The Santayana Effect: Scene 3- France, 15 October 1918

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

The sound of artillery shells shocked Adrienne out of the, well, shock, she had fallen into after watching Remy, Jean-Paul, and Warren, and the battering noise had all her attention returning to the present. She was looking at a sort of makeshift hospital, with lumps of bandages and uniforms that were once whole people lying on cots or on the ground. Screams, wails, pleas joined the sound of shelling and gunfire. Oh shit.

From the uniforms, which she tried to inspect without having to focus on the wounded men inhabiting them, Adrienne recognized that she was looking at a scene from the Great War, something she knew only because she had read other items in the past that had histories intersecting with this War to End All Wars. She never liked revisiting battlefields, but had become almost used to it.

Her focus centred on a man in an AEF uniform lying on a cot in one of the tents hastily set up by the mobile field hospital, but Adrienne couldn't spot the seal. She adjusted her angle. something she was still getting used to being able to do, and would have gasped if she had been able. The wounded soldier was Morgan. What the hell was Morgan's face doing on someone who must have been a man? The wounded soldier moaned and Adrienne found all her attention diverted from wondering what the hell was going on to watching the Morgan figure.

Another figure appeared through the tent flap, short and slight and... oddly grey, wearing a white uniform. Angelo? What the hell? "We're a little low on painkillers", he said, brisk but not unsympathetic. "Do you want some water?"

"I want some whiskey," the woman drawled to the nurse. Morgan's eyes moved down the nurse's body, stopping appreciatively at the legs below the hem of the skirt the nurse wore. "There's other ways to make the hurting stop, darlin'." A pained sound followed the words, killing the soldier's attempts at flirtation.

"No whiskey", the nurse said firmly. "And I really don't think you're up to any of those other ways right now. I need to check your wound."

"You don't know what you're up for 'til you try, darlin'." The soldier smiled at the nurse. "It's okay if you just want an excuse to get your hands on me. That's understandable."

"What, are you secretly here to torture everyone by talking like that?" A pilot grumbled from a bed over. Adrienne zeroed in on his face, surprised to see Sam Guthrie wearing an American airman's uniform. But really, why was that any stranger than Angelo as a nurse and Morgan as a soldier? "You think you're making it better on anyone by playing the clown? Who raised you like that?"

The soldier shot the pilot a scowl. "Don't you question how my momma raised me or we're going to have words and you'll need a nurse a helluva lot more after them words, boy. We're just havin' a good time over here. Who pissed in your oatmeal?"

"No need to question with how you treat women and people you disagree with." The pilot fired right back. "You can say we're going to fight all you want but you better stay over there and keep it at just saying. Anybody who raises a hand to me out here might as well be a Kraut."

"Quiet, both of you", the nurse said sharply. "No one is going to raise a hand to anyone on this ward, or I'll have you both restrained."

"Better listen to her, boys." said another wounded man, stretched out on a cot. Well, his uniform had enough bullet-holes in it to constitute cheesecloth but the flesh beneath was whole and unmarked. "Don't suppose either of you have a cigar on you? No? Well, s'pose that's what I get for asking in an infirmary." he said with a strong Canadian accent. He then closed his eyes and by all appearances drifted back off to sleep. Logan again. Adrienne had some questions for Garrison's pal when she was finished here, that was for sure.

"Yes, ma'am," was the instantaneous reaction out of the soldier's mouth to the nurse's rebuke. He tipped his head down in a gesture which would've been much more fitting if he'd been wearing a hat of any kind. Morgan didn't look over at the pilot but rather kept all eyes on the nurse. "No disrespect meant, ma'am, just havin' a bit of fun to make the time go by."

"Believe me, soldier, I've heard a lot worse." She nodded to herself as she finished redressing his leg. "The wound looks fine."

The pilot waited patiently for some comment to come from the use of the word 'fine.' His eyes stayed on the soldier in the bed over, glancing sidelong every few moments. Threats were clearly taken seriously and the idea of a Kraut behind their lines ever more so.

With the pilot forgotten, the soldier was grinning up at the nurse. "You think I'll ever dance again, darlin'?" The grin only grew wider, Morgan's red eyes glowing with playfulness. "Think you'd test it out with me when you discharge me?" The pilot could get as uppity as he'd like about the soldier's behavior, but what man wouldn't ask out a woman that cute when he was stuck laid up with an injury?

She actually smiled at that. "If it'll encourage you to behave yourself and recover faster, I think I can promise one dance."

A smile spread across Morgan's face as the soldier grinned. "I'm going to hold you to that now, darlin'." When he glanced over at the pilot the grin became a rather self-satisfied smirk.

The pilot stared back coldly, motionless for the moment except for his eyes. He ignored the nurse now, his focus on the soldier and they was he acted, the satisfaction he gained from threatening and defeating someone who was supposed to be his ally. Something was wrong and the pilot knew it.

Adrienne pushed the timeline forward a little, more out of curiosity than a need to rush to help Wyngarde authenticate the seal. She didn't like the way the Sam character was looking at the Morgan character, and was interested to see if she could figure out why the hell she was seeing these particular faces on historical figures when they should have had very definitive historical gender signifiers.

When the sun set and night blanketed the forest, the Sam character began thrashing in his sleep as if from a nightmare, and Adrienne stopped pushing the timeline. She could still hear artillery shells and gunfire, even in the darkness when sane people would be asleep. The screams hadn't stopped either.

The pilot sat up with a jolt. He was getting better about not disturbing anyone with his nightmares although the sweating still kept him from truly suffering silently. He looked around the ward, down to the oil burns across his chest from being trapped in his cockpit during descent, then back to the ward again. The soldier across from him slept awkwardly but it was hard to tell why. It was as if he was anticipating something.

The nurse looked up from whatever she was doing at the other end of the ward, and moved quickly and quietly to his side. "Rest easy, airman. It was just a dream."

"A dream I was shot down outside Paris and had to spend weeks starving behind enemy lines to get back so that the burned flesh could be scraped off me? Good, all this time I was wondering how anyone was going to look at me again once I got back home but now I can rest easy." The pilot forced himself to lay back again, sarcasm still cloudy around him. "How lucky I am you were here to let me in on that."

"I'm sorry", she said quietly. "I know it may not help, but there'll be a hero's welcome waiting for you at home."

"Maybe I can use all that ticker tape to cover my burn scored body so I don't make people at the pool ill. At least I won't have to worry about women; just loyalist Krauts that would always love to add a broken down soldier to their notch belt." The pilot rolled his head to face away from the nurse.

The soldier wasn't any good at sleeping heavily anymore. That'd been worked out of him out in the battlefields and made sleeping in the hospital near impossible most nights. Morgan's face turned to the pilot, eyes opening but remaining narrowed. "Feeling sorry for yourself, that's going to help," the soldier drawled without sympathy in a quiet voice.

"I didn't ask either of you to help yourselves to my business." The pilot turned to face the soldier. "Good to see not only that you can't accept your situation but that you recruit others, too. I'm sure acting like a clown would be much more helpful than acknowledging what happened but I think I'll stick with having some dignity."

"I got shot, nothing to cry over. It'll heal and I'll be back out there with my unit beating down the enemy." The soldier had a self-satisfied smile on his face. Blue fingers traced along the handle of a golden handle in his hands. The family seal had been his father's and he'd taken it with him as proof he'd be coming home. "We can't all be whiners, airman. Some of us were raised better than that. Some of us gotta look the enemy in the eye and shoot him before he shoots us. The squeamish ones get sent to your branch, not mine.

"Maybe if you stop whining like a fucking girl we wouldn't have to worry about your business none, too. But you're keeping some of us up." The soldier almost spit, but his eyes turned up to the nurse and he stopped.himself. You didn't spit in front of ladies. He swallowed hard and turned his eyes back to the metal seal in his hands, the pilot clearly dismissed.

"The Air Corp is the Army you dumb Kraut motherfucker." The pilot was on his feet, a pistol against the soldier's head in a heart beat. "An American would know that. I knew something was wrong with you. What's your angle? You feel like telling me before I end you? I can't believe they sent you in when you can't act for shit. I knew you weren't really hurt the second you started with your flirting." The pilot was yelling so quickly he could barely be understood and he had the wide eyes of a person that was watching for a signal.

Adrienne watched the nurse scurry away, towards the tent where she'd seen doctors entering and exiting, and assumed the woman who had Angelo's face had gone for help.

"The Air Corp are pansies who hide in the sky because they haven't got the nerve to fight on the ground," the soldier spit back without flinching. The blue-skinned soldier sat up slowly, pressing back against the barrel of the gun. "Hiding behind your planes, hiding behind your gun. If you want a man dead you do it with your own damned hands, son. Now get your weapon outta my face." A threat went unspoken with those words, but the soldier wasn't really sure if he could make good on it. There was a gun to his head and nothing but his fists to use against the pilot. He'd be damned if he was going to flinch for this bastard, though.

A shot rang out as the pilot left that Kraut with his last words, more than he deserved. When people were interrogated they became more aggressive to hide their secrets, proof they had them. The pilot had seen it plenty of times before and he had done it himself. He might not serve much longer but he was still a professional and still an American, it was his duty.

The shock hit Adrienne like a punch to the gut, and if she had been witnessing anything that was actually real the sight of her best friend having her brains blown out would have shattered her completely, but she remembered that she couldn't be seeing Sam shoot Morgan. This was the Great War! But the image was haunting nonetheless as she had the feeling that this scene had happened to someone. Why Morgan's face was on that someone, how it had come to be there, was the really disturbing part.