumbles onto your body, pushed by handsâ€"not even the dignity of a shovelâ€"that are mangled and bleeding from the icy clods of dirt. Blood, dirt, iceâ€"at least you'll be buried with familiar faces.

You don't question the fact that you can see without opening your eyesâ€"if your sight were physical, there'd only be hard earth to look at. You're inside your body and outside at the same time. Youâ€"the outside youâ€"coughs, and by now you know the sign, now you know you're simply dreaming again. Simply drifting and looking for a reason to fight, and as you watch the scene, you think you might have, even if it makes you sick to your stomach.

The hands pushing dirt into your grave are two-pair, one tiny and calloused and clawing, the other round and slim and soft. Women's hands, your mother, your girl, both wailing like banshees, their hair like windblown-haystacks, eyes swollen, mouths wide, limbs bloodied, knees grinding dirt. Behind them is the man, looking at youâ€"the you that seesâ€"his eyes still glittering with a bit of madness. At the head of the grave is a thick stone, carved with your epitaph, written by your killer, a curse and word that has become a curse.

Coughing, clutching your abdomen. The dream hurts, the reason hurtsâ€"because you're not fighting to save anyone, you're not fighting to destroy any sort of evil or to protect your country.

You're fighting to save your own skin. You're a fool who went to war so he wouldn't die, and the irony hurts even more than the low, sickening motives.

You're fighting because one man made you afraid.

You're fighting because you're afraid.

Because you're not a goddamn Quaker