Foreign Wars

Life after Death Draft

There were some nights that he wondered if his heart had a serial number on it. Those thoughts were probably the worst of them all, honestly. If the little stamp on his temple that read USMC-523429 was also stamped into his veins, his heart, his false, blackened lungs. If he officially was the property of someone else. It was one of the things he had experienced many sleepless nights like this one from, along with nightmares about explosions that were a little too up close and personal, gunfights where he seemed to feel bullets passing inches from his face, and surgeries where he could almost feel the knives cutting into his shoulders and chest and see the surgeons faces so clearly but not being able to open his mouth and scream that there was something horribly wrong happening.

To him, they were all equally terrifying thoughts, but they had very good reason to exist. Many other shared the same idea, as well. Artificial eyes moved too smoothly looking down his arm. He vaguely remembered a military surgeon telling him later that it was the newest model, how he had first mistaken him for saying 'You're the newest model.' Which was true, but it didn't really make a difference when he took off his shirt and looked at the points on his shoulder where flesh met steel, those new eyes staring at the black, woven Kevlar contrasting against his skin, the different texture looking painfully obvious to him. It didn't hide the hairlessness, or the false musculature that seemed to move naturally when he lifted things, or the imperfect digits that seemed to always pinch his wifes own when she held it. The 'natural' shaping and jointwork of the hands that somehow refused to rest on her curves the right way.

It was the nights like these that he wanted that most of all, to pick her up and embrace her and place his hand on the small of her back, feeling his fingers bend back and let his palm conform to the curve of her spine. To pull her in close and hold her to his chest, where pink scars and a set of 3 ports along his collarbones (things he had first become painfully aware of when he first rewatched The Matrix movies with her) rested like badges and ribbons.

Right now, he could feel a heart beginning to thump hard in his chest, lungs taking in air more rapidly than they should. He looked to the woman in bed next to him, a familiar sight to help ground him into calmness again. He began to recall what his therapist had told him to do, to analyze her slowly. He held a breath and forced his eyes to trail her body, starting at her head. Messy hair swept over her face, casting its own kind of shine in the dark. He could just make out the auburn tone of it, focusing on a strand that had fallen over her nose and covered one eye, leaving the other exposed. He carefully brushed it away, looking at her eyes, the dark eyebrows that framed them, the neutral flatness they had while she slept. The long eyelashes that he thought were so cute. The curve of her nose, how it looked just so at the end, and the Cupids Bow of her lips just below it, with one side just slightly shorter than the other. How she always fretted about hiding it and used all sorts of strange lip pencils and makeup to do so. He glanced down to her exposed neck and wondered how soft it would feel against his no doubt rough lips.

He looked at her shoulders, curving out powerfully, at the lack of strong collarbones, another thing she fretted about and would take great care to shower in makeup so that they would be more obvious. His loose night shirt was hiked up to her breasts, showing just the bottom curve of them. He stared at her bare stomach, how it curved out slightly with a few layers of fat that she constantly berated herself for before hopping onto a treadmill, which he thought ridiculous. He looked at her hipbones jutting out, and saw the lacy fringe of her underwear barely peeking out from under the sheets that curled around the rest of her body.

Sliding back under the covers carefully, so as to not disturb her, he placed his head on the pillow and wrapped his arm around her waist to pull himself closer to without waking her. She muttered something before moving around and facing away from him, letting him hold her close to the cool skin of his chest, one of the few things not fully artificial about him. He saw her warm skin prickle as it came into contact with his own cold hide, and felt a touch of guilt for it, but his selfish instinct beat it out. He held her close. He took in the contact he craved so much without her knowing, even if he did play like he was fine during the day. How he always wanted things like her hand to rest on his shoulder as he sat in his office and hear her voice talk to him, or to always feel her smooth lips against his as she walked in from work and hung up her keys.

Putting the thought out of his head for now, he unwound his cool body from her small warm one, and rolled over to reach at his nightstand. Fumbling around for a moment, he grasped onto one of the books his therapist had asked him to pick up. [book title. 'living with your new prosthesis' related] His nose wrinkled for a moment, looking at the renaissance satire of The Creation of Adam, showing only Adam's hand as a robotic hand not entirely unlike his, reaching out to touch God's natural hand. It was a mockery, in his opinion. Even a man of little faith such as himself felt the disgrace of that image to what a human is supposed to be. His eyes focused in on his own hands for a moment, as he sighed and opened the book to one of the chapters he was instructed to study carefully- coping with your new body.

Truly a book for a victim of some sort, because that wasn't really a chapter for someone who wanted a body like his. He let out a tentative breath, and began to read, trying to empty his mind of relevant thought. 'If you're reading this, it's likely that your new modifications are not a fixture of yourself that you asked for. As such, it is easy to find yourself feeling bitter towards some kind of third party. Maybe it's God. Maybe it's Fate, or luck, or the military, or someone else. And that's alright. It's fine to be angry, or upset, or overall unhappy with your body. But research has found that people who have gained permanent functioning prosthesis almost always show high signs of body dysphoria, depression, and-'

He couldn't keep reading. Shaking his head, he closed the book again, and stared at the alarm clock on the desk. 2:56. Rubbing one eye, he first flinched away from the coolness of his hand, before forcing the cool alloy against his face to wipe away tears that seemed to pour when he thought about his condition. He was angry, the book was right about that. But his anger just didn't seem to have anything to focus upon. He couldn't be angry at the other army that made this happen, because now he couldn't do much about it. He couldn't be mad at the doctors, they were just doing their job trying to keep 'fine, young men' like himself from dying. He couldn't be mad at the good-for-nothings that wore flowers in their hair, because even if they did make him mad, they didn't bring him back from the dead. He couldn't be mad at the men in his platoon, because they were dead.

At that moment, he felt the heart in his chest seize a bit, and saw the red orange explosion barreling towards him in slow motion. He could see the finest detail of the ash on the outer edges of the small ball of flame that had somehow encompassed everyone in that line, sparing his torso and left leg, and only because the man in front of him had tried to barrel back and when the flame overtook the small group, he had fallen over his head, torso and leg, leaving him to lay sandwiched together, screaming their throats raw in a painful duet, and one voice dropping out after an hour, leaving him to make as much noise as he could on that dirt road, until another platoon came close enough to smell the burning flesh and hair, hearing his blown out vocal chords try and cut through the humid, Vietnamese jungle alone. The dark, drab olive fabric had smouldered out by now into bloody ash, leaving the wet air to let touch the exposed nerves on his arms and leg, the humidity to keep the scabbing moist and septic. He remembered one of the men from the base dragging him over to a litter, and being able to see nothing but raw meat.

He thought he saw a fat bug lodged between some of the muscle groupings on his calf, but he wasn't sure anymore if that was a tendon, or a trick of his mind.

Coming out of his thoughts, he looked at the clock again. 2:58. He could feel his lungs burning for air, and for a confused second he thought he was dead with his friends too, before his body reminded him to breathe. He fell down onto the bed letting the cold feeling of headrush wash over him and blind him for a moment.