He was running. Running and shouting for his squad to follow him, now now now, this way, hurry, for fuck’s sake get yourselves under cover. Counting them in and turning to follow.

The race between the enemy’s sniper and his men. The race he had run and lost the first time, and then so many ties after in his dreams. Only; instead of the round catching him in the calf, shredding muscle and tendon, shattering bone; sometimes he is chest shot, goes down outside cover and he has to watch his squad, his men, get gunned down in front of him as they try to retrieve him, retrieve their dying comrades.

Sometimes it’s not him who’s shot and the dream face changes each time he sees it, cycling from Smitty to Ellis, to Dewey, to Nobby, but always, always, he wakes up sore and restless and in a bad mood for the rest of the way, as if the anger can chase away the vulnerable feeling which always makes that spot between his shoulder blades itch.

Tonight, mercifully, the dream is not a distortion, it is the true events, but amplified somehow, every sound deafening, every feeling ratcheted up to fever pitch and, but the time the alarm goes off he’s damp with sweat, his pillow wet with it, feeling like he’s just run a marathon. He has trouble at first distinguishing between the (real) beeps of the alarm and the remembered beeps of the heart monitor as the doctor explained that that he was out on a medical, that there were no legally available techniques which would repair his leg enough or restore the sight in the eye struck by shrapnel as a bullet pinged by close enough for him to feel the wind of its passing.

#####

Brooks frowned at the girl sat up in the back row. She didn’t appear to have a notebook, he hadn’t seen her using a computer of any sort and the university administration knew that he didn’t allow people to audit his classes without his vetting them first.

Unusually for a freshman, she met his gaze levelly, without flinching. He smiled to himself. His first volunteer of the year. This one would learn to swim fast, or sink without a trace.

#####

Brooks looked up at the knock on his door. It was his nemesis from his freshman class. The odd girl with the made up name.

“What do you want?” he snapped in his best officer tone. Office hours didn’t start for twenty minutes, and by now the Fresher class should be suitably cowed to stick to office hours only as posted.

She disregarded his expression entirely.

#####

The young woman snorted, taking a deep drag of her highly illegal cigarette. Brooks knew that the only reason she smoked them, was allowed to smoke them, was to ensure that her altered physiology which the government was so interested in studying received all the trace elements and stimulants it needed. The students, unsurprisingly, were a little in awe of their professor’s TA.

“Right,” she told him, shooting him a speculative glance as she stubbed out the cigarette butt that suggested that he was not going to like what she was about to say. “So you aren’t going to go see the physical therapist because the appointments are made by the military surgeon who told you that you would never walk without a limp again? Because not only does that sound like cutting off your nose to spite your face, it also sounds like you’re fulfilling a dumbass prophecy made by someone with no bedside manner and one hell of a cynical world view. Well, someone else with an incredibly cynical world view.”

Brooks stared at her for a brief moment. “What the hell would you know about it?” he demanded angrily.

She shrugged. “You know my history. I know that the administration told you about me when you took me on as your TA.”

He nodded, though she wasn’t really looking for his confirmation.

“I was going to refuse psychiatric help from the same people who used to hire me to kill for them,” she told him bluntly. “The guy who put me back together physically told me what I’m going to tell you.

‘He said, “Let them pay for their mistakes”. They aren’t asking for forgiveness. Hell, they probably don’t want it and wouldn’t know how to ask for it even if they did. But they are offering to pay for something you need. Take advantage of it!”